How does repatterning work?
By unleashing the potential for systems change, your organisation can thrive in a future sustainable economy.
If you are looking to create a strategy or transition plan and want transformative change with lasting impacts, you will need to explore the full range of opportunities within your ecosystem – including the undiscovered territories of new collaborations with stakeholders.
Making fundamental, transformative change can be difficult because it’s likely that everyone around you has to change. But what if they were all ready, and change could be enabled by you engaging differently?
Repatterning your organisational ecosystem starts by engaging differently: with the supplier who never thought of offering you a solution as they assumed you wouldn’t be ready; with the values-driven customer who didn’t ask because their expectations were lowered; with the critic who actually wanted to be a partner; or with the team of staff whose passion and ambition to make progress on this has been hiding for a long time behind being too busy.
To repattern your organisation means:
- Reframing your strategic questions and challenges,
- Rewriting the narratives you hold about yourself and others,
- Rewiring your network to enable new patterns of relationship to form,
- Redrafting your agreements and contracts to support new business models, and
- Regenerating your enterprise through new flows of sustainable finance that make the optimum systemic impact.
“If you want to go far, go together…”
Repatterning is an ‘Ecosystem Strategy’ process for you and your stakeholders.
Successful systemic change will mean embedding new patterns of relationship across an organisation and their entire ecosystem – employees, suppliers, partners, customers, investors, communities, regulators, industry peers, commentators, campaigners, thought leaders and innovators.
Organisations cannot ‘control’ their ecosystem, nor should they seek to. But they can decide how to approach them and set the context for the interactions that take place.
Key elements of repatterning process
Discover latent opportunities that could emerge from the wider landscape, mobilising untapped sources of talents and potential from your networks.
Open up to the non-linear world reality we live in. Become obsessively curious about the way things are and how they relate to each other.
Change the way we think – neural pathway development for change, opening ourselves and our wider system up to future possibility.
Break out of the loop of change fatigue and disillusionment – “we tried that before” leaves a lot unexamined.
Organisations are increasingly aware of their social and environmental impact on the world and are exploring how they can become more sustainable.
Some changes are as simple as replacing the light bulbs to save energy. Others, such as a new infrastructure or changes to internal processes, are more complicated and require research or advice.
In many areas of sustainability, the challenges are complex:
- it’s hard to predict the precise outcomes of an intervention
- there are numerous interdependencies linked to what others do and how they react or behave
- there could be unintended consequences to manage and a pressure to communicate clearly in the context of many unknowns.
It’s not easy to open up to observing the non-linearity of the systems we really live in.
The feelings of uncertainty, coupled with old habits, predominant mindsets and patterns of relationships with key stakeholders have a tendency to undermine the intentional strategy, with organisations falling back into the normal routines.
This is why so many sustainability projects fail.
And the increased scrutiny on company performance and authenticity has triggered a deluge of disclosure requirements and measurement – often at the cost of directing resources to making the sustainable changes that were intended in the first place.
To understand complex sustainability challenges means…
opening up to multiple perspectives to gain insight on the key leverage points for change.
radical listening to truly hear stakeholders and challenging our preconceptions and narratives about our own roles, re-examining what might be possible.
reframing challenges as opportunities that can drive purpose-led innovation.
reflecting the new patterns of relationship that emerge into contracts to unlock flows of sustainable finance, driving regenerative growth and positive impact.
maintaining focus on the systemic goals as initiatives scale up: it’s possible to steer deeper change across the economy as familiarity grows, other organisations replicate, new alliances form, regional or national policies change and a cycle of endogenous growth takes hold.
About us
James Vaccaro: CEO
James is a sustainability strategist and systems thinker with twenty-five years’ senior management experience in sustainable finance and business. He has provided leadership for organisations and projects and served on a wide range of business and charity boards and governing bodies.
Through RePattern, James is a strategy advisor to a number of regenerative agriculture-tech companies and has led the development of the WWF Nature-based Solutions Accelerator. James was previously Group Director of Strategy for Triodos Bank – Europe’s leading international sustainable bank and investment manager. In his career at Triodos, James set up and managed the UK investment business comprising corporate finance and crowdfunding services, venture capital fund management and fund distribution.
Current Engagements
- Strategy Advisor, ShareAction: Supporting this leading NGO in its work to unleash the positive potential of the investment system.
- Senior Advisor, Topo Finance: Building on the insights of the pioneering Carbon Bankroll report to catalyse corporate cash being aligned with sustainability strategy.
- Design Council Expert Network, the UK’s national strategic advisor with a ‘design for planet’ mission.
- Senior Associate, Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership.
- Senior Associate, Volans: Leading change programs for nature-positive impact and multi-stakeholder business model innovation.
- Advisory Panel Member, GFANZ: The global financial coalitions supporting net zero launched by Mark Carney at COP21.
- Member, Transition Plan Taskforce: The UK Government taskforce to define Transition Plans.
- Co-founder, Beyond Bretton Woods: A research collaboration for international financial architecture reform.
- Advisor/Investor, Carbon13: The venture-builder for the climate emergency.
- Senior Fellow (previously Board Chair), Finance Innovation Lab: A network of innovators to help transform the financial system to serve people and planet. Founded as a joint venture between WWF and ICAEW.
- Non-executive Director, Regen: Transforming energy systems for a net zero future.
- Advisor Gold Standard Foundation: Advising on the Gold Standard for the Global Goals in relation to enabling actions for impact funds.
- Advisory Group member of NatureScapes, a Horizon Europe project researching the interconnectivity of nature-based solutions across a landscape.
- Senior Advisor, Club of Rome.
Previous Engagements
- Strategy Director, Triodos Bank supporting advocacy on financial sector reform, innovation, strategic advice and facilitating learning and development. Previously Managing Director (Investments), managing Positive Impact funds and corporate finance for Europe’s leading sustainable bank.
- Chief Catalyst, Climate Safe Lending Network: Leading innovation and strategy for a global multi-stakeholder network dedicated to accelerating the decarbonization of the banking sector to secure a climate-safe world.
- Managing Director, Thrive Renewables (previously Triodos Renewables).
- Project Lead, Bankability, Nature Based Solutions Accelerator, WWF UK.
- Special Advisor to the Finance Impact Hub, Club of Rome.
- Special Advisor, Finance Watch.
- Banking Committee Member, UNEP FI (Chairing the Civil Society Advisory Board for the UN Principles for Responsible Banking).
Lizzie Flower: Executive Assistant
Brought up in Philadelphia, Lizzie Flower moved to the UK in 1995 to complete a degree in History of Art from the University of Manchester. Prior to that she had worked for the Lotus Development Company in Cambridge MA and started up a small catering company to satisfy, in part, her love of food and entertaining. She lives on a small farm in rural Suffolk UK, works as Personal Assistant to James, as the Programme Coordinator for the Climate Safe Lending Network and serves on the Board of the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation.
Jenny Dance: Communications Strategy
Jenny’s career has embraced the themes of finance, communications and pedagogy. She worked at Goldman Sachs in London as a Financial Communications Analyst, and later at Hargreaves Lansdown and Lloyds Banking Group in Communications, Analytics and Business Development roles. More recently, she founded Phona, publishers of an award-winning app, Say It: English Pronunciation. She has a track record in turning innovative, original ideas into successful products and services. An entrepreneur with a passion for data insights, design thinking and user-centred innovation, Jenny’s mission is to create messaging and experiences which engage, surprise and delight the audience.
