By Jenna Robertson, Founder, Gaia’s Evolution

Earlier this month, I attended the Australian e-commerce industry gathering, RetailFest. As a regenerative leadership and culture development professional working with purpose-led founders, executives, teams and organisations, I was curious to listen to the challenges faced by businesses that sell their products online and in stores.

For e-commerce businesses and brands, regenerative leadership means moving from an extractive model focused on rapid financial growth through linear consumption, to one that actively regenerates the humans, culture, place and environment it touches.

Here are my takeaways from the conference.

Aliveness and Passion

There is a particular vitality and passion in the part of the e-commerce culture I experienced at RetailFest. I was delighted to notice how passionate the founders are about their niche products. Many had started in their home garages and found their way to hugely successful businesses and I sensed that the aliveness I felt in many of them provided a creative fuel for the hard work necessary to thrive in e-commerce.

It offered a refreshing contrast to the burned out, jaded and exhausted cultures common in other sectors.

Sustainability is Still Optional. We can do better. 

In the sessions I attended, some of the speakers and founders had the opportunity to demonstrate their care for their social and environmental impact. But it didn’t come up in the conversation as much as I’d hoped.

If we consider human business activity at this time, e-commerce takes up 21% of all global retail sales and therefore holds huge potential for regenerative impact and reversing the damage that we have done to our planet, culture and mental health. I see this as a huge opportunity.

Let me offer some more context. Our species are collectively using 1.8 Earths worth of materials and that is trending up. This is a collective human and business behaviour that is undermining the ability for humans to live on this planet. Put plainly, we are living in a way that has commenced the sixth mass extinction on this planet, and if we don’t reverse this trend, we will be included.

As a collective of founders and businesses, we are contributing to the positive or negative unfolding of our current polycrises through our work. There is real opportunity to shape that impact. Every founder who actively closes the knowing-doing gap through their leadership shapes what comes next.

While it may be almost impossible for one founder to change the economic system on the outside, every founder can shape the system and culture within their own self and organisation. They can define the relational, cultural and economic logic of their business, and build it in such a way that it regenerates the humans inside it, the cultures and communities around it, and the living world it depends on.

Through my work with Gaia’s Evolution, I support leaders and businesses to walk this path.

For those already invested in a sustainability journey, my work supports them to go to the next level of regenerative impact. 

I love how Laura Storm put it in her ChangeNOW presentation last year.

Letting Go of the ‘Role’

In my work, I am often cultivating spaces where human wholeness and connection is the foundation of the culture. This sounds like human-centred check ins at the beginning of a conversation, a slow pace and choosing relationship building before a transactional agenda.

So, it was a reminder of a different kind of relational field when people introduced themselves quickly and fluently with what their business was, what their role was, even explicitly sharing how much revenue they make. There was an efficiency of ‘doing business’ and ‘getting the job done’, and also a heightened reality where the whole self was checked in at the door and the ‘work self’ was instead embodied.

I craved to know and hear the founders beyond their work roles. How did they become founders? What really matters to them in their life right now? How does their work align with that? What legacy might they like to be creating? How well do they take care of their own self? What are they not saying that they really want to say?

I do know that my calling is to meet these leaders where they are now, and invite them slowly into ways of being that feel more easeful and less performative.

Because I know that when that happens, it not only uses less energy on performing that can be directed elsewhere, it unlocks regenerative impact for themselves and the whole system around them.

A unique moment of authenticity happened when the co-founders of health and wellness B-Corp brand, Zea, Hayden Brass and Jade McKenzie, a couple, shared about the joys and challenges of running a family business. Hearing music in the presentation and seeing their beautiful weaving of the personal with purpose and profit, all delivered in a real way, was refreshing to experience.

And it was also a welcome break from the conversation about AI. 

AI and Strategic Intuition

AI was mentioned in almost every conversation. Some leaders were proud of how they had integrated it into their business at lightning speed and it was now affording them efficiencies. Some were experiencing a sense of FOMO that they hadn’t yet.

One voice stood out to me on this topic. Liv Coleman, Founder of clothing brand All Things Golden. She bravely talked about leading from intuition and rather than leaning further into AI, choosing instead to ‘double down on her values’ and build more of what made her feel alive, community.

Liv Coleman, Founder, All Things Golden

What struck me was her courage to speak about human intuition within a conference culture that felt safer to sit conversationally, within the mechanics of AI.

What was unsaid and I dare say, unseen by many, was the strategic advantage that Liv has in the e-commerce world. Human intuition is an ancient technology, as old as life itself, that has been suppressed through cultural conditioning due to its power. Reconnecting to it not only makes surfing the complexity and volatility of the current and future world easier, it actively transforms culture through restoring what has been lost through centuries of patriarchy and colonialism.

I support my clients to develop whole-system intelligence. 

It is vitally important now to develop a world where leaders weave whole-system intelligence and artificial intelligence to navigate the increasingly complex future of business.

Liv Coleman is ahead of the curve with her approach to engaging her intuition within her leadership, as much as the AI pioneers are ahead of the curve with theirs.

What I want to hear are conversations about how the future e-commerce business leader weaves their own intuitive human intelligence with advanced, ethical and environmentally responsible use of AI.

Founding Co-ordinates

In one case, I noticed that a business was founded upon the phenomenon of increasing human distraction. Business success in that case would mean amplifying human disconnection, which is a contributor to the current mental health crisis, which contributes in turn to cultural and ecological crises.

There is nothing preventing the establishment of commercial products that catalyse our current human crises. No regulatory process. No ethical threshold that must be crossed before a product reaches the market. 

Whether a business is regenerative or destructive is determined by the awareness of the founder(s) who conceived it. With my clients, I talk about getting the conceptualisation (founding) coordinates right. A business built from a deeper, broader awareness of human, cultural and ecological contexts asks questions like: does this product contribute to regenerative human and planetary thriving, or does it extract from them? Does it make the customers more whole, or more fragmented? Does the business regenerate the humans inside it, or extract from them? 

For my clients, those questions are not optional. They are leaders and businesses who seek to consciously contribute to the regeneration of human health, culture, community, place and planet. If we get those founding coordinates right, for businesses and products, and the organisational culture and relationships are thriving, the business can become a force that regenerates the planet, rather than one that catalyses the current crises.

E-Commerce: The Opportunity

My intuition presented me with some metaphorical images to describe my response to the conference. 

First, a wheel of consumption where some on that wheel were running hard, not looking up and unaware of the world around it.

And another wheel that was interconnected with the world around it. Part of and nourishing the human and more-than-human ecosystem it was participating in. 

The alive beings on the wheel aligned with the laws of nature, thriving, grounded, growing at the pace determined by life.

There is a huge regenerative opportunity in this sector.

E-commerce moves fast enough to adapt, generates profit quickly and changes the rules often. A purposeful passion fuels the creativity and life-force of many visionary founders. And it is impactful enough to become an important regenerative force – within our lifetimes.

It will require the leaders and their businesses to truly become all that past generations hoped for and the future generations need them to be.

And I’m ready to support them to do just that.

_________________________________________________________________________

Gaia’s Evolution offers regenerative leadership and culture development for purpose-led founders, executives, teams and organisation through 1:1 coaching, facilitation, leadership circles, workshops and programs, speaking and consulting. Reach out at www.gaiasevolution.com or email our founder Jenna Robertson on jenna@gaiasevolution.com