The Compass for Regenerative Business
Most sustainability strategies are built to slow down harm. The Compass for Regenerative Business starts from a different question: what would it take for your organisation to leave the people, places, and planet it touches measurably better off than it found them?
Positive built the Compass in 2020 and has refined it ever since with more than 100 experts, academics, and business leaders. It's free to use, mapped across 110+ data points, and has already guided 200+ companies from good intentions to a sequenced, future-fit roadmap.
The 360° Methodology for Impactful Business
The Compass doesn't treat impact as a single score or a pass/fail certification. It maps your organisation across five interconnected principles — Purpose, People, Planet, Partners, and Places — because a business that scores well on emissions but poorly on how it treats its supply chain isn't regenerative, it's selectively sustainable.
Each principle is broken into concrete, checkable data points rather than open-ended questions. That's what turns "we care about our people" into something you can actually assess, benchmark, and improve — and turns a generic sustainability policy into a roadmap with a sequence and a next step.
Purpose
Purpose is the throughline the other four principles serve. The Compass asks whether your organisation's purpose is a living commitment that has changed a real decision in the last year, or a homepage statement no one in the business could recite. Regenerative organisations revisit purpose as they learn more about their impact, rather than treating it as fixed at founding.
People
This principle looks past compliance — fair pay, safe conditions — into how much real decision-making power, transparency, and ownership people inside the organisation actually have. The Compass benchmarks governance structures, participation in strategic decisions, and equitable access to opportunity and information.
Planet
Planet asks whether environmental impact is tracked with the same rigour as revenue, across emissions, resource use, biodiversity, and waste — and whether the organisation is designing to restore ecosystems, not just reduce its footprint within them.
Partners
Suppliers, distributors, and investors are assessed on mutual benefit, not convenience or cost. This is often where an otherwise-strong sustainability story breaks down — a business can be regenerative internally while its supply chain quietly isn't. The Compass is built to surface that gap.
Places
Places measures an organisation's concrete relationship with the specific communities and ecosystems it operates in: local sourcing, local employment, and biodiversity impact where the business actually sits, not a generic global commitment.
Why Five Principles, Not One Score
Single-number impact scores are easy to headline and easy to game — a business can look impressive by excelling on one dimension while quietly extracting value on another. The Compass keeps the five principles visible separately for the same reason a financial statement keeps revenue and cash flow on different lines: collapsing them into one number would hide exactly the tension leaders need to see.
How the Assessment Works
Start with a self-scored pass across all five principles — most teams complete this in under 20 minutes. The Compass then translates your scores into a prioritised roadmap: the two or three levers most likely to move your overall impact, sequenced by effort and dependency, rather than a 110-item to-do list.
Roadmaps are designed to be revisited. Regeneration is a direction, not a destination — teams typically reassess every 6–12 months to track what's actually changed.
Getting Started
The fastest way in is a first, self-scored pass done by one person who knows the organisation well — usually a founder, sustainability lead, or operations director. Bring the results to your leadership team as a starting conversation, not a verdict; the value of the Compass is in the roadmap it produces, not the score itself.
Built With, and Used By
The Compass was developed in collaboration with 100+ experts, academics, and business leaders, and has been used by 200+ companies across food & drink, mobility, fashion, packaging, and tech-for-good — including Positive members like Riversimple (zero-emission mobility) and Auga (regenerative organic food). See their full stories in our case studies.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is the Compass free to use?
A: Yes. The Compass and its supporting toolkits are free — Positive is funded to make this framework as widely usable as possible, not to sell access to it.
Q: How long does the assessment take?
A: A first, self-scored pass takes about 15–20 minutes. Going deeper into all 110+ data points with your team typically takes a few working sessions spread over 2–3 weeks.
Q: What's the difference between the Compass and the book?
A: The Compass is the interactive assessment and roadmap tool. The Regenerative Enterprise is the narrative and case-study companion — it walks through the thinking behind the five principles with 120+ real examples. Most teams use the book to build the case internally, then the Compass to act.
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