A nested systems view of value creation in business, sales, and sustainability
Regenerative value starts with a simple but uncomfortable insight: many deals create value in one place by destroying it somewhere else. A company may improve ROI, lower costs, or increase revenue, while quietly depleting employees, communities, supply chains, or natural systems. Traditional business cases rarely see that, because they focus too narrowly on the transaction.
That is why I find the idea of nested systems so useful. It helps us understand that a deal never exists in isolation. Every transaction sits inside a wider set of connected systems: the customer’s business, the wider network of stakeholders and communities around it, and the larger social and ecological systems on which it ultimately depends.
Seen through that lens, regenerative value is not just about being greener or doing less harm. It is about creating value in a way that strengthens the wider systems that make value creation possible in the first place.
Why traditional value thinking is too narrow
Most value propositions are still built around one question:
What is the value of this deal?
Usually, that means some combination of cost reduction, revenue growth, payback, margin improvement, or return on investment. Those things matter. But they are not enough.
A deal can look attractive at the transactional level and still be destructive at every outer level. A business can improve its internal economics while weakening the local community around it. A product can generate strong returns while increasing waste, emissions, fragility, or burnout elsewhere in the system.
That is the blind spot of traditional value thinking. It tends to treat the transaction as if it were the whole system.
It is not.
The nested systems view of value
In my own work, and in discussions with Jef Teugels of the Regenerative Marketing Institute (https://regenmarketing.org/), I have found the concept of nested systems especially powerful.
The idea is straightforward. Every deal sits inside a series of connected layers:
- the transactional layer
- the customer’s business system
- the wider value chain and community
- society and the planet
Each layer affects the others. Value created in the inner layer may depend on value being extracted from the outer layers. That is what happens in many traditional, extractive business models. They strengthen the deal, but weaken the systems around it.
A regenerative approach asks a different question:
Can we create value in the transaction while also strengthening the larger systems around it?
That is the shift.
The four levels of sustainability and value creation
One useful way to make this practical is to distinguish four levels of business impact.
1. Extractive: do harm
At this level, the business creates value in the inner layer while pushing costs outward.
The transaction works. The ROI may be strong. But employees, communities, suppliers, or ecosystems carry the hidden burden. This is the classic logic of the extractive economy: local gain through wider depletion.
2. Sustainable: do less harm
At this level, the company reduces some of the negative impact.
It becomes more efficient, wastes less, pollutes less, or improves compliance. This is real progress. But the underlying logic is still mostly about reducing damage rather than creating health.
3. Circular: do no harm
Here, the company redesigns materials, flows, and processes to eliminate waste and reduce leakage from the system.
Circularity is a major step forward because it changes the design logic of the business. It aims to keep value in circulation rather than allowing it to be lost or destroyed.
4. Regenerative: do good
A regenerative company goes beyond efficiency and beyond harm reduction.
It creates value in a way that restores, renews, or strengthens the larger systems around the transaction. It improves not only commercial performance, but also the health of communities, ecosystems, and people where possible.
This is the highest bar. It is not just “less bad.” It is a positive contribution.
SunIsUp: a practical example of regenerative value in action
One of the clearest examples in my notes is SunIsUp (https://sunisup.be).
What makes SunIsUp interesting is that it is not simply another company “selling green energy.” It enables a local energy community.
Take a school with surplus solar electricity during the day. In a traditional model, that surplus would be sent back into the grid and absorbed into a centralised energy system dominated by large distributors. The school would receive limited value, and the broader community would not directly benefit.
SunIsUp changes that logic.
It enables the school to redistribute its surplus energy to its own local community, such as teachers, parents, and nearby residents. The producer gets a better deal for the excess electricity. Local users gain access to lower-cost renewable energy. And SunIsUp facilitates the redistribution and billing of those transactions.
This matters because the value is no longer captured only at the transactional level. The wider local system benefits too.
Value stays more local.
The economic arrangement becomes fairer.
The local community becomes more connected and resilient.
That is what makes the case so interesting. It shows that regenerative value is not only about the product or service itself. It can also come from redesigning the architecture of value flows.
That said, I think it is important to stay realistic. Not every promising model should immediately be labelled fully regenerative. Some cases clearly move in the right direction without yet meeting the highest bar of restoration or net-positive contribution in every layer. SunIsUp is valuable precisely because it shows the direction of travel: away from centralized extraction and toward more local, shared, and resilient value creation.
Circl: redesigning the house-building system
A second example is CIRCL (https://circl.be/en).
CIRCL is useful because it shows that regenerative value is not limited to energy or environmental services. It can also appear in how entire systems of production and delivery are redesigned.
In my notes, CIRCL is described as a company using prefabricated construction in controlled factory environments, recyclable materials, improved labour conditions, and faster on-site assembly. The result is not only a better product outcome for the buyer. It also improves predictability, reduces waste, lowers site chaos, and creates better conditions for workers and partners involved in the process.
That is already more than a simple product value story.
It is a systems story.
Circl creates value by rethinking how a house is built, how labour is organised, how materials are used, and how execution risk is reduced across the process. That places it well beyond a narrow transactional logic.
Again, I would be careful not to romanticise the case. CIRCL is best understood as strongly circular and system-improving, with regenerative potential. But that is exactly the point. Real businesses do not neatly fall into perfect boxes. Many sit somewhere between sustainable, circular, and regenerative. What matters is whether they are reducing extraction and increasing positive contribution across the nested layers.
Regeneration is not only ecological. It can also be human.
One mistake I often see is that regeneration is treated as if it only applies to nature.
That is too narrow.
Regenerative value can also apply to people.
A business can be extractive toward employees just as easily as it can be extractive toward ecosystems. When organisations continuously drain people’s energy, attention, emotional capacity, and health without restoring those capacities, they are running an extractive human system. Burnout, disengagement, and chronic overload are not just HR issues. They are signs that value is being pulled from one layer without adequate reinvestment.
That is why I believe employee wellbeing can also be regenerative.
This is not about superficial wellness programs. It is about designing work in ways that allow people to recover, learn, grow, and sustain their contribution over time. A more regenerative workplace builds autonomy, mastery, health, employability, and human resilience rather than merely extracting effort until people break.
When viewed through nested systems, human wellbeing is not a side topic. It is part of the value logic itself.
Why regeneration should not become a purity test
This is where I think realism matters.
Not every company is regenerative.
Not every offer can create positive value in every layer.
And not every sustainability claim deserves the language of regeneration.
Trade-offs are real.
A company may reduce emissions while increasing dependency on scarce materials. A solution may improve customer resilience while still imposing costs elsewhere. A business may become more circular without yet becoming regenerative.
That does not invalidate the concept. It makes it more useful.
Regeneration should not be treated as a purity badge. It should be used as a design discipline and a commercial lens.
The real questions are better phrased like this:
- Where are we still extracting value from the outer layers?
- How can we reduce that extraction?
- Where can we create positive contribution instead?
Those are much harder questions than simply asking whether something is sustainable. But they are also much more valuable.
What regenerative value means for sales and value propositions
This is where the concept becomes commercially powerful.
For salespeople, regenerative value is not just a moral or environmental idea. It is a better way to evaluate and improve a value proposition.
Instead of asking only, What is the ROI of this offer?, a stronger commercial conversation might ask:
- Does this reduce hidden extraction elsewhere in the system?
- Does it strengthen the customer’s wider business model?
- Does it improve the resilience of the surrounding network?
- Does it reduce burden on people, communities, or ecosystems?
- Can it add value beyond the immediate transaction?
That is a far richer and more strategic way to think about selling.
It moves sales beyond narrow benefit statements and toward a broader business case. Not only financial return, but also resilience, risk reduction, human wellbeing, community benefit, and ecological contribution.
In that sense, regenerative value is not a green add-on. It is a way of improving the quality of value creation itself.
Regenerative value is about creating value with the full system in view
So what is regenerative value?
It is value created with the full system in view.
Not just value for the deal, but value for the larger systems on which the deal depends. Not just lower harm, but healthier relationships, healthier communities, healthier work, and healthier ecosystems where possible. Not just extraction with better branding, but a more intelligent form of value creation.
That is why I think regenerative value matters.
Not because business needs another fashionable term.
And not because every company can suddenly become fully regenerative overnight.
It matters because the old definition of value is too small.
If we continue to judge value only at the level of the transaction, we will keep rewarding deals that look successful locally while damaging the wider systems that make success possible. But if we widen the boundary, we can start designing offers, business models, and sales conversations that create stronger value across the nested layers.
And that may be the real commercial opportunity.
The best value propositions of the future may not be the ones that create the most value in the transaction. They may be the ones that create value while reducing extraction and strengthening the wider systems on which all long-term value creation depends on.
