Beatrice Ungard (Benne), Ph.D.

Beatrice Ungard founded Soma Integral Consulting in 2010 with a mission to facilitate the resolution of adaptive challenges by designing purposeful organizations, while focusing on the well-being of social and environmental ecosystems. Beatrice brings to her clients 15+ years of experience grounded in a whole systems approach to organizational and systems change, strategic management, and leadership capacity development. Passionate about her work, Beatrice is deeply committed to supporting her clients move towards more conscious and regenerative business practices using a broad range of skills and expertise including strategic thinking, leadership capacity development, a holistic and collaborative approach to unleashing individual and organizational potential, and work design. In partnership with practitioners in the Design Built Environment, she delivers regenerative design and development services to communities, cities, and local governments that seek to become more sustainable and resilient.

Working in diverse organizational settings over the past 15 years—from large corporations such as Bechtel to startups—Beatrice has gained experience in facilitating change, leading process improvement projects, and creatively combining ideas from different fields for the design of strategic business solutions. With her unique ability to combine rational analysis and perceptive intuition, Beatrice is able to successfully navigate the intricacy of highly complex organizational environments, while maintaining a sharp focus on the expected outcomes and performance of the projects and initiatives she leads.

Beatrice has been an adjunct faculty with Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) (now part of Presidio Graduate School) and with the MBA in Design Strategy program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco; she taught Business Strategy and Systems Thinking. She is currently a member of the faculty team at The Regenesis Group, in New Mexico, where she co-teaches The Regenerative Practitioner Series—a ground breaking online course on regenerative development and design. She is a member of the Regenerative Business Alliance, a network of regenerative business practitioners working at the cutting edge of business innovation and human development; The Alliance produces the Regenerative Business Summit—an event designed and orchestrated by Carol Sanford, one of the founders of the field of regenerative business.

Beatrice holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Architecture at the University of Berkeley, California. Her doctorate dissertation topic was “Managing Architectural /Engineering/Construction (AEC) Project Organizations at the edge of Chaos: An Analysis of AEC Project Adaptive Capacity from a Living Systems Perspective.” Prior to her Ph.D., Beatrice completed a M.S. from the Department of Architecture at the University of Berkeley, California, and a Diploma of Architect from the University of Geneva, Switzerland.