Regenerative Project Management
Regenerative Project Management (RPM) is a framework for rethinking how projects are designed, governed, and evaluated in complex social, ecological, and organizational systems. Rather than focusing solely on efficiency and delivery, RPM emphasizes regeneration, resilience, and long-term system health.
This site presents RPM as an educational and scholarly resource supporting research, teaching, and critical inquiry into the future of project management.
About the RPM Framework
Regenerative Project Management (RPM) is a framework developed to address the limitations of traditional project management approaches in complex social, ecological, and organizational systems. Rather than focusing solely on efficiency, optimization, and delivery, RPM emphasizes regeneration, resilience, and long-term system health.
RPM is presented as an educational and scholarly framework intended to support research, teaching, and critical inquiry into how projects can contribute positively to the systems they affect. The framework draws on systems thinking, regenerative design, and interdisciplinary perspectives to re-examine how project success is defined and evaluated over time.
Why Regeneration
Projects increasingly operate within complex social, ecological, and organizational systems marked by uncertainty, interdependence, and cumulative risk. Yet many project management approaches remain grounded in models optimized for predictability, efficiency, and short-term delivery. While effective in stable contexts, these models often fail to account for long-term system impacts, unintended consequences, and the conditions required for system health over time.
Sustainability-oriented approaches have sought to reduce harm and improve efficiency, but frequently remain bounded by a logic of minimization rather than contribution. In contexts of ecological overshoot, social fragility, and institutional strain, reducing negative impact is no longer sufficient.
Regeneration shifts the focus from limiting damage to actively supporting the renewal, resilience, and vitality of the systems projects depend upon. A regenerative perspective asks not only whether a project met its immediate objectives, but how it influenced system capacity, adaptability, and long-term wellbeing.
Regenerative Project Management (RPM) adopts this perspective to reframe project practice as a systemic and ethical endeavor—one concerned with relationships, feedback loops, and temporal responsibility, rather than control and output alone.
Framework Origins
Regenerative Project Management (RPM) emerged through sustained research, teaching, and observation across project, organizational, and socio-ecological contexts. The framework developed in response to recurring patterns observed in both practice and education—particularly the limitations of delivery-centric project management models when applied to complex, adaptive systems.
Through teaching project management and related subjects, it became increasingly evident that prevailing frameworks often struggled to account for interdependence, unintended consequences, and long-term system effects. Student inquiries, case analyses, and reflective practice repeatedly surfaced tensions between efficiency-driven project success and broader ethical, ecological, and organizational considerations.
RPM evolved as a way to articulate these tensions and explore alternative assumptions about what projects are for, how success is defined, and what responsibilities project actors hold over time. Rather than prescribing a fixed method, the framework integrates insights from systems thinking, regenerative design, and interdisciplinary scholarship to support deeper inquiry into project practice.
RPM is presented here as an evolving conceptual framework. It is not positioned as complete or definitive, but as a foundation for ongoing research, teaching, and dialogue as understandings of regeneration, complexity, and project work continue to develop.
About the Author
Lisa Hammond is a scholar and educator whose work focuses on project management, organizational systems, and regenerative approaches to design and governance. Her research and teaching explore how projects operate within complex social, ecological, and organizational contexts, and how prevailing project management models shape long-term system outcomes.
Regenerative Project Management (RPM) reflects her ongoing inquiry into how project practice might move beyond efficiency- and control-oriented paradigms toward approaches that support resilience, ethical responsibility, and system health over time. RPM is presented as an evolving framework informed by research, teaching, and interdisciplinary engagement.
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Inquiries related to Regenerative Project Management (RPM)—including research collaboration, educational use, or scholarly discussion—are welcome.
contact@rpmframework.org