When we speak of sustainability today, it's no longer just about 'going green'–it's about a fundamental shift in mindset. What do you see as the fundamental truth we must embrace about sustainability and how do you see the narrative around sustainability evolving?

In my job as the Coca Cola Chaired Professor of Sustainability at the IEDC-Bled School of Management, which I left in 2016, I wrote books, did research, and worked with organizations with this idea of sustainability not being enough, that we are entering the stage where it's just not an exciting aspirational goal anymore.

I often joke that if you haven't seen an old neighbor of yours for a while who moved away, and you meet in a restaurant and you hug and you ask them how their life is and how their work is and how their marriage is, the answer is “sustainable”. That's hardly an aspirational answer. We don't want our marriages to be just “sustainable”. In the same way, I hope we don't want our organizations or our communities or our entire civilization to be just sustainable – to dragon, to be at the basic level of survival. I hope we want it to be flourishing and thriving and exciting and beautiful and glorious and so on.

So I think we have finally moved from the idea of reducing harm to now entering the stage of regenerative capitalism, where we are actually regenerating and creating more value than we are consuming as a society. And that for me is exciting because that is a goal that drives innovation. It’s less about shame, less about fear, less about businesses feeling guilty for their impact in the world and more about innovation that drives creative products and services, and beautiful new solutions – which is the essence of what business is about: problem-solving and value creation. That's the sustainability I'm interested in. This is sustainability plus. This is regenerative capitalism.

What lessons have you drawn from global crises–economic, environmental, or social–that underscore the importance of reinvention?

My shift from sustainability to reinvention happened during my time at IEDC-Bled. I was a keynote speaker at a major conference, and I already had a best-selling book Embedded Sustainability, which is now a classic in the field of sustainability, as it’s about innovation and how to embed and integrate sustainability in all of your business operations to drive competitive advantage. And I felt very proud of myself.

I really felt that I was doing a good job. And at the end of the conference, all the keynote speakers were having dinner and we all went around the circle and one of us asked, do you have hope? And all of us coming from very different fields (some, like me, from business and others from biology and climate and politics), all of us agreed that when it comes to some of the fundamental issues such as climate change, for example, and its impact on our access to food, fresh water, or the catastrophic weather events such as the floods that Slovenia experienced recently, this kind of change is inevitable, that we're past the moment of prevention. And the only other option we have now, if we are going to face the dramatic disruptions anyway, is not prevention, it’s adaptation. I was looking for a more aspirational word than that, so I chose the word “reinvention”.

We cannot prevent, so we need to reinvent. We need to find a way to live with whatever is coming without knowing what exactly is coming and how it will show up in our region, in our industry, or in our company. Therefore, the only answer is universal reinvention skills, tools, and communities. And that's how the whole effort of Reinvention Academy started – from realizing that without giving reinvention skills and tools, science-based but easy to use, not super theoretical, applied and tested in the real-world environment, in the messy reality of companies or the nonprofit sector or community living, that we need to develop tools and teach those tools to grow the skills so that whatever specific disruption your company or your community is facing, you're ready. For some, it will be climate change, but for others, it will be economic collapse.

For some, it will be, as we're facing right now, geopolitical turbulence, including violent conflicts and wars. For some, it might be a technological disruption. We're all facing it with artificial intelligence right now. It doesn't matter what specific disruption you're facing. The set of skills and tools to address and success fully adapt are universal.

It's like playing a good musical instrument. Once you master the piano, you can play Bach and the classics, but you can also play folk song songs, rock songs, and rap songs. It doesn't matter. You can be very, very good at this universal toolkit and apply it in any context. And that's where we are with reinvention right now.

If we're tasked with leading the reinvention of Slovenia as a global player in business and sustainability, what would be the first critical step?

For me, the first critical step is to find and disseminate all the incredible cases of business sustainability innovation that is happening in Slovenia right now, and make them world-famous. Slovenia is a land of reinvention. And when we speak about reinvention, innovation is only one out of nine types of innovation. You have a very wide and diversified portfolio of reinvention, from incremental change to radical innovation and everything in between.

I would start with finding those cases, highlighting and celebrating them, and learning how to scale them and make them available to everyone. You have so much good happening in the country, and transferring lessons learned from one organization to another, one community to another, is the place I would start because you're already great at this. Making solid research and using your own best practices, not looking outside of the country. These unique cases happen in small pockets and niches, so nobody knows about them and everyone starts from scratch, wasting precious time and resources to invent something where you can just reinvent somebody else's invention.

It's already been done, and there's a lot of success in the country. It just needs to be available as an open-source community, learning from each other, sharing super-quick, pushing each other, and building on the success that has already happened.

What are the key elements that determine success in the reinvention process?

There's really only one measure of success when it comes to reinvention, and that is the level of life in the system.

Reinvention works as a new cross-disciplinary field of management that connects strategy, innovation, and change management – aligning them and creating synergies between them. We call them anticipating change, designing change, and implementing change. Anticipating change involves analytics, foresight, strategy. Designing change – that's innovation, design thinking, R&D. Implementing change – that's change management, project management, Scrum Agile. All of those traditionally are done separately from each other, not aligned and almost at war with each other.

Reinvention is connecting those three key areas, and there's only one measure. Have we increased the level of life in the system or not? If we are reinventing a company, is our company more alive from the point of view of both financial performance and customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction? This is a cohesive index of performance. If we're talking about product reinvention, is our product more alive?

You can use whatever measures of “aliveness” you want because it’s uniquely yours. Sometimes it's customer user cases, customer experience, customer retention, and so on. But you do need to sustain and continuously increase the level of life in the system.You need to make sure you no longer treat change as a one-time project.

Reinvention is a continuous regular process like brushing your teeth. If you don't brush your teeth, you cannot go without brushing your teeth for 7 years and then brush them very well for 2 weeks. They will be gone by then. You will have loss, cavities, and so on. It’s the same with business.

Reinvention is a regular process. It's not an everyday process, but it's definitely more often than every 7 years.