From garden minds to garden practice: Supporting organizational regeneration while the ground is still shaking

I write from the experience of accompanying Ukrainian civil society organizations through ODeSA – Organisational Development Support Agency, an emerging platform for regenerative organizational development support. This forms part of a series of essays about Possible Now (see the others: Possible Now and the Journey from Machine Mind to Garden Mind and Blossoming at a New Dawn – 30 years of Indonesia for Humanity). 

Olga Bentz, ODeSA – Organisational Development Support Agency

The invitation to move from a “machine mind” to a “garden mind” is a powerful one.

A machine can be designed, assembled and controlled. When it stops working, we identify the defective part, repair it and try to restore normal operations. A garden asks something different of us. It is alive, relational and unpredictable. We cannot manufacture its growth. We can only work with the soil, tend the conditions, notice what is emerging and support life in finding its own forms.

In her opening essay on Possible Now, Jenny Hodgson describes a quieter story unfolding beneath the visible crisis of international development: communities and organizations building alternatives through mutual aid, solidarity economies, community philanthropy and other living systems rooted in relationships and place.

Kamala Chandrakirana’s account of Indonesia for Humanity takes us further into this emerging landscape. Through the multiple meanings of merekah — earth cracking, fruit breaking open, dawn rising and a flower blossoming — she describes both the exhaustion of the existing funding system and the vulnerability, courage and imagination required to move beyond it.

Together, these essays raise a further question for those of us concerned with organizational development: What would it mean to bring the garden mind into the everyday life of civil society organizations themselves?

If another civil society ecosystem is already emerging, what kinds of organizations will be able to inhabit it? How might they organize, lead, decide, care, learn and relate differently? And how can we support their regeneration without turning regeneration into yet another model designed and imposed from the outside?

These questions are especially immediate in Ukraine, where civil society organizations are not waiting for a crisis to end before imagining the future. They are responding to war, sustaining communities, defending rights and democratic institutions, undergoing internal change and preparing for recovery — all at once.

The ground is not merely moving. It is still shaking.

The cracks are visible

Both Possible Now essays begin with rupture.

The international funding system is contracting, while its deeper contradictions are becoming harder to ignore. Organizations have lost funding, programmes and staff. Leaders have been left holding both the operational consequences and the emotional weight of collapse. At the same time, the crisis has exposed the dangers of an aid model built on external dependency, unequal power and competition for scarce resources.

The imagery of cracked earth is particularly apt. Cracks reveal what was already unstable beneath the surface. They also create openings through which something unexpected may grow.

But the cracks do not exist only in the funding architecture surrounding civil society. The system has also left its imprint inside organizations.

We see this imprint in many ordinary organizational habits. Strategies become collections of funded projects. Teams are assembled and disassembled according to grant cycles. Leaders carry fundraising, external relations, programme oversight and internal management at the same time, often for too long. Organizational “capacity” is measured through budget size, compliance systems and the ability to secure the next grant.

“The funding system, in other words, does not remain outside the organization. It enters its routines, relationships and imagination.”

As Chandrakirana observes, civil society organizations have learned to speak donor language, adopt donor methods and sometimes imitate donor behaviours. Money has too easily become the measure of institutional strength.

The funding system, in other words, does not remain outside the organization. It enters its routines, relationships and imagination.

A transition towards a different civil society ecosystem must therefore involve more than changing where money comes from. It also requires organizations to examine, with honesty and care, what the old system has taught them to become.

The system lives inside organizations too

The machine mind can be found in many familiar organizational assumptions.

It is present when organizations are treated as delivery mechanisms rather than communities of people connected by purpose. It is present when development begins with a list of deficiencies to be repaired. It is present when success is defined primarily as growth: larger budgets, more projects, more staff, more visibility and wider geographic reach.

It is also present in the expectation that change should be linear and manageable: diagnose the problem, develop a plan, introduce new systems, measure the results.

Some technical problems can indeed be addressed in this way. Organizations need sound financial procedures, clear decision-making, appropriate policies and workable structures. In difficult contexts, such systems are not bureaucratic luxuries. They can protect people, distribute responsibility and reduce avoidable pressure.

But organizations are not machines.

“This is where regenerative organizational development begins: not with the idea that an external actor can regenerate an organization, but with the recognition that organizations possess their own intelligence, agency and possibilities for renewal.”

A new organigram will not, by itself, resolve a leadership culture built around one person carrying everything. A strategy document will not automatically create shared direction. A well-being policy will not restore trust in a team that has learned to conceal exhaustion. A new fundraising plan will not answer the deeper question of whether an organization’s identity has become detached from the communities and purposes from which it emerged.

In practice, these questions often appear in very human ways. A director realizes that she has become the place where every decision stops. A team admits that it no longer knows which projects are central and which are simply possible. A colleague responsible for finance, administration and reporting quietly says that the work has outgrown the informal arrangements that once made sense. Someone asks, almost apologetically, whether it is legitimate to pause when there is still so much urgent work to do.

This is where regenerative organizational development, or ROD, begins: not with the idea that an external actor can regenerate an organization, but with the recognition that organizations possess their own intelligence, agency and possibilities for renewal.

The role of organizational development is to help create conditions in which this capacity can become visible and active.

Ukraine and radical simultaneity

Many conventional approaches to organizational change assume a degree of stability.

First, an organization responds to the crisis. Later, when the immediate pressure has passed, it can recover, reflect and develop. Eventually, it may begin to think about transformation.

This sequence makes intuitive sense. It rarely describes the lived reality of Ukrainian civil society.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, organizations have had to survive, recover and build the future simultaneously. They deliver urgent assistance while redesigning programmes. They support people affected by war while their own colleagues experience displacement, loss, family separation and mobilization. They engage with immediate needs while contributing to reforms, justice, democratic resilience and the long-term shape of the country.

This is what we have come to describe as radical simultaneity.

Survival, recovery and transformation are not separate phases. They overlap, compete and sometimes reinforce one another.

“The image of the wild garden is useful here. Confusion and messiness are not necessarily evidence of failure. They may also indicate that we have reached the edge of what existing forms can contain.”

In Ukraine, this is not an abstract concept. It is a leader joining a strategy conversation after a night of air alerts. It is a team discussing governance while colleagues are scattered across different cities and countries. It is an organization preparing a long-term programme while also responding to the latest wave of attacks. It is the feeling that nothing can wait, and yet some things cannot be carried any longer in the same way.

This simultaneity changes how organizational development must be practised.

There may be no calm period in which to step away from operations and redesign the organization as a whole. Change has to happen while the organization continues to act. Reflection needs to be woven into work rather than reserved for the end of a crisis. Structures must become clearer without becoming rigid. Care must be taken seriously without reducing people to their trauma or asking organizational advisers to assume therapeutic roles.

The image of the wild garden is useful here. Confusion and messiness are not necessarily evidence of failure. They may also indicate that we have reached the edge of what existing forms can contain and that something new is trying to emerge.

The task is not to romanticize the mess. It is to learn how to remain attentive within it.

What garden practice might look like

Garden practice does not mean abandoning structure, strategy or professional discipline. Gardens also need boundaries, paths, water, nourishment and sustained attention.

The difference lies in how these are created and what they are intended to serve.

In regenerative organizational development, strategy is not primarily a fixed route towards predetermined outputs. It is a shared capacity to read changing conditions, make choices and remain connected to purpose.

Leadership is not simply the ability of one exceptional individual to hold the organization together. It includes the distribution of agency, authority and knowledge so that the organization does not depend on continuous acts of personal sacrifice.

Care is not an occasional well-being activity added to an otherwise extractive culture. It becomes part of how workload, pace, roles, decisions and relationships are organized.

Reflection is not a retreat from action. It is one of the conditions of intelligent action, particularly when organizations operate under sustained pressure.

External support also changes. Instead of arriving with a standard capacity-building package, advisers accompany the organization in identifying what requires attention and what form of support is appropriate.

“Reflection is not a retreat from action. It is one of the conditions of intelligent action, particularly when organizations operate under sustained pressure.”

In our work in Ukraine, this support builds on organizational development methodologies developed by the PeaceNexus Foundation in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, adapted to the realities of wartime Ukraine. With support from the Robert Bosch Stiftung, it also becomes part of a wider reflection on what responsible investment in local actors can mean in practice:

Participating organizations receive flexible organizational development grants alongside accompaniment by two interconnected advisers: one focused on strategy and systemic change, and another focused on people, leadership dynamics and care. This combination carries particular weight. Strategic choices cannot be separated from the people who carry them. And care cannot be reduced to individual well-being when exhaustion, trauma and uncertainty also affect organizational cultures, communication patterns, decision-making, trust, conflict dynamics and the capacity to imagine the future.

Each partnership begins with a simple Partnership Outline, first developed by the organization itself and then refined through conversation with the advisers. It names where the organization is now, what it wants to change, what support may be needed, what questions it wants to learn from, and how the partnership will be held.

The point is not organizational strengthening for its own sake, but strengthening the organization’s ability to serve its public-benefit mission and the communities or groups to which it is accountable.

Funding is provided in phases, allowing the second phase to be adjusted as circumstances change and learning emerges. Grants can be used flexibly for organizational and team needs, with part of the funding available as overhead and core support. Regular check-ins and narrative reflections help partners notice what is changing, what remains difficult and what kind of support is needed next.

This may sound simple, but it changes the relationship. The process is not designed to extract a perfect plan from an organization under pressure. It is designed to honour local agency — not only in strategic choices, but also in pacing, priorities and how support is shaped and delivered.

“The organizations we work with do not simply need ‘capacity building.’ They need conditions that allow them to continue functioning as living systems.”

The organizations we work with do not simply need “capacity building.” They need conditions that allow them to continue functioning as living systems.

The process may look modest from the outside.

A team clarifies who is responsible for decisions that had previously accumulated with the executive leader. An organization recognizes that its many projects no longer form a coherent programme and makes difficult choices about focus. An informal accounting arrangement is replaced by a proper financial function with clear oversight. A leader begins to distinguish between responsibilities that genuinely require their attention and those that others can carry. A team creates a regular space to surface tensions before they become crises.

None of this looks dramatic from the outside. There may be no public announcement, no new logo, no major institutional milestone. But inside the organization, something shifts. A leader breathes a little more freely. A team understands who decides what and demonstrates more initiative and a sense of ownership. A colleague who used to “help with finances” becomes part of a real financial function. Work starts to feel less like permanent improvisation and more like something that can be carried together.

This is garden practice: not forcing growth, but tending the conditions from which healthier forms of organizing can emerge.

From capacity-building to regenerative capacity

The language of capacity building has always carried an uncomfortable implication: that capacity is absent until someone from outside arrives to build it.

Indonesia for Humanity offers a richer vocabulary. In Kamala Chandrakirana’s essay, daya encompasses energy, strength, ability, effort, force and agency. Resources are not limited to money but include knowledge, memory, networks and voluntary contributions. Indonesia for Humanity’s ambition is not merely financial resilience, but movement sovereignty and regenerative capacity.

This opens an important distinction. Organizations do need technical capacities: skills, policies, tools and systems. They also need adaptive capacity (the ability to read context, learn and change direction) and relational capacity (the trust and cooperation that allows people to navigate tension and stay connected).

“The language of capacity building has always carried an uncomfortable implication: that capacity is absent until someone from outside arrives to build it.”

Regenerative capacity goes further. It is the ability of an organization to renew its energy, meaning, relationships and coherence while continuing to act.

This does not mean returning to some ideal state that existed before the crisis. Regeneration is not restoration. Organizations may discover that previous ways of working depended on hidden overwork, centralized leadership or unsustainable funding. Renewal may require letting some things end.

Nor is regeneration synonymous with organizational growth. One of the most resonant lines in Indonesia for Humanity’s story is: “We do not want to become big. We want to become many.”

This challenges deeply embedded assumptions about maturity and success.

A regenerative organization may decide not to expand. It may choose depth over reach, partnership over ownership, or strategic focus over the accumulation of projects. It may understand its strength not as institutional dominance, but as its contribution to a wider ecosystem.

The relevant question is no longer simply, “How can this organization become stronger?” It is also: How can the organization become strong in ways that strengthen the life around it?

Organizations as small islands of coherence

Possible Now asks how multiple, creative but often isolated experiments might be recognized as part of a wider pattern. It invites those closest to the work to be understood not as implementers of somebody else’s system, but as makers of what comes next.

Chandrakirana similarly refers to “small islands of coherence”: spaces in which different ways of relating, sharing resources and exercising collective leadership can begin to prefigure wider systemic change. Civil society organizations can become such islands.

Not because they are perfect, fully healed or independent from the systems around them. No organization operates outside the political economy of funding, regulation and power. Ukrainian organizations, for example, continue to navigate acute resource constraints and an overwhelming scale of need.

But organizations can create pockets of greater coherence between what they seek to change in the world and how they organize themselves.

An organization working for participation can examine how decisions are made internally. An organization advocating for dignity can look honestly at whether its own pace of work respects the limits of its people. A funder promoting local agency can consider whether its requirements leave partners with meaningful room to decide. An organization committed to justice can ask how power, recognition and resources are distributed within its team.

“Organizations can create pockets of greater coherence between what they seek to change in the world and how they organize themselves.”

These acts of alignment may appear small beside the scale of systemic crisis. Yet they provide practical evidence that different ways of organizing are possible.

Hope is not naïve optimism. It becomes credible when it is grounded in concrete alternatives that already work.

Each organization that begins to distribute leadership, protect reflection, value relationships as infrastructure and connect institutional strength to ecosystem health adds another small piece of evidence.

An invitation, not a blueprint

Regenerative organizational development should not become another universal framework promising to repair civil society. That would reproduce the very machine logic it seeks to question.

There is no single regenerative organization, just as there is no single model of a healthy garden. What supports renewal in a small grassroots initiative may be unsuitable for a national human rights organization. What is possible in Indonesia may not translate directly to Ukraine. What an organization needs during an acute crisis may be different from what it needs when a new period of stability begins.

ROD is therefore best understood as an orientation and a practice of accompaniment.

It asks us to pay attention to the whole organization: its purpose, people, structures, relationships, resources, history and context. It combines technical strengthening with care and reflection. It respects the organization’s agency while creating space for difficult questions. It understands that organizations may need to survive, recover and transform at the same time.

Above all, it resists the temptation to design the garden in advance.

The two Possible Now essays suggest that another ecosystem will not be built from one centre or according to one blueprint. It will emerge through connections between experiments, practices and communities already taking shape at the edges. Its roots will be relational: trust, shared norms, mutual care and networks strong enough to withstand shocks.

Regenerative organizational development may be one small part of this larger garden of alternatives.

“Another ecosystem will not be built from one centre or according to one blueprint. It will emerge through connections between experiments, practices and communities already taking shape at the edges. Its roots will be relational.”

Its contribution is to ask what happens inside the organizations from which we expect so much. Are they able to renew the human energy on which their work depends? Do their structures enable agency or concentrate pressure? Can they remain connected to their purpose while navigating the demands of survival? Are they becoming larger, or are they becoming more alive?

In Ukraine, we are exploring these questions without the comfort of stable ground. The war has not paused to allow organizations to reflect, recover or redesign themselves. Yet reflection, recovery and redesign are still happening — in between urgent calls, grant deadlines, air alerts, staff changes and difficult conversations that can no longer be postponed.

We are still learning what this means.

There is no promise of stability and no possibility of waiting for ideal conditions. Yet organizations are finding ways to pause, notice, reorganize and develop new ways of carrying their work. They are not only enduring the rupture. In small but significant ways, they are shaping what may emerge through it.

We cannot regenerate organizations for them.

But we can stand alongside them, tend the conditions and take seriously the life that is already trying to grow.

By: Olga Bentz, Founder, ODeSA – Organisational Development Support Agency