The future of business is
Co-ARISING is a regenerative enterprise co-creation firm that partners with corporations, investors, and innovators to design and build next generation environmentally restorative, socially beneficial, and economically resilient businesses and ecosystems.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life."
MARY OLIVER
The Summer Day, New and Selected Poems
Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1992
How will we respond to the current times and context demanding fundamental reinvention of the economic, business, political, and social systems we operate within?
We are called to sense our unique purpose and highest future possibility — and to walk a path of integrating that purpose and possibility into our work in the world.
This doesn't just apply personally. Every venture, every company, every community, every institution has this same assignment: aligning purpose, grand potential, and systemic transformation.
We partner with you, your organisation, and your ecosystem to develop future-fit
business models, leadership strategies, competencies, and capacities that co-create transformational change.
Who We Serve
Does one or more of these scenarios resonate?
This is your invitation to partner with us.
You carry responsibility for true value creation, moral integrity, strategic and operational resilience, and innovation capacity. The concerning VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) business environment recognized 10-15 years ago has not accelerated into hyperspace.
You understand that the increasingly visible systemic risks are now enterprise risks. Your organization faces material exposure across an expanding risk landscape: market instability, supply chain disruption, energy price volatility, capital access constraints, insurance availability and cost, climate-related threats from flooding, wildfires, and severe storms, brand value erosion, critical mineral and natural resource constraints, and an unpredictable socio-political and regulatory environment.
Simultaneously, you see real opportunity in strategy and business model innovation, the transition to renewable and distributed energy, and traditional and frontier technologies and materials. You recognize that fiduciary duty has evolved and ESG and sustainability accountability has shifted — from tangential to critical risk management; from disclosure to performance and impact; from internal operations to full value stream responsibility. And, you are aware of a powerful moral imperative and closing window for leadership action.
We partner with you to meet this moment: propelling innovation and defining future-fit pathways for lasting, genuine value creation, strengthening leadership and governance of complex systemic risks, deeply integrating regenerative sustainability.
You are building solutions with genuine potential to reshape industries and create transformative societal and planetary impact — technological, financial, ecological, or social.
Your company is on the leading edge, developing and bringing to market solutions with the potential for positive societal impact.
The challenge is never just invention. It is forging the right business model, securing capital, developing strategic partnerships, protecting founding values, “building the bicycle while riding it”, and compressing time-to-meaningful-impact — all simultaneously, and often with limited resources.
We partner with ventures whose solutions are critical to resilience and regeneration. We co-create business development strategies, go-to-market plans, and partnerships that amplify and accelerate collective prosperity and impact.
Your organization is recognized by investors, customers, and peers for visionary strategic analysis and foresight and meaningful integration of sustainability/ESG. You've built compelling frameworks and plans, met targets, and earned stakeholder trust. Experience validated the business case in technology and product innovation, eco-efficiencies, brand value, resilience, investor ratings, employee and customer loyalty, risk mitigation.
And yet a deeper recognition is emerging: that this good work, however real, is insufficient to produce an economic system that addresses current and emerging risks, operates within planetary boundaries, and honors the social foundations of human wellbeing. You understand that the next frontier is not incremental improvement — it is transformational systems redesign. And the time for true leadership is now.
We partner with you to design and implement regenerative value innovation across your full business ecosystem, align strategy with future-fit economic models, moving the enterprise beyond siloed initiatives toward coherent, systemic transformation.
To date, your business may have avoided detailed external scrutiny and the full force of climate-, nature-, and socio-political risks. In the current political climate around ESG, the instinct to wait may feel reasonable. It isn't.
These risks are already moving through capital markets, physical infrastructure, supply chains, human resource management, and access to critical natural resources. The window to act before costs escalate is closing. At the same time, the companies that move now will capture innovation opportunities that slower movers will not.
We partner with you to rapidly assess your risk and opportunity landscape, benchmark performance against competitors and market expectations, and shift your organization's trajectory toward a resilient, future-wise enterprise.
You've dedicated your career to advancing organizational performance, leadership competencies, innovation, and positive impact — a genuinely cross-functional, systems-level endeavour. Whether you work internally within a strategic planning, operational or corporate function, or as an external consultant, coach, or NGO leader, this work is central to your purpose.
You understand the business, physical and moral imperative, the strategic risks and opportunities, the global frameworks, the data, the reporting — and their gaps and limitations. Many of you are also carrying the weight of a deeply disheartening moment: the politicization and weaponization of ESG, unraveling of progress, and the widening gap between what is needed and what is being done.
You know that real, tangible progress has been made. You also know it isn't enough — that a truly transformational shift is required. Your hard-won knowledge, experience, and leadership are not peripheral to that shift. They are essential to it.
Let's explore how we might collaborate.
You are rethinking foundational paradigms — pedagogy, curriculum, research design, institutional structures, and cross-sector collaborations — to lead and contribute to the societal transition now underway.
Across disciplines and roles, you face a shared challenge: how to prepare students, generate knowledge, and build institutional capacity for a world that urgently needs regenerative leadership, systems thinking, and transformative design. The scale of what is required is daunting. So is the opportunity.
Academia is not peripheral to this transition. It is a primary source of the research, ideas, frameworks, talent, and evidence that make transformation possible — and credible.
We partner with you to chart a visionary yet pragmatic path forward: building on existing strengths, forging meaningful collaborations, and designing programs and research agendas with the ambition and rigour the moment demands.
What We Do
Co-Creating Regenerative Enterprises, Economies & Ecosystems
Humanity is entering a period of profound threat and emerging transformation. The conventional economic paradigm — underpinned by extraction, exploitation, colonialism, externalization of harm, and the illusion of limitless growth — has created today's metacrisis.
Yet the seeds of the Great Turning are emerging. Everyone has a role to play.
Co-ARISING works with visionary leaders to co-create the next generation of enterprises designed to be environmentally restorative, economically resilient, and socially beneficial.
"The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to life-sustaining civilization."
…"A life-sustaining society requires new forms and structures. The arising of these new forms constitutes the second dimension."
— Joanna Macy, YES! Magazine, Summer 2006
The Concept of Co-ARISING
A New Paradigm for Enterprise
Co-ARISING reflects the principle of dependent co-arising — the understanding central to both natural systems science and Buddhist teaching that all systems rely on and flourish through relationships and deep interdependence. As with nature, thriving business and economic ecosystems arise through mutually beneficial and synergistic relationships, diversity, adaptability, and continuous regeneration.
We apply these life-essential premises — Interdependent Flourishing, Emergent Possibility, and Evolutionary Learning — to reimagine conventional mental models for business and economic success, move beyond incremental sustainability/ESG, and craft customized strategy innovation and regenerative value streams ecosystem design.
Our “Deep Design Assignment” invites us to architect and co-create local and bioregional enterprises and ecosystems as holons in a global regenerative living systems economy where all humans, other beings, and our exquisite planet thrive. We are challenged to design for synergistic integration of the EESG criteria.
Environmentally Restorative
Moving beyond "do less harm" to actively regenerating ecological systems with nature — designing enterprises that restore flourishing natural systems and biodiversity. And, in the process, rebuilding humanity’s connection to nature and each other.
Socially Beneficial
Building enterprises where collaborative multi-stakeholder interdependence repairs the harm and generates shared, fairly distributed value for all — co-creating businesses and communities that contribute meaningfully to thriving present and future generations.
Economically Resilient
Designing regenerative enterprise ecosystems that are more adaptive, more trusted, and more life-affirming — creating genuine short and long-term value (without the dark underbelly of harm) in an era of systemic disruption.
Re-Imagineered Governance
Crafting regenerative governance systems (more decentralized, participatory, just, dynamic, ethical) to replace conventional hierarchical, closed, rigid, power-imbalanced and often corrupt governance systems and structures.
From Consulting to Co-Creation
We Work Differently
Traditional consulting focuses on optimizing within existing paradigms. Co-ARISING works differently. We partner with corporations, investors, entrepreneurs, and public-private initiatives to co-create new possibilities — from design and strategy innovation to implementation platforms and processes.
Co-ARISING is a new category of firm — not a consulting firm, not an accelerator, not a think tank — but a strategic platform for regenerative enterprise ecosystem co-creation. Rather than advising from the sidelines, we work alongside our partners to Design • Build what does not yet exist.
We are your transformational innovation partner.
Where Regeneration, Innovation & Enterprise Co-ARISE
We bring together the sciences of living systems, the principles of regenerative design, and decades of enterprise transformation experience — synthesizing them into actionable co-creation processes.
Design • Build What Does Not Yet Exist
We don't just advise. We roll up our sleeves and build alongside you — creating ventures, platforms, ecosystems alliances, and governance structures that embody the regenerative principles we espouse.
Areas of Co-Creation
What We Build Together
The next era of business will be defined not by extraction and exploitation, but by multi-stakeholder collaboration in regenerative, shared value co-creation.
Absolute Value Optimization
Designing for true multi-dimensional value — economic, ecological, social, governance — enhancing benefit and reducing harm across entire systems.
Transformational Business Models & Leadership
Redesigning for future-fit business models, leadership competencies and capacities, and organizational DNA for the regenerative economy — from the inside out.
Regenerative Enterprise & Ecosystem Design
Co-creating transformational business systems built on living systems principles, from design through implementation and ongoing evolution.
Co-Creation Platforms & Processes
Leveraging systems modeling, open innovation platforms, co-creation processes, and inclusive governance structures to unlock new forms of collaborative value creation and synergies.
Innovative Technology from Discovery to Adoption
Bridging breakthrough and traditional technology with the organizational, cultural, and systemic conditions needed for meaningful development, adoption and impact.
Strategies for Transition & Transformation
Charting pathways from the current paradigm and systems to regenerative futures — realistic, sequenced, and co-designed with the people who will navigate them.
Focus Industries
Where We Work
Industry & Sector Experience
Proven Partnership
Lorinda Rowledge, Ph.D., brings decades of experience working at the intersection of sustainability, organizational transformation, and systems innovation across a wide range of sectors and geographies.
Aerospace & Airlines
Alaska Airlines
The Boeing Company (multiple business units)
Apparel, Footwear & Outdoor Industry
NIKE, Inc.
Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI)
Banking & Finance
Al Ahli Bank of Kuwait
Assurant Inc.
BECU
Grant Thornton
National Bank of Kuwait
RSM International
Sound Community Bank
Brand, Marketing & Communications
AGT (now Telus)
AT&T Canada
Bell Canada
Kantar Added Value (WPP)
Mosaic Communications
Built Environment & Real Estate
Brookdale Senior Living
College Housing NW
Enclave Ventures
Spirit Bay Development
Sand Castle Dreams /Los Pueblos SA de CV
Conservation & NGOs
The Nature Conservancy (WA)
The Nature Conservancy (Global)
Nature Conservancy Canada
Electric Equipment & Parts Manufacturing
ESCO Mining, Construction, & Industrial Products
Fourstar Connections
Energy & Clean Tech
Ballard Power Systems
SES AI (Lithium Metal)
ČEZ Group (Czech Republic)
Tesoro Corporation
Food, Agriculture & Forestry
Danone S.A.
Darigold / NW Dairy Association
Glanbia Cheese & Whey
Glanbia plc.
KONA Deep Corporation
Theo Chocolate
The Weyerhaeuser Company
Health Care & Pharmaceuticals
Mayo Clinic
Virginia Mason Health System
Saskatoon Health Region
SmithKline Beecham (GSK)
Public Sector & Government
City of Calgary
City of Seattle
Port of Seattle
Dept. of Ecology, WA State
Canadian Office of Auditor General
Technology
Hewlett Packard Company
Lucent Technologies
Microsoft /R2Integration
Quantum Corporation
StorageTek
Universities/Academia
Bainbridge Graduate Institute
Presidio Graduate School
University of Victoria
Ready to Co-Create?
The next generation of regenerative enterprise won't emerge from business as usual. It will be
co-created — by visionary leaders, innovative partners, and committed collaborators working together toward what is both urgently needed and newly possible.