Why Greater Good Co exists
I didn’t set out to create a method for change. I set out to solve problems — mostly messy, complex, people-shaped problems.
I started out as a Town Planner in local government, immediately struck — and genuinely horrified — by the siloed mentality and the absence of anything genuinely human-centred. That frustration became a calling.
In my very first role, I watched a system fail a human being in plain sight. A colleague who was overqualified, unfulfilled, isolated, and whose real needs the organisation had no mechanism to see. She wasn’t a resistant stakeholder. She was a person whose needs had been betrayed. And the system around her just experienced her as a problem to manage.
That moment crystallised something my whole career has gone on to prove, again and again: sustainable change starts and ends with people. Not structures. Not strategies. People.
Every role that followed showed me the same pattern. Walk in. See the system clearly. Understand the people inside it. Create change. Outgrow the container. Move to a bigger one. I was never given the official change mandate — the work just found me, because I could see what the people around me couldn’t.
In 2001 I established my own consultancy. In 2021 I founded Greater Good Co, with a conviction that had been building for decades: organisations are living systems, not machines to be optimised. The question underneath the method — the one that asks how we change — is this: what becomes possible when change starts with people?
And underneath that sits a bigger question — one I keep returning to, and one that A Regenerative Way is built around: change toward what?
What I Stand For
Meet Bev
Bev Merrett
Regenerative Leadership & Systems Change Guide
Bev sees the world as a collection of interconnected living systems — complex, relational and carrying their own intelligence.
She believes we are all different and the same. Shaped by our unique histories, perspectives and experiences — and united by the same core human needs to feel seen, heard, valued and understood.
She is a systems change advisor, facilitator and guide with deep, lived experience across organisations, communities and sectors — from local and state government to tourism, education, infrastructure and the private sector.
She is currently a participant in the inaugural global cohort of the Mastery of Systems Leadership program with Small Giants Academy.
Bev is based in Torquay, Victoria on the traditional lands of the Wadawurrung people.
Bev’s living inquiry — A Regenerative Way — is published on Substack, where she shares essays, frameworks and reflections on collective thriving for people and planet. Each piece becomes a living page in an evolving resource. You can find it at A Regenerative Way on Substack.