Dialectical tensions and regenerative capability formation in social enterprises: cases from Egypt

1 Introduction

In an era marked by intersecting global crises, ranging from ecological degradation to stark social inequalities and the erosion of communities, there is a growing urgency to reimagine economic and social systems in the pursuit of justice, resilience, and renewal (East, 2020; Hickel, 2020).

1.1 Corporate sustainability and social entrepreneurship

These realities have led to the rise of notions such as sustainability management, or the integration of environmental, social, and economic considerations into a company's strategy and operations (Hörisch et al., 2014). In parallel, social enterprises that pursue dual social and economic missions represent a prominent organizational form through which this re-imagining is attempted (Almandoz and Lee, 2022; Saebi et al., 2019). The hybrid nature of social enterprises requires balancing between often competing social, ecological and financial goals; a reality that is especially true in resource constrained contexts (Battilana and Lee, 2014). This reality makes paradoxical thinking not only expected but necessary for navigating competing demands (de Mon et al., 2022; Rappaport, 1981; Smith and Lewis, 2011).

Social enterprises are a natural extension to the notion of corporate sustainability and represent compelling laboratories that operate at the intersection of social and economic definitions of success. Rather than centering profit as the primary aim, social enterprises adopt a more balanced value orientation, one that accounts for the well-being of workers, communities, ecosystems, and future generations (Kummitha et al., 2025). This shift reflects a broader transformation from top-down extractive models toward long-term collective well-being. It is important to note that no social enterprise exists in isolation. Drawing from Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological systems theory, we can understand (social) enterprises as nested within interdependent human, institutional, and environmental systems: from individual and team-level dynamics (microsystem), to organizational structures and norms (mesosystem), to broader community and sectoral relations (exosystem), all the way to wider cultural, political, and economic conditions (macrosystem). Systems thinkers remind us of the complexity of sustainability challenges, how systems are interconnected, and that sometimes shifts at one level can reverberate through the whole to transform it (Voulvoulis et al., 2022). Social enterprises are not just actors in the market; they can be integral to regenerating the living social fabric, influencing and being influenced by the complex systems they inhabit.

Unpacking myths of what makes an “efficient” and “effective” organization (Almandoz and Lee, 2022) needs to be untangled within the context of social entrepreneurship. Truly transformative and second-order change requires turning typical corporation mindsets on their head. Pathways to “success”, defined in much broader, multiple-stakeholder perspectives, involve, more than anything else, leaning into ethical conundrums and challenging the most persistent and pernicious myths (Kummitha et al., 2025).

1.2 Regeneration

Empowerment, according to Rappaport in his “Terms of Empowerment” (1987), must, embody more than individuals overcoming adversity. With this in mind, social enterprises, other kinds of organizations and even broader contexts must be central in reproducing regenerative principles: approaches that move beyond sustainability toward actively restoring and renewing social, ecological, and psychological systems (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Sanford, 2017). If a social enterprise is authentically pursued from a regenerative perspective, every attempt is made to resist the temptations toward pseudo-social responsibility and neoliberal illusions (Oberoi et al., 2022). The mission of the social enterprise then becomes advancing an ecologically broad assurance that financial viability is fostered in a way healthy to the entire ecosystem in which it exists and throughout time.

Regeneration is defined as cultivating life-affirming systems where human potential, collective purpose, and ecological vitality are mutually reinforced (Gibbons, 2020; Sanford, 2020). Regenerative organizations represent an evolution beyond conventional organizational sustainability, by aiming for net-positive outcomes (Gibbons, 2020; Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Konietzko et al., 2023).

Regenerative organizations operate from a systems-awareness and an understanding of their embeddedness within complex social-ecological systems (Caldera et al., 2022; Hahn and Tampe, 2021). Their core purpose goes beyond profit maximization or problem-solving toward net-positive impacts that actively contribute to the flourishing of whole systems (Gibbons, 2020; Hahn and Tampe, 2021). They engage stakeholders, including employees, communities, partners, and investors as key co-creators in governance, innovation, and value creation (Hutchings and Storm, 2019). Moreover, regenerative organizations draw inspiration from nature by adopting strategies such as circularity and biomimicry to actively regenerate natural, social, and cultural capital (Hutchings and Storm, 2019; Morseletto, 2020).

Konietzko et al. (2023) propose a framework for regenerative business models that entails focusing on the promotion of both planetary health and social well-being by creating and delivering value at multiple stakeholder levels, namely those of nature, societies, customers, partners and suppliers, shareholders and investors, and employees. In doing so, these organizations adopt a number of practices (regenerative leadership, co-creative partnerships with nature, and justice and fairness) that allow them to deliver value at multiple levels, and lead to net-positive impacts across the previously listed stakeholder levels. This framework maps the business model to go beyond the organization-centric view (value captured primarily for the organization) toward an ecosystem-centric view (value co-created for the health and well-being of the broader social-ecological system) (Konietzko et al., 2023).

Traditional sustainability paradigms aim to minimize harm and maintain existing systems by reducing negative social and ecological impacts (Gibbons, 2020); sustainability operates from a "do less bad" logic by emphasizing strategies that are geared towards using less resources, producing less waste, or reducing inequalities. On the other hand, regeneration seeks to actively enhance the vitality, adaptive capacity, and well-being of social-ecological systems; not reduce harm caused within them (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Buckton et al., 2023). In other words, sustainability can be understood as a necessary foundation or pre-condition whereby an organization may be financially viable, environmentally compliant and socially responsible before moving toward net-positive outcomes or a systemic orientation that is geared toward renewal. In the restore-preserve-enhance continuum proposed by Hahn and Tampe (2021), Restore strategies focus on remediating past or ongoing damage and returning them to their prior state of functionality; Preserve strategies aim to maintain the health and integrity of existing systems by preventing degradation, conserving resources, and safeguarding ecological and social assets; and Enhance strategies are the most advanced, and work towards the active enhancement of capacity for greater equity, resilience, and collective well-being than what existed previously (Hahn and Tampe, 2021).

Regenerative leadership is essential for cultivating regenerative organizations. This approach to leadership is grounded in ecological intelligence, developmental consciousness, systemic awareness, and an ethic of care (Hutchings and Storm, 2019; Sanford, 2020). It entails nurturing individuals, teams, and communities to express their full potential and vitality (Sanford, 2020).

Regenerative leaders recognize the limits of individual agency and cultivate shared responsibility by decentering their egos (Sanford, 2020); an approach that is starkly different from heroic leadership models that focus on a single hero or savior (Crevani and Lammi, 2023). They cultivate critical reflexivity, or the ability to perceive patterns, interconnections, and leverage points within complex systems (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Sanford, 2020). They also act as facilitators who align individual passions and gifts with a collective, life-affirming purpose, thus connecting daily work to broader systemic regeneration (Aoustin, 2023; Sanford, 2020). Finally, they develop the capacity for adaptivity, or to navigate ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity, and competing tensions (Hahn and Tampe, 2021).

1.3 Intangible assets and dynamic organizational capabilities

Intangible assets are non-physical sources of value and resilience within organizations. They include human capital, relational capital and structural capital, which are collectively referred to as intellectual capital (Buonomo et al., 2020). They also include culture (Kaupp, 2018), competencies and capabilities (Almansoori et al., 2022), and strategic foresight (Almansoori et al., 2022). Strategic Foresight encompasses multiple dimensions, including the scanning of the organization's surrounding environment; scenario planning; generating, using and disseminating knowledge that enables future-forward awareness and in turn cultivating an organizational culture that is forward-thinking. It also allows for developing the organizational structures necessary to facilitate being future-oriented and planning for the future (Almansoori et al., 2022).

This study moves beyond treating intangible assets as static descriptors and treats them as dynamic organizational capabilities that can be created and nurtured. From a management perspective, organizational culture functions as the infrastructure for co-ordination, learning and legitimacy, and in turn shapes how members understand and relate to the collective purpose of the organization, or navigate competing demands in real-life settings (Kaupp, 2018; Zaragoza-Sáez et al., 2023). Similarly, human capital is seen as the collective capacity of a team to share knowledge, resources, and to act with reflexivity and adaptivity (Herlina et al., 2024; Jiang et al., 2024). Moreover, a relational capital, or the trust, reciprocity, and stakeholder networks are seen as pathways to unlocking resources and building legitimacy for any given organization, thus allowing it to co-create value with its stakeholders and beyond its own limitations or boundaries (Buonomo et al., 2020). Following the same interpretation, structural capital reflects the governance systems and processes that enable coordination, accountability, and ultimately institutional wisdom and memory (Buonomo et al., 2020; Lapinskaite et al., 2025). With this in mind, strategic foresight becomes a dynamic capability that entails sensing, interpreting, and reconfiguring organizational resources in response to emerging socio-ecological complexities (Almansoori et al., 2022; Grassi et al., 2025; Malik and Terzidis, 2025).

When understood as capabilities, intangible assets thus shape an organization's capacity for shared value creation and are essential for the transition toward sustainability and regeneration (Kallio, 2021; Vidrascu, 2015).

1.4 Contributions

Despite growing theoretical interest in both regeneration and intangible assets and dynamic capabilities, the shift toward regeneration on the ground remains understudied (Ryan et al., 2023; Ståhlhammar, 2025). While frameworks like the regenerative business model (Konietzko et al., 2023) outline the “what” of regenerative organizing, and as those who developed the model themselves argue, we still lack a grounded understanding of the “how” of regenerative organizing. The way in which intangible organizational assets and capabilities are managed, nurtured or even contested, in practice requires further investigation. Developing such an understanding is necessary within the paradoxical reality of social enterprises and hybrid organizations. Accordingly, the study at hand contributes to the development of a better understanding of the dynamics at play when it comes to embedding regeneration within social enterprises or exercising regenerative leadership within them. Specifically, it also explores the role that intangible assets and capabilities play in this process.

This study addresses this gap in understanding through three key contributions. First, it offers empirical insight into the realities of social enterprises and navigating regeneration; a process that is largely theorized and understudied, especially outside Western contexts. Second, it identifies six dialectical tensions through which intangible organizational capabilities can be formed, strengthened, or eroded. By framing these tensions as sites of capability formation, the study advances a conceptual understanding of how regenerative capabilities emerge within organizations. Third, it offers insights to founders, investors, and educators seeking to further regeneration, with particular attention to the constraints and opportunities of emerging economies.

As the second largest economy in Africa, and a major emerging market (International Monetary Fund, 2025), Egypt presents a vibrant and critical case for this understanding. Egypt has been historically shaped by rhythms of renewal, but currently faces an array of inter-connected social, ecological and environmental challenges (Elsayed, 2018; Khedr, 2019). Egyptian social enterprises have emerged in response to restrictions on the non-profit sector and a limited support ecosystem, yet are experimenting with more sustainable models to address Egypt's challenges under noteworthy constraint (Elsayed, 2018; Fakoussa et al., 2020; Han, 2024; Seda and Ismail, 2020). The founders interviewed for this study lead enterprises that are among the most established and recognized within Egypt's entrepreneurship ecosystem. Their journeys offer rare insight into how intangible organizational capabilities are cultivated within the constraints and opportunities of an emerging economy, making their experiences relevant not only to Egypt but to other entrepreneurship ecosystems operating under similar socio-economic conditions.

2 Methods

Rooted in a critical-constructivist epistemology and informed by community psychology's emphasis on empowerment, participation, and systemic change (Jiménez et al., 2023; Rappaport, 1987), this qualitative study investigates the following research questions: do founders of Egyptian social enterprises demonstrate regenerative practices? And if yes, how so, and what is the role of intangible assets and dynamic organizational capabilities in their adoption of and shift toward regeneration?

The study is exploratory in nature and aimed to develop grounded conceptual insight rather than to test an existing theoretical model. The study focused on the founders of social enterprises as the main unit of analysis. Founders were treated as strategic narrators and sense makers whose accounts give insights into the enterprise's journey, approaches and practices. The study received approval from National Louis University's Institutional Review Board approval (IRB: ER01266) prior to conducting any outreach or data collection activities.

2.1 Sampling and recruitment

Participants were selected through purposive sampling to ensure relevance to the study's focus on social enterprise and regeneration. The first author created a database of 20 social enterprises through professional networks and an online search of dual-mission organizations across Egypt that are either listed on the digital communication channels of local social enterprise support organizations, have stand alone websites, or are covered in regional digital media platforms like Wamda. Since a few of the identified organizations explicitly used the language of regeneration, participant inclusion criteria included organizations that: (1) make an explicit public commitment to social and/or environmental missions, (2) offer products and services or are financially viable, and (3) that had sustained their enterprise for at least 2 years. Inclusion criteria also included a diversity in the gender of the founders, and the sectors of the organizations. Organizations were excluded if they operated purely as non-profits without a revenue-generating model, or if they had been in operation for less than 2 years at the time of data collection. A short-list of 12 founders was created based on these criteria, the first author reached out to them via email and or WhatsApp messages, and conducted interviews with those who responded.

All of the founders approached and interviewed lead well-established social enterprises that are well-known within the Egyptian entrepreneurship ecosystem and have achieved noteworthy achievements in their respective sectors. For example, the enterprise in energy, one of the enterprises in consulting, one of the enterprises in Education, and one of the enterprises in Agriculture are leaders of their respective sector; they either pioneered the introduction of a product or service or are currently considered leaders within their sectors. Given the nature of this group and the wealth of insights that their journeys carry, the sample size of nine was considered sufficient based on the principle of information power (Malterud et al., 2021). Information power is determined by the specificity of the research question, the richness of the participants' experience, and the quality of dialogue achieved, all of which were high in this study. The narrow focus on social enterprise founders navigating regeneration, the depth of engagement through 60–90 min life-history-style interviews, and the rarity of individuals who can speak to this topic with first-hand experience all contributed to the adequacy of the sample. Furthermore, no substantively new themes emerged in the final interviews conducted, suggesting that thematic saturation had been reached within this focused domain.

It is important to acknowledge that the recruitment strategy, which drew on professional networks and publicly visible organizations, may present with a selection bias toward founders who are more visible, better connected, or more articulate about their practices. This was partially mitigated by supplementing network-based outreach with an online search. However, it is also important to note that leaning toward well-established enterprises is partly intentional, since the study sought founders with substantial experience in navigating the tensions inherent in social entrepreneurship and regeneration.

2.2 Participant and enterprise overview

The final sample consisted of nine founders of leading social enterprises in Egypt, comprising four women and five men. These individuals led organizations across diverse sectors, including Agriculture (n = 3), Education (n = 2), Consulting services (n = 2), Renewable energy (n = 1), and Retail (n = 1). Enterprise size and scope varied widely. Participating organizations included small teams with a few members, as well as organizations employing up to 150 people. Most of the participating organizations had been in operation for more than 5 years at the time of data collection, with an average enterprise age of 8 years. Only one enterprise had been operating for just 2 years. Additionally, organizations varied in their geographic scope in Egypt, with some focused on a single governorate in Egypt and others operating regionally or globally.

Despite these differences in the participating organizations' scope and sector, as demonstrated in Table 1, all interviewed founders demonstrated a commitment to social or environmental change. Their mandates included regenerative agriculture, women-led retail networks, purpose-driven consulting, community-based education, and renewable energy solutions.

Table 1. Study participants.

As Table 2 demonstrates, all nine of the interviewed founders identify their organizations as social enterprises. For the majority of these companies, their dual mission is to achieve both financial and social or environmental returns. In the case of only one venture (It Takes a Village), the mission is to achieve social returns in a financially viable manner. Given the absence of social enterprise legislation in Egypt, all of the organizations included in the study are registered as businesses, with the majority being limited liability companies. Only one organization (It Takes a Village) has two structures registered as described in Table 2.

Table 2. Enterprise self-identification and legal registration status.

2.3 Interview design and procedure

To ensure accessibility and comfort, interviews were conducted in the participants' preferred language, either Arabic or English, with flexibility regarding time and location. All interviewees read and signed an informed consent form.

The interview discussion guide included open-ended questions that encouraged story-telling and self-reflection, in line with Community Psychology's participatory and dialogical traditions (Watkins, 2019). The questions covered the story of how and why the founders established the enterprise, their change models and mandates, challenges and facilitators they faced, and when possible their interpretation of regeneration within their local context. The discussions followed the natural flow of participants' narratives, and interviews lasted for 60–90 min. The discussions emphasized respectful engagement and voice, ensuring that the beliefs, attitudes, and narratives of participants were represented with care and authenticity. To maintain confidentiality, pseudonyms were used for founders and their enterprises (see Table 1). Interviews conducted in Arabic were transcribed verbatim and translated into English by a professional transcriber. Key passages and quotes used in the analysis were reviewed by the first author who is fluent in both Arabic and English to ensure accuracy of meaning and nuance. Interviews conducted in English were transcribed verbatim. All coding was completed manually using Microsoft Word; no qualitative analysis software was used. The first author conducted the primary coding, and the coding framework and emergent themes were reviewed through debriefing sessions with two qualitative research experts, as described in the Analysis section below.

2.4 Analysis

The analysis was conducted in two stages, guided by the framework of Konietzko et al. (2023) and by a dialectical understanding of paradox (Rappaport, 1981). The way in which the analysis was sequenced, and how results are presented is eclaborated on at the end of this section.

2.4.1 Assessing alignment with the regenerative business model framework

Each organization's described change model and practices were systematically assessed against the regenerative business model framework proposed by Konietzko et al. (2023). This involved coding transcripts for evidence related to the key dimensions of the framework. The framework was not used as a scoring tool, but rather to map the described practices of the interviewed organizations in relation to a comprehensive model. This stage allowed for identifying initial points of convergence and, more importantly, divergence from already existing definitions of regenerative organizations.

While this stage revealed the extent to which these enterprises adopt elements of the regenerative business model, it also has the limitations of a purely deductive framework for understanding what was happening on the ground. This was especially true since many practices fall between the framework's categories. More importantly, the most intriguing dynamics emerged in the tensions between competing commitments between the founder's vision and the team's capacity, the aspiration toward inclusion and the reality of social stratification, etc. These tensions could not be adequately captured by mapping practices against a pre-existing model; hence, the significance of the dialectical analysis described below.

2.4.2 Dialectical analysis

The heart of the analysis was the dialectical analysis, which allowed for critical-constructivist engagement with the data. Inspired by Rappaport's (1981) view of paradox as generative, we employed a dialectical analytical method (Olson and Jason, 2015). During this stage, transcripts were analyzed through line-by-line open coding to remain close to participants' language and lived experience.

Next, axial coding organized emerging categories, which resulted in six dialectical pairings or tensions (e.g., Passion vs. Pacing, Heroism vs. Humility). Rather than treating tensions as noise or failure, the analysis highlighted them as productive oppositions, reflecting how regenerative practices unfold within the complexity of social and organizational life, and broader ecosystems that are degenerative.

The coding framework and emergent themes were reviewed through debriefing with two qualitative research experts. A reflexivity journal was also maintained throughout the process to document the first author's assumptions and positional influence as an insider to Egypt's social enterprise ecosystem. This aligns with critical-constructivist and community psychology commitments to transparency and self-awareness in research (Jiménez et al., 2023). Member checking was not employed due to logistical constraints, but rich, verbatim quotes are used to ground the findings in participants' voices.

It is important to note that the dialectical analysis was conducted first in light of the study's critical-constructivist epistemology. Rather than imposing an existing framework onto the data from the outset, we began by listening to founders' narratives on their own terms, allowing tensions and contradictions to surface from the data. The assessment against Konietzko et al.'s (2023) regenerative business model framework was then conducted as a complementary step to situate the findings within an established model and to identify where grounded insights converge with or diverge from existing theory. However, we reversed this order in presenting the results to provide readers with a structured overview of the organizations and their practices, and in turn provide context for understanding the insights gained from the analysis. It is also worth noting that no researcher truly enters qualitative inquiry with a blank slate; theory is always in the background as “sensitizing concepts” that orient attention without predetermining what will be found (Charmaz, 2014).

3 Results

3.1 Adopting regenerative business model elements

The presence of each regenerative business model element (Konietzko et al., 2023) within the interviewed organizations and at different stakeholder levels is presented in Tables 3–7. Three key patterns emerged across the five business model elements. First, adoption was strongest in the domains of value propositions and employee well-being, where most organizations demonstrated commitments to social or environmental missions and to creating meaningful workplaces. Second, adoption was weakest in the domains of co-creative partnerships with nature, justice and fairness across all stakeholder levels, and comprehensive value capture at the social-ecological level. Third, a recurring tension was observed among all five elements whereby most organizations prioritized either social or ecological stakeholders or struggled to prioritize both simultaneously. This was especially evident in the cases of Nature Solutions and Organica, whose value propositions were nature-centric but whose founders were unable to meaningfully engage farm workers from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds. Only CommuCulture, Evolve, and to some extent EgRenewables demonstrated commitments across most stakeholder levels and most dimensions of the framework, even though none aligned with all elements of the model.

Table 3. Elements of the regenerative business model framework present among the sample pertaining to the value proposition (Konietzko et al., 2023, p. 378).

Table 4. Elements of the regenerative business model framework present among the sample pertaining value creation and delivery through an emphasis on regenerative leadership (Konietzko et al., 2023, p. 378).

Table 5. Elements of the regenerative business model framework present among the sample pertaining to value creation and delivery through an emphasis on co-creative partnerships with nature (Konietzko et al., 2023, pp. 378–379).

¹Nature-inclusive design is by the authors as models that “integrate measures to increase the suitable habitat for native plant and animal species populations that have been degraded” and Nature-based solutions are defined as models that “Integrate measures that protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems to address societal challenges like climate change, food and water security or natural disasters” (Konietzko et al., 2023, pp. 378–379).

²Climate resilience defined by the authors as models with “the ability to anticipate, withstand, and adapt to the impacts of climate change and other disruptions, by integrating proactive strategies and measures to minimize risks, maintain operations, and seize new business opportunities” and indigenous knowledge is defined as that “refined over thousands of years, offers invaluable techniques to foster harmony with nature and to adapt to climate change, such as preventing and controlling wildfires, understanding plant species, and conserving biodiversity.” (Konietzko et al., 2023, pp. 378–379).

Table 6. Elements of the regenerative business model framework present among the sample pertaining to value capture and delivery through an emphasis on justice and fairness (Konietzko et al., 2023, p. 379).

Table 7. Elements of the regenerative business model framework present among the sample pertaining to value capture (Konietzko et al., 2023, p. 379).

The consulting-based enterprises (Evolve and Disrupt) addressed the interests of more stakeholder levels across most elements. This is likely because their service-based models have less operational constraints when compared to product-based enterprises. On the other hand, the organizations primarily focused on agriculture struggled most with integrating diverse stakeholders in the domains of value creation, justice, and value capture. Value capture was the least developed element across all interviewed founders; it was best addressed at the employee level through capacity development, retreats, and attention to workloads. Some organizations reported ongoing challenges with overwhelm and burnout, however.

In summary, the findings indicate that the interviewed social enterprises partially adopt elements of the regenerative business model defined by Konietzko et al. (2023). Based on these findings, the interviewed enterprises can be characterized along a continuum where CommuCulture and, to a lesser extent, Nature Solutions can be described as moving toward regeneration since they demonstrate commitments across most stakeholder levels and most dimensions of the framework. This is true despite gaps in areas such as employee engagement (Nature Solutions) and formalized governance for both. Next, Evolve, Disrupt, and EgRenewables can be characterized as partially regenerative since they integrate regenerative elements into significant aspects of their business models, especially in the domains of value creation and leadership. They do not consistently extend these commitments across all stakeholder levels or ecological dimensions, however. Finally, the remaining enterprises, namely EduScience, It Takes a Village, Organica, and Reach are best described as sustainability-oriented with regenerative aspirations. They demonstrate a strong commitment to social or environmental missions but their practices align more closely with conventional sustainability than with the holistic, multi-stakeholder, net-positive orientation that characterizes regeneration (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Konietzko et al., 2023).

This continuum is not a ranking of organizational quality but rather provides analytical lens for understanding where these enterprises sit in relation to the regenerative business model framework. It also affirms that the journey toward regeneration is not a binary one. It is rather a gradual and often uneven process shaped by the tensions that founders navigate daily. It is worth noting that the enterprises characterized as moving toward regeneration (CommuCulture, Nature Solutions) were productively navigating tensions across more domains, while those characterized as sustainability-oriented (Reach, Organica) had more degenerative patterns. This suggests a connection between the two stages of analysis that calls for further investigation.

This continuum and the six tensions described in the next section can be understood as a preliminary and emergent framework rather than a definitive theory. They represent the patterns that surfaced from the accounts of nine founders and are offered as a starting point for further conceptual and empirical development. The tensions are presented thematically below with supporting data from the interviews with participants.

3.2 Navigating tensions and paradoxes

3.2.1 Heroism vs. humility; synthesis: relational stewardship

Leadership styles varied from instructive and centralized to facilitative and humble (Sanford, 2020). Khaled, who left his corporate career to pursue organic farming through Organica, exemplified the isolating pitfalls of heroic leadership:

“It's just me… I had workers, but I am fed up with them.”

Karim of Reach similarly noted how over-centralization stifled initiative within his organization:

“More than 15 people were waiting for instructions from my co-founder and me. It created dependency.”

Karim's situation stemmed from centralized responsibility, which made the founders the bottleneck. In retrospect, he wished he had decentralized decision-making, empowered team leads and created space for initiative-taking among his team.

In contrast, Amal described leadership as a relational process:

“People allowed me the legitimacy of leading them without having the right experience. They gave me the space to fail, and we allowed each other the opportunity to fail.”

Amal again offers a striking model of relational stewardship:

“I was not the idea generator… I just had to ask the questions to allow us to find the answers as a team.”

Rather than lead through charisma, she cultivated shared inquiry. Regenerative leadership in Amal's cases emerged as a dialectical synthesis of purpose and humility, autonomy and interdependence. As a leader who embraced relational stewardship, she created a culture of trust and adaptability.

3.2.2 Hierarchy vs. self-organization; synthesis: situated governance

Most founders struggle with how to structure leadership: traditional hierarchies offer clarity, but often stifle innovation and autonomy. Taher, founder of EgRenewables, consciously held both poles:

“There is a hierarchy, but it does not prevent anyone from taking initiative.”

Since the company's establishment, Taher has empowered senior managers and field engineers, cultivated feedback loops, and built coordinated systems. Several other founders in the present study neither reject nor rigidly enforce hierarchy. Instead, they combined vertical and horizontal structures of organization, which allowed them to maintain flexibility while preserving clarity and accountability.

3.2.3 Uniformity vs. diversity; synthesis: inclusivity

While being diverse was a common aspiration among the interviewed founders, actualizing diversity required intentional design, which was not always present. In some cases, founders fell back on homogeneous volunteer pools when facing class or cultural differences:

“We struggled to bridge differences. So we relied on volunteers from similar educational and economic backgrounds.”

Raed, founder of CommuCulture, a desert-based regenerative farming community (including a restaurant and hotel) modeled an alternative. Based in a marginalized region of Egypt, he embedded hospitality and cultural reciprocity into every aspect of the organization:

“I shared with families from the surrounding Bedouin communities how this is not a restaurant; this is my home. People eating at the restaurant are my guests, and as a part of our culture, we all take care of guests. This was the starting point of effectively engaging Bedouin families in the success of this community. We centered everything around hospitality and caring for the guests that come in.”

By treating customers, staff, and community members with familial dignity, Raed fostered trust across deep social divides. By grounding diversity and inclusion in local cultural values of hospitality, Raed fostered trust and collaboration, enabling more than 70 small farms, most led by indigenous community members, to eventually join his community and framing desert efforts.

3.2.4 Exclusion vs. participation; synthesis: living governance

Stakeholder participation was widely valued among all interviewed founders, but few enterprises consistently incorporated external voices into their decision-making processes and equity models. Only three had formal boards (EgRenewables, Disrupt, and It Takes a Village), and many remained founder-driven in their decision making. When boards existed, they enhanced accountability and legitimacy. In contrast, when boards were absent, organizational strategy and direction faltered.

Raed's CommuCulture stood out. Engaged deeply with Bedouin communities, Raed did not treat residents as program recipients but as co-creators of the enterprise's mission:

“Governance for us is inclusive, multi-level, and all about shared knowledge, and continually reshaping the organization's purpose.”

Raed's reshaping of the organization's very identity reflected his commitment to living governance, which evolved through continuous and collective dialogue.

Other enterprises relied on surveys, community meetings, or occasional efforts to gather insights from local communities.

3.2.5 Passion vs. pacing; synthesis: harmony

All of the interviewed founders emphasized passion as a driving force behind starting their enterprise. However, the form this passion took had an impact on an organization's sustainability differently. Karim, founder of Reach, who shifted from traditional development to retail in an attempt to expand economic opportunities for stay-at-home mothers, described an intense passion (Gillet et al., 2023):

“We were very aggressive. We essentially asked staff at the office to perform at 150% of their capacities.”

This intensity reflected the risks of overextension, where zeal overtook sustainability. In contrast, Taher, who founded EgRenewables, one of Egypt's first players in the renewable energy space, reflected:

“I love my life… I love going to my office every day. Everyone here is deeply excited about what we are trying to do. This was a deliberate process. We went as far as designing our office space to ensure a tight-knit community, we have shared spaces, shared meals, and most importantly, we share a vision.”

His example illustrates a harmonious passion that integrates work meaningfully into life without overshadowing well-being (Gillet et al., 2023).

Pacing one's passion is not just about building relationships and community within the organization; it is also about fostering a sense of purpose and belonging. Amal who founded It Takes a Village to address the challenge of children's access to quality education in urban informal areas, further showed how intentional pausing and collective reflection prevented burnout and fostered resilience among her team and the entire organization. Despite gaining national attention for community-based education, she sensed her team's pace had outstripped its capacity, and her team felt comfortable saying they felt the same:

“Something did not feel right. We told ourselves we must stop, reflect, and see if our actions are right. That was one of the best things we have done.”

Rather than pushing forward, Amal paused with her team to reflect and realign their mission. Her regenerative rhythm (i.e., intentional slowing, collective listening, and recalibration) prevented burnout and reinforced trust and purpose.

3.2.6 Stability vs. emergence; synthesis: mission in motion

The final paradox that emerged from discussions with the founders is related to maintaining coherence while adapting to the ever-changing contexts that surround them. While some founders clung to their founding visions, others risked either mission drift or losing relevance. Regeneration, as these leaders practiced it, meant evolving the organization's mission without losing its soul.

Farida's journey with Evolve embodied this tension. She launched a collaborative purpose lab in Cairo, inspired by social justice and entrepreneurship. Initially fluid and experimental, the enterprise became more complex as tensions with the status quo, or what the traditional market demands, arose:

“Meaningful change demands mutual openness across all levels.”

Emergence required more than adaptability; it demanded emotional endurance. Farida held space for change while acknowledging her limits:

“I want to love and support everyone, but I can not carry it all.”

Her story illustrates that emergence can become emotionally unsustainable without shared capacity and feedback loops.

Nour, co-founder of the nature-based agriculture farm, Nature Solutions, provided a complementary example. As a social scientist who links ecological, human, and community health, she intentionally allowed the organization to evolve in response to stakeholder learning. Regeneration here meant staying open to surprise.

Finally, it is worth noting that the six tensions were not experienced in a uniform manner across all founders. While all nine participants described dynamics related to most of the tensions, the intensity of each varied. For instance, the Passion versus Pacing tension was particularly acute among founders of product-based enterprises operating under financial pressure (such as Karim at Reach, Khaled at Organica) but was less pronounced among consulting-based enterprises with more flexible operating models (such as Farida at Evolve, Leila at Disrupt). Similarly, the Uniformity versus Diversity tension was more visible in enterprises that interface directly with communities from different socio-economic backgrounds, and less so in those whose stakeholders that are more homogeneous. No founder described having fully resolved any tension; rather, the data suggest that these paradoxes are ongoing and that founders may hold regenerative practices in one organizational domain while maintaining degenerative patterns in another. This reality is consistent with the dialectical framing of the study, which treats tensions as enduring features of organizational life rather than problems to be eliminated (Rappaport, 1981).

4 Discussion

4.1 Adopting regenerative business model elements

Findings from this stage of the analysis indicate that social enterprises and regenerative enterprises share considerable overlap in their value propositions, and especially when it comes to their commitments to social well-being. This overlap is not surprising given the purposive selection of ventures with dual missions. However, the findings also point to a consistent gap among social enterprises, whereby most organizations prioritize value to one stakeholder level over another, and few demonstrate the holistic, multi-stakeholder orientation that defines regeneration (Konietzko et al., 2023). This is consistent with how hybrid organizations face consistent tensions between competing logics, and that few manage to integrate them simultaneously (Battilana and Lee, 2014).

The most revealing pattern was the tension between nature and society, and between different groups within society. In the cases of Nature Solutions and Organica, the founders centered ecological restoration but were unable to extend their value propositions to farm workers from less affluent backgrounds. Nour at Nature Solutions faced resistance from a farm manager to whom workers were allied and encountered aggressive interactions when she attempted to engage neighboring farms through the cooperative's General Assembly. In contrast, CommuCulture was able to center both nature and diverse communities through years of intentional relationship building. The discussions with all three founders indicate that the main differentiator was not intention but investments in relational capital building. Raed's years of sustained presence within Bedouin communities, and his facilitative approach to nurturing both the desert land and its inhabitants, enabled a more holistic integration of stakeholder levels. This aligns with the argument that regenerative organizations draw on sustained relational processes rather than episodic interventions (Hutchings and Storm, 2019), and with that collaborative governance depends on long-term trust-building rather than one-off engagement (Calò et al., 2024).

This pattern was also observed across all five business model elements whereby the organizations that addressed the most stakeholder levels were those that had invested in trust-building and community engagement over time. The consulting-based enterprises (Evolve and Disrupt) also addressed most stakeholder levels, though likely because their service-based models allow greater flexibility in tailoring strategies to regeneration. The inability of most organizations to capture value across multiple stakeholder levels points to a macro-system constraint: the Egyptian ecosystem is primarily geared toward traditional organizations, and when capital providers prioritize financial or social returns in isolation (Halabi et al., 2017). In other words, the broader ecosystem creates organizations committed to one dimension rather than holistic regeneration. This aligns with the institution-based view, in which organizational strategies are shaped by internal capabilities as well as institutional constraints and incentives of the broader environment in which they operate (Peng et al., 2009).

4.2 Navigating tensions and paradoxes

This study set out to explore the paradoxical reality of social enterprises and shifts toward regeneration, and to understand how intangible organizational capabilities are cultivated within this context. Our dialectical analysis revealed six core tensions that shape regeneration and the journey toward it. Each tension represents a dilemma or space where the intangible organizational capabilities of culture, human, relational and structural capital, and strategic foresight are either solidified or eroded. With this in mind, each tension constitutes a site for capability development, where the way founders and their organizations engage in paradox impacts capacity to adopt regeneration.

The below subsections elaborate on each tension by discussing (1) how the tension appeared in founders' narratives; (2) which organizational practices were involved; (3) which intangible capabilities were being strengthened or weakened; and (4) what this means for the shift toward regeneration. Figure 1 visually depicts the six tensions. Specifically, the six tensions intersect with leadership capability (Heroism vs. Humility), design capability (Hierarchy vs. Self-organization), governance capability (Exclusion vs. Participation), knowledge breadth (Uniformity vs. Diversity), temporal capability (Passion vs. Pacing), and adaptive capability (Stability vs. Emergence).

4.2.1 Heroism vs. humility; synthesis: relational stewardship

Among the most important tensions that emerged from founders' narratives was that between heroic, centralized leadership and a more humble, relational approach. Several founders described experiences where they or their co-founders had become the single point of reference for their organizations. This is what Sanford (2020) refers to as the heroic model, which assumes that systemic change depends on a single, exceptional leader or hero (Sanford, 2020). The interviews suggest that such a model becomes a bottleneck for organizational learning and growth.

Khaled's account of running Organica largely alone, and Karim's description of 15 people waiting for instructions from the two founders at reach, both illustrate how heroic leadership can negatively impact the very human capital an organization depends on. When decision-making remains centralized, knowledge stops flowing, members are hindered from taking initiative, and the organization and its culture become limited to the world view and capacity of the founder (Buonomo et al., 2020; Herlina et al., 2024). In both cases, founders described organizations that were in effect degenerative, with little shared agency or adaptive capacity needed to achieve or work toward their mandates, and especially regenerative ones.

In contrast, Amal from It Takes a Village described a widely different story and understanding. She described leadership as a relational process where her legitimacy was granted to her by her team, failure was allowed and a shared responsibility, and where collective inquiry replaced top-down directives. Her approach in turn actively built human and relational capital, which in turn sustained the organization through periods of uncertainty. This is consistent with research that demonstrates how distributed leadership enhances organizational adaptability and well-being (Klasmeier et al., 2025; Maldonado et al., 2021).

From a capability perspective, this tension indicates that the shift from heroism toward humility is not simply a matter of leadership style or preference. Rather, it is a process through which the capability for organizational learning, trust-building, and cohesion is either cultivated or eroded. Founders who adopted heroic patterns limited their organizations' intellectual capital, and especially the capacity for knowledge sharing, collective sense-making, or initiative taking and agency. In contract, those who moved toward relationship stewardship cultivated the cultural foundation needed to enable regeneration. This includes shared trust and ownership of the mission, and an organizational identity that can survive beyond the founder (Gee, 2025). It is worth noting that Amal has in-fact stepped down from being CEO of it takes a village, and the organization still runs successfully 2 years from her stepping down. These insights align with the regenerative paradigm's understanding of transformative change as a collaborative and emergent process that is shaped by relationships between groups of individuals, and not a single hero alone (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Sanford, 2020).

4.2.2 Hierarchy vs. self-organization; synthesis: situated governance

The issue of how to structure decision-making and authority was one that most founders grappled with. This tension is often discussed in organizational theory, whereby hierarchical structures offer clarity and accountability, while flatter structures allow for greater autonomy and innovation. Given the context of Egyptian organizations, it is important to acknowledge that the interviewed founders are operating in an environment where hierarchical structures are the norm (Bayraktar et al., 2022). Yet, the mandates of their organizations require a great deal of innovation and adaptability (Hahn and Tampe, 2021).

Taher's approach to leadership and organizing offers the clearest example of a founder who is able to hold poles simultaneously. His organization maintains a formal hierarchy that ensures accountability, but also creates the space for initiative taking and autonomy. Within this structure, employees from different tiers are empowered to take decisions, there are open feedback loops across the organization, and a co-ordination system was built over the span of more than a decade of operation. He describes this simply by saying

“there is a hierarchy but it does not prevent anyone from taking initiative.”

This approach demonstrates what is referred to as heterarchy (Aime et al., 2014) or ambidextrous leadership (Zacher and Rosing, 2015). Such a setting allows leaders to balance opening behaviors that promote creativity with closing behaviors that provide alignment and clarity (Zacher and Rosing, 2015).

On the other hand, the experiences of founders like Karim at Reach, where centralized decision-making created dependency and ultimately contributed to organizational strain, illustrate what happens when the tension between hierarchy and self-organization is not resolved. Without the structures that distribute authority, the organization's capacity to learn and adapt becomes concentrated, and bottlenecked, at the top, and the structural capital needed for long-term resilience is hindered.

From a capability perspective, this tension is about the organization's ability to create governance arrangements that are suitable for its context, stage of development, and regenerative ambitions.

Situated governance, a synthesis that emerged from the data, is not a fixed model, but is rather dynamic and depends on where the organization is along its journey. It involves sensing when more co-ordination is needed, and more importantly, staying alert to cues of when more or less authority and structure are needed. Developing such a capability allows for maintaining clarity and accountability while empowering frontline employees and managers to exercise judgment and adapt to local conditions (Teece, 2007). This in turn contributes to building the structural capital required to exercise strategic foresight (Almansoori et al., 2022). After all, an organization that can only operate through top-down directives lacks the shared sensing capacity to detect and respond to socio-ecological shifts (Teece, 2007; Almansoori et al., 2022; Malik and Terzidis, 2025). It is worth noting that establishing this kind of situated governance is especially challenging in contexts where institutional pressures and cultural norms favor hierarchical clarity and centralized authority (Bayraktar et al., 2022; Peng et al., 2009).

4.2.3 Exclusion vs. participation; synthesis: living governance

All interviewed participants discussed the importance of engaging stakeholders. The degree to which this engagement was meaningful, however, varied. Specifically, participation was less nuanced when it came to decision making, strategy formulation, or setting organizational direction. As mentioned in the results section, only three of the engaged founders had formal governance boards (EgRenewables, Disrupt and It Takes a Village). The rest remained largely founder-driven, albeit engaging various stakeholders through occasional surveys, community meetings, or ad-hoc consultations.

A key defining feature of organizations moving toward regeneration and life affirmation is being stakeholder-driven rather than shareholder-driven. These organizations are designed to expand value for multiple interconnected stakeholders rather than for a single group (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Hutchings and Storm, 2019); or their relational and structural capital (Buonomo et al., 2020). These founders and their organizations are aware of their various stakeholders, actively engage with them, and intentionally strive to create value for them.

At the highest regenerative level, participation is about more than consultation; it is about fostering vitality and unlocking the full potential of the ecosystem in which an organization and its stakeholders exist (Sanford, 2020). Most founders described engagement practices that were well-intentioned but inconsistent. They primarily relied on gathering input without systematically integrating it into governance or strategy. Such engagement is largely focused on value extraction, rather than to genuinely redistribute decision-making power (Buhmann et al., 2025).

As described in the Results, Raed's CommuCulture represented a different model. He describes governance as “inclusive, multi-level, and all about shared knowledge, and continually reshaping the organization's purpose.” This description reflects what we call living governance; a dynamic, evolving process in which the organization's identity itself is co-created through ongoing dialogue with its stakeholders. By fostering trust and co-creation with Bedouin communities, Raed leveraged human and relational capital (Buonomo et al., 2020) in a localized manner to further regeneration.

On the other hand, the lack of boards among most of the interviewed organizations prevents them from implementing best practices for establishing systems of accountability (Blanc et al., 2022) and ultimately hinders their intellectual and structural capital. This also indicates that they do not actively involve their direct stakeholders in decision-making or in shaping their approaches; a key strategy for fostering a participatory and empowering approach within social and regenerative enterprises (Hutchings and Storm, 2019; Larner and Mason, 2014).

From a capability perspective, what distinguishes Raed's approach is that participation functioned as a mechanism for building governance capability and stakeholder integration that is not tokenistic. In contrast, the enterprises that lacked formal governance structures or relied on shallow engagement were constraining their own capacity for strategic foresight, because an organization that does not systematically listen to its stakeholders cannot effectively sense the shifting needs and dynamics of the broader system in which it is embedded (Almansoori et al., 2022; Sanford, 2020). Shallow or short-lived stakeholder engagement practices represent a deeper challenge to achieving transformative and systemic change, since they overlook the levels of participation required to re-shuffle power dynamics (Arnstein, 1969) and to nurture the relational and structural capital on which regeneration depends (Buonomo et al., 2020; Hutchings and Storm, 2019).

4.2.4 Uniformity vs. diversity; synthesis: inclusivity

As the results section demonstrates, most of the interviewed enterprises demonstrated a diverse and inclusive approach in some, but not all, aspects of their management and governance practices. In other words, diversity was something that most founders in the study valued in principle. In practice, however, the gap between aspiration and actualization was one of the most interesting patterns. When founders encountered class, cultural, or socio-economic differences that were difficult to bridge, some retreated to what was familiar by relying on volunteers and collaborators from educational and economic backgrounds similar to their own. This may not be a conscious rejection of diversity but rather reflects the real difficulty of building inclusive organizations in the Egyptian context which is characterized by stark inequalities and in turn social stratification (Abdel Ghafar, 2021). It is worth noting that the founders openly described their struggles in this domain, and that the consequences are clear to the outside observer: their organizations' human and relational capital remain narrower than their missions demand.

From a capability perspective this tension is especially important, since diversity is a precondition for the cognitive variety and knowledge breadth that enable organizations to learn, adapt and innovate (Buonomo et al., 2020; Herlina et al., 2024). In other words, less diverse organizations have access to less insights, and in turn a lower capacity to sense emerging challenges and opportunities, to build legitimacy, and especially among diverse stakeholder groups. Shore et al. (2018) argue that inclusive workplaces require the active cultivation of belonging and participation among diverse members. In the context of regenerative organizing, the effective navigation of diversity could be argued to be even more important, since priorities such as co-creative partnerships with nature and communities cannot be sustained by a homogeneous group speaking only to others with the same mindset or background (Hutchings and Storm, 2019; Konietzko et al., 2023).

Raed's approach at CommuCulture also discussed under Participation represents the most compelling navigation of this tension. Instead of importing an external framework for diversity and inclusion. Moreover, instead of engaging in tokenistic engagement (Jayashree et al., 2022), he drew on local Bedouin cultural values of hospitality, reciprocity, and familial obligation to build trust across significant social divides. This approach was relational and locally sensitive, allowing the founder and the organization to bridge local traditions with his own background to shape the enterprise's regenerative practices. This is consistent with argument that sustainability leadership requires multi-stakeholder engagement that goes beyond tokenistic consultation.

Inclusivity, or the organizational capacity to hold, integrate, and learn from diverse groups and ways of knowing, emerges as the synthesis for this tension; a capability that is truly difficult to develop. Those who managed to be inclusive of diverse groups, even partially, expanded their organizations' intellectual and relational capital in ways that directly served their regenerative mandates. Those who did not remained limited in the range of stakeholders they could meaningfully engage, and in turn the depth of impact they could achieve.

4.2.5 Passion vs. pacing; synthesis: harmony

All of the interviewed founders emphasized passion as a driving force behind starting their enterprise. However, the form this passion took impacted their organizations in different ways. Gillet et al. (2023) distinguish between obsessive passion which is all-consuming, and ultimately depleting, and harmonious passion, which sustains rather than erodes well-being. This distinction mapped directly onto what founders described.

Karim's intensity at Reach where staff were asked to “perform at 150% of their capacities” reflected the risks of overextension, where passion overtook sustainability. In contrast, Taher described a harmonious passion at EgRenewables, or a more a deliberate process of designing shared spaces, allowing space for rest and connection, and building a tight-knit community around a shared vision. Amal, who founded It Takes a Village to address children's access to quality education in urban informal areas, also showed how intentional pausing and collective reflection prevented burnout and fostered resilience. Despite gaining national attention, she sensed her team's pace had outstripped its capacity, and her team felt comfortable saying they felt the same. Rather than pushing forward, Amal paused with her team to reflect and realign their mission.

The organizational practices that shaped how founders navigated this tension were primarily about designing internal rhythms. Taher's shared spaces and shared meals were deliberate structures that embedded a sustainable pace into daily organizational life. Amal's collective pauses or her regenerative rhythm of intentional slowing, collective listening, and recalibration allowed her team to realign around their mission before exhaustion or mission drift set in. Pacing one's passion, in other words, is not just about moderating intensity; it is about building relationships, fostering a sense of purpose and belonging, and creating organizational practices that make sustained commitment possible (Hutchings and Storm, 2019). In Karim's case, these regulating practices were absent. The result was an organization that consumed its own human and social resources faster than it could replenish them; what is referred to as being internally degenerative (Buckton et al., 2023).

While the tension on Exclusion vs. Participation revealed how relational and structural capital are built through governance structures and meaningful stakeholder engagement (Arnstein, 1969; Calò et al., 2024), this tension shows how those same assets can be eroded from within, not by exclusion, but by exhaustion. The capability at stake here is temporal: the organizational capacity to regulate collective energy, to design rhythms that sustain rather than deplete, and to sense when internal pace is out of alignment with organizational capacity (Malik and Terzidis, 2025). Amal's scenario represents a foresight competency focused on maintaining the health of the organization's core human and social resources over time (Almansoori et al., 2022). Where strategic foresight in the Participation tension was about sensing the needs and dynamics of external stakeholders, here it becomes about sensing internal signals to read the organization's own wellbeing, and to intervene when needed.

This is important within the context of regeneration because enduring transformation requires energy, but as necessary is the wisdom to pace it carefully and control it. This balance allows founders and their organizations to maintain purpose without compromising relationships or the organization as a whole. This aligns with the literature on regeneration, whereby regenerative leaders thrive by gaining perspective about their own inner realities, as well as the realities of the system in which they are embedded, including their organization and the broader ecosystem, to create change within this ecosystem (Hutchings and Storm, 2019).

From a community psychology perspective, this theme highlights the importance of working toward both individual and collective well-being. Regenerative practice thus requires striking a balance between drive and reflection, echoing the traditions of praxis in community psychology that integrate action and reflection (Hutchings and Storm, 2019; Olson and Jason, 2015).

4.2.6 Stability vs. emergence; synthesis: mission in motion

The final paradox that emerged from discussions with the founders is related to maintaining coherence while adapting to contexts that are in constant flux. While some founders preserved their founding visions, others were at the risk of mission drift or losing relevance. Regeneration within this context meant evolving the organization's mission without losing its soul. Farida's journey with Evolve embodied this tension. She launched a collaborative purpose lab in Cairo that aspires to leverage innovation and entrepreneurship toward greater social justice. Initially fluid and experimental, the enterprise became more complex as tensions with the status quo emerged. Her reflection that “meaningful change demands mutual openness across all levels” captures the aspiration, but her admission that “I want to love and support everyone, but I cannot carry it all” indicates to a heavy toll. Her story indicates that emergence can become emotionally unsustainable without shared capacity and feedback loops. Nour at Nature Solutions provided a different example. As a social scientist who links ecological, human, and community health, she intentionally allowed the organization to evolve in response to stakeholder learning. Regeneration here meant staying open to surprise.

The practices that enabled founders to navigate this tension were less about formal structures and more about a willingness to hold direction loosely enough to evolve while maintaining enough coherence to sustain identity. Nour's openness to stakeholder-driven evolution was not passivity; it was a conscious choice to let the organization's approach and pathway be shaped by what emerged from its relationships with communities and ecosystems. This kind of practice is tied to the capabilities explored in earlier tensions. It required the humility discussed under Heroism vs. Humility, or the willingness to let go of the founder's original vision when the system calls for something different (Sanford, 2020). It also required the inclusive governance explored under Exclusion vs. Participation, since an organization cannot evolve in response to stakeholder learning if stakeholders are not meaningfully involved in the first place (Calò et al., 2024; Hutchings and Storm, 2019). Finally, it required the temporal capability explored under Passion vs. Pacing, since adapting purposefully demands the kind of collective pause and reflection that prevents drift (Malik and Terzidis, 2025).

The capability at stake in this tension is what might be called adaptive capability and strategic coherence, or the organization's capacity to sense social-ecological challenges, manage resources responsibly, and remain viable in the long run (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Grassi et al., 2025).

Founders who synthesized this tension, like Nour, were demonstrating foresight not as rigid planning, but as the capacity to evolve purposefully in light of complexity. In contrast, Farida's experience shows what happens when adaptive capacity rests on the founder's shoulders alone rather than being distributed across the organization. In this case, emergence becomes emotionally unsustainable, and the organization's human capital is depleted rather than renewed (Buonomo et al., 2020).

It can thus be argued that navigating this tension successfully required humble leaders who are able to pace their passion, and to work alongside their various stakeholders at the appropriate pace, and toward the relevant mandate. In doing so, these humble and facilitative leaders are able to maintain an organizational culture and mandate that is coherent enough to maintain the core purpose yet flexible enough to evolve through learning and co-creation (Hutchings and Storm, 2019; Konietzko et al., 2023).

This tension can also be interpreted as a representation of strategic foresight, whereby organizations are able to observe and respond to changing social-ecological contexts without losing their core identity (Almansoori et al., 2022; Grassi et al., 2025).

4.2.7 Interdependence of the tensions and capability building

Table 8 and Figure 2 present the relationships between the six tensions, the intangible capabilities they affect, and the regenerative outcomes they enable. A conceptual framework is proposed (Figure 2), and illustrates these and interdependencies across tensions visually.

Table 8. A preliminary framework linking tensions, intangible assets, capabilities and regeneration.

While the previous subsections discussed each tension individually, the data suggest that these tensions do not operate in isolation. The way founders navigated one tension seems to be shaping their capacity to navigate others. In parallel, it can be argued that the capabilities cultivated or eroded in one domain had consequences across the entire organization. This interdependence has an effect on the trajectories of the organizations themselves.

Raed's journey at CommuCulture offers the clearest example of such interdependence. His movement away from heroic leadership toward relational stewardship (Heroism vs. Humility) created the conditions for genuine stakeholder participation (Exclusion vs. Participation), which in turn enabled him to integrate diverse Bedouin knowledge systems into his organization's practices (Uniformity vs. Diversity). This diversity of perspectives enriched his capacity for adaptive foresight, or his capacity to evolve the organization's direction in close coordination with to what the broader social-ecological system demanded (Stability vs. Emergence).

Karim's trajectory at Reach is an example of an opposite dynamic. Heroic, centralized leadership limited initiative taking and participation among team members, which limited the diversity of perspectives available to the organization, which in turn limited its capacity to sense emerging challenges and to adapt accordingly. The resulting dynamics between the founders and the employees was not just a pacing problem; it can rather be interpreted as a consequence of unresolved tensions further up the chain. It can thus be argued that when human and relational capital are not cultivated through humility, participation, and inclusivity, organizations lack the internal resources to sustain their ambitions, and the temporal capability to regulate collective energy (Malik and Terzidis, 2025; Buonomo et al., 2020).

These two trajectories suggest that regenerative capability formation follows a cumulative logic. The relational stewardship born of humility opens space for participation; participation, when in turn enriches the cognitive variety and knowledge breadth that come with diversity; diversity and participation together strengthen the organization's capacity for strategic foresight; and the temporal capability to pace collective energy helps sustain the stability needed for purposeful emergence over time. This is consistent with recent literature on paradoxical leadership, which emphasizes that the productive engagement of one tension often depends on the prior navigation of others (Gopakumar and Gupta, 2024; Sarhangi et al., 2024). It also aligns with dynamic capabilities theory, which holds that sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities are mutually reinforcing (Teece, 2007).

At the same time, the data indicates the need for caution about treating these inter-dependencies as sequential or linear process. This is especially true since founders did not narrate moving neatly from one tension to the next. For example, Nour from Nature Solutions demonstrated genuine adaptive foresight and openness to emergence but struggled to bridge socio-economic divides in her immediate community; or to exercise true inclusivity. In other words, while the tensions may be interdependent, organizations can hold regenerative and degenerative patterns simultaneously, which is consistent with Rappaport's (1981) understanding of paradox as an enduring feature of organizational and social life rather than a problem to be resolved.

Figure 2 visually demonstrates these interdependencies by mapping the relationships between the six tensions, the intangible capabilities they affect, and the pathways through which cumulative capability formation may be advancing or hindering the shift toward regeneration. The framework proposes that regenerative capability is not a single asset to be acquired but an emergent characteristic of how organizations navigate the full set of tensions they face. This navigation process is shaped by leadership, culture, context, and the capacity or willingness to engage paradox productively rather than resolve it prematurely.

This framing aligns with and extends literature on paradox and hybridity, which shows that social enterprises manage enduring contradictions not through final resolution but through selective coupling, integrative strategies, and paradoxical leadership (de Mon et al., 2022; Gopakumar and Gupta, 2024; Sarhangi et al., 2024). The study adds a more detailed understanding of what is at stake in navigating these tensions: the intangible organizational capabilities that determine whether an enterprise moves toward regeneration or remains caught in degenerative patterns. Specifically, the Heroism vs. Humility tension can be understood as a process of leadership-enabled capability development; Hierarchy vs. Self-organization as the formation of organizational design capability; Uniformity vs. Diversity as the cultivation of knowledge breadth and cognitive variety; Exclusion versus Participation as the development of governance capability and stakeholder integration; Passion vs. Pacing as the building of sustainable organizational rhythm; and Stability vs. Emergence as the evolution of adaptive capability and strategic coherence.

5 Implications, limitations and conclusion

5.1 Implications

5.1.1 Implications for practitioners and social innovators

For practitioners, the findings suggest that cultivating a regenerative organization is less about adopting a checklist and more about developing a dialectical sensibility. Founders must build personal and organizational capacity to hold and productively engage tensions.

This aligns with recent research showing that social enterprise leaders manage enduring contradictions through integrative strategies and paradoxical leadership rather than through resolution (de Mon et al., 2022; Gopakumar and Gupta, 2024). Based on the study's findings, this involves:

• - Maintaining rhythms that pace passion through intentional retreats, collective reflection practices, and well-being checks, to prevent burnout and sustain long-term impact (Passion vs. Pacing). A concrete starting point is the kind of structured collective pause that Amal practiced at It Takes a Village; when she engaged in a deliberate organizational reflection moment to assess whether its pace and approach is aligned with its capacity and mission. This was not a retreat for strategic planning; it was a diagnostic pause focused on organizational health. Without such practices, the findings suggest that organizations risk becoming internally degenerative or consuming their human and social capital faster than they can replenish it (Buckton et al., 2023). This resonates with the community psychology tradition of praxis, which holds that sustainable action requires cyclical integration of doing and reflecting (Olson and Jason, 2015).
• - Shifting identity from “expert with answers” to “facilitator of collective wisdom,” which involves developing skills in humble inquiry, active listening, and overall reflexivity (Heroism vs. Humility). The contrast between Khaled's isolation at Organica and Amal's relational leadership at It Takes a Village where she has since stepped down and the organization continues to thrive demonstrates that distributed leadership is not just an aspirational value but a pre-requisite for organizational resilience (Klasmeier et al., 2025; Maldonado et al., 2021). For founders who recognize themselves in the heroic pattern, a practical first step is transitioning from founder-led meetings to facilitated team inquiry, and settings where the founder's role is to ask questions rather than provide answers.
• - Adopting practices that enhance the inclusivity of decision making and design processes (Exclusion vs. Participation; Uniformity vs. Diversity). This can take the form of formal structures such as multi-stakeholder boards and accountability frameworks that track social and ecological outcomes alongside financial ones, or informal but sustained ones such as multi-stakeholder engagement and co-design processes (Calò et al., 2024; Jayashree et al., 2022). For organizations without boards, a first step is establishing a structured advisory circle composed of stakeholders from different parts of the enterprise's ecosystem. As Raed's experience at CommuCulture demonstrates, a key success factor in effective engagement and participation is sustained relational investment rather than one-off consultation efforts.
• - Attending to the organization's governance architecture as it matures (Hierarchy vs. Self-organization). Founders should consider when the enterprise has outgrown founder-centric decision-making and whether a transition toward shared governance structures is needed. As Taher's experience at EgRenewables shows, the goal is not to abandon hierarchy altogether but to develop a situated governance approach that maintains accountability while distributing authority to those closest to the work (Aime et al., 2014; Zacher and Rosing, 2015).

5.1.2 Implications for educators and capacity developers

Educational institutions and capacity development programs can integrate regenerative principles into curricula by:

• - Integrating paradox navigation as a core competency for sustainability and regeneration programs. The six tensions identified in this study offer a pedagogical framework in which each tension presents a genuine dilemma with no clear resolution. They offer insight into the kind of complexity that future sustainability leaders need to learn to navigate. This may be facilitated through creating experiential learning opportunities where students practice holding competing demands through case-based simulations that require balancing stakeholder interests without finding a single “right answer.”
• - Emphasizing place-based and culturally grounded approaches to regeneration. Raed's success at CommuCulture demonstrates that the most effective regenerative practices are deeply embedded in local cultural values, rather than imported from external frameworks. His use of Bedouin hospitality and reciprocity as the foundation for inclusive governance is consistent with the regenerative principle that organizations should draw on local wisdom, capacities, and resilience rather than imposing external models (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Muñoz and Branzei, 2021). Curricula should reflect this by incorporating local case studies and encouraging students to explore how regeneration might be grounded in their own contexts.
• - Fostering multi-disciplinary learning that bridges multiple disciplines, including community psychology, management, and economics, among others. The tensions identified in this study span psychological (Passion vs. Pacing), organizational (Hierarchy vs. Self-organization), social (Uniformity vs. Diversity), and ecological (Stability vs. Emergence) domains. No single discipline can address them all, which aligns with calls for interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability education (Castillo and Trinh, 2019).

5.1.3 Implications for investors and financiers

Areas of investment necessary for furthering regeneration include but are not limited to:

• - Offering financing instruments that are geared toward creating long-term value on the social-and ecological levels, and not just financial returns. These include patient capital that allows organizations the time to build trust, iterate models, and deepen community embeddedness, and to navigating the tensions described in this study. Karim's experience at Reach illustrates what happens when financial pressure compresses an organization's temporal capability; staff were pushed to 150% capacity, and the enterprise ultimately could not sustain itself. With this in mind, patient capital becomes a pre-requisite for the kind of relational trust-building and iterative learning that regeneration requires (Hutchings and Storm, 2019).
• - Supporting governance innovations that allow for shared design, decision making and equity. Investors can play an active role by requiring or incentivizing the creation of multi-stakeholder governance structures as a condition of investment, and by measuring social and ecological outcomes alongside financial performance.

5.2 Limitations and future research

This study is exploratory and limited by the purposive sample of founders. The study is also limited by its reliance on founder perspectives only. While founders hold a strategic position that allows them to observe reflect on and narrate organizational dynamics, their accounts do not capture the experiences of employees, community members, investors, or other stakeholders. Accordingly, another limitation stems from how the framework under development proposes capabilities that are by definition collective, yet the primary data source is individual founder stories.

Moreover, the first author's positionality can be perceived as both a strength and a limitation. As an insider to Egypt's social enterprise ecosystem who has professional relationships in the field and familiarity with many of the organizations under study, the first author brought both advantages and risks to the research process. The strengths included ease of access, cultural fluency, and the ability to build rapport quickly with participants, all of which contributed to the depth of the interviews. The limitations included potential blind spots arising from familiarity, and the possibility that participants may have tailored their narratives for someone they perceived as a peer or colleague. These limitations or risks were managed through maintaining a reflexivity journal throughout the data collection and analysis process to document assumptions, emotional responses, and positional influences. Moreover, the coding framework and that emergent themes were debriefed with two qualitative research experts who were external to the Egyptian social enterprise context. Additionally, verbatim quotations are used throughout the findings to allow readers to assess the interpretive distance between participants' words and the researchers' analysis.

Finally, the findings are shaped by Egypt's specific institutional, cultural, and socio-economic context. While the tensions identified may resonate with social enterprises in other emerging economy contexts, direct transferability should not be assumed without comparative research.

With the above in mind, future research should:

• - Incorporate multi-stakeholder perspectives to better understand the relationship between social enterprises, regeneration, and different stakeholders.
• - Incorporate member checking or participant validation to further strengthen the credibility of the analysis.
• - Employ longitudinal designs to track how founders, teams and organizations navigate these paradoxes over time, and the relationship between the navigation of these paradoxes with long-term impacts at the social-ecological levels.
• - Develop and validate quantitative measures of regenerative capacity that account for the tensions identified in the study.
• - Conduct comparative studies across different social, cultural and economic contexts to further contextualize regeneration frameworks, and their ties to intangible assets.

6 Conclusion

This study argues that each identified tension represents a generative paradox, not a problem to be solved, and that the effective navigation of these paradoxes entails engaging both to foster a synthesis that promotes systemic vitality. Findings also indicate that founders may simultaneously hold regenerative practices in one organizational domain and degenerative ones in another. This aligns with Rappaport's (1981) “praise of paradox” and the regenerative principle that transformation emerges from engaging systemic contradictions, not from imposing technical fixes (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Sanford, 2020).

Navigating these tensions is a core task for the founders of organizations, who in turn influence and shape their organizational cultures, which in turn shape the broader ecosystems in which they exist. In other words, intangible organizational capabilities of leadership competencies, governance, knowledge breadth, temporal regulation, and adaptive foresight not merely resources that an organization owns. Rather, they are actively shaped, enhanced or eroded by the way in which founders engage with paradoxes and tensions that are inherent in their work. With this in mind, regenerative capability is proposed as an ongoing process that is shaped by leadership, context, culture, and most importantly, the capacity to balance and navigate competing demands without their premature resolutions.

Moreover, our findings indicate that strategic foresight manifests not as long-term prediction and planning, but as capacity for sensing socio-ecological complexities and regulating internal rhythms accordingly. This is evident in multiple tensions. In Passion vs. Pacing, foresight is the competency to anticipate burnout and adopt collective pauses for recalibration (such as in the case of Amal from It Takes a Village). In Stability vs. Emergence, it is the ability to hold a core identity loosely enough to evolve through stakeholder learning (such as in the case of Nour's openness to surprise). In Hierarchy vs. Self-Organization, it involves decentralizing sensing capabilities across the entire team, while maintaining accountability. These forms of insight allow organizations to navigate their situation in ever dynamic social-ecological contexts; a core strategy for regenerative shifts.

Finally, the cumulative and interdependent nature of these capabilities suggests that regeneration is not achieved through any single organizational intervention. As the trajectories of Raed at CommuCulture and Karim at Reach illustrates, the way founders navigate one tension shapes their capacity to navigate others. The conceptual framework proposed in this study and presented in Figure 2 offers a preliminary model for understanding these interdependencies and paves the way for further future research around how regenerative capabilities are nurtured, eroded, and sustained across diverse organizational and cultural contexts.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. This manuscript was developed by the authors without the use of generative-AI. After the manuscript was fully developed, generative-AI was used solely for linguistic editing. It was not used to draft or generate any sections of the manuscript. All AI-assisted edits were carefully reviewed and revised by the authors to ensure accuracy and to preserve their original voices.

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Footnotes

Edited by: Ummi Azizah Rachmawati, YARSI University, Indonesia

Reviewed by: Antonio Cano Ortega, University of Jaén, Spain

Muhammad Husni Thamrin, University of North Sumatra, Indonesia

Hadisaputra Hadisaputra, Universitas Muhammadiyah Makassar, Indonesia