Creativity training and teaching for engineers
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This week I’ve been going back through my writing to find material on interconnection, feedback and resilience.
The Carrier Wave is one my favourite motifs in the Pattern Book for exploring the difference between mere connection and active exchange of information.
Rather than repeat the metaphor here, I’ll let it speak for itself.
This week at the Regenerative Design Lab, we’ve been working with the Living Systems Blueprint — a model for connecting high-level regenerative thinking with more tangible design decisions.
The Blueprint identifies three qualities common to living systems. One of these is interconnection.
Thriving living systems tend to have high levels of local connectivity:
contact between species, relationships of co-dependency, flows of information and energy.
A good example is the mycelial networks that connect trees in a woodland. These networks allow feedback to travel through the ecosystem, helping the system adapt and stay in balance.
One feature of the industrialised human economy is just how separated we have become from the living systems that support life on Earth.
So interconnection becomes a useful design prompt.
Interconnection as a topic comes up in so many ways:
It’s a common thread running through much of this blog.
If you are interested, you can explore the archive of posts tagged with interconnection.
When you can’t remember why you are doing this work?
When the questions feel too large to answer?
When the wind has gone out of your sails?
When you don’t feel you are making any progress?
Any work of systems change requires work against the grain.
Friction.
Swimming against the flow.
And that’s the moment that you need friends, allies, colleagues in this work.
People who can see where you are at.
Recognise the pattern.
Remind you that you’re not doing it alone.
Systems change can be isolating.
Moments of doubt are part of the territory.
Which is why it’s worth figuring out in advance:
Who you’re gonna call.
This came up in a facilitation call today.
What do you do if the group talks too much?
Or the opposite — no one contributes?
The answer in both cases is the same:
Set up the conditions early.
With a group that talks too much, success usually comes from permission-setting near the start of the session.
I’ll often say something like:
“I’m sure this will be a very engaging conversation, and there may be moments where I need to move us on — is everyone ok with that?”
No one has yet said no.
But later, when you need to step in, you can simply say:
“I need to move us on.”
You’ve already established the ‘contract’ with them.
I’ll often also add that I may ask for contributions from different people so that we hear a range of voices. Again, this creates permission in advance for bringing quieter people into the conversation later on.
Quiet groups need a different approach.
It rarely works to begin by saying:
“I expect contributions from everyone.”
You have to create the conditions where it feels safe to contribute.
The first step is to avoid asking open questions to the whole room before the group has warmed up.
It is almost always better to get people talking in pairs or small groups first.
After that, you can move to a technique I learnt from Nick Francis while developing the Get it Right Initiative Train-the-trainer programme:
Pose an open question.
Pause to allow someone to answer.
And if nobody does, ‘pounce’ — ask someone specific by name.
This works best when used regularly enough that people come to expect it.
And as with any facilitation technique, remember:
These things often feel awkward before they become natural.
That searing noise tearing across the sky.
The first time I’ve heard it this year.
It means only one thing: the swifts are back in Bristol.
They tear through the sky at breathtaking speed, eating flies on the wing. They are definitely on the list of creatures I’d like to spend a day in the life of.
Their UK population has declined by around 65% since 1995, so each return from their epic migration feels more precious than the last.
Maybe I’ll have a swift half to celebrate.
I’ve never been invited to speak on the construction conference circuit before. And this year I’ve got three appearances. Something is shifting (or maybe everyone else was busy…).
First up, I’m at FutureBuild on Tuesday 12th May, on a panel curated by Architects Declare on the Buildings and Materials stage, talking about regenerative practice.
Then on Wednesday morning I head over to Footprint + where I’ll be speaking with Timothy Clement from Morgan Sindall to answer the question ‘what is regenerative design?‘
And then back to FutureBuild for a session in the Future Build Arena at 3pm, curated by The Edge, exploring how regenerative thinking can reshape the built environment,
If you are around, then do come down and say hi.
Borrow some money.
Use it buy an asset — say, a water supply company.
Load the debt onto the company.
Continue to extract profit.
Last week I went to a talk where Hettie O’Brien presented her book The Asset Class.
This, in essence, is the mechanism she describes — used by private equity across sectors, from water to care homes.
The goal of regenerative design is to survive, thrive and co-evolve.
This is a recipe for the opposite.
Systems originally designed to provide life-giving functions — water, care — are reconfigured to service debt and maximise profit.
A recipe for parasitic extraction.
A blueprint for degenerative design.
As I reached the end of my 1851 Fellowship in Regenerative Design I had the feeling I wanted to do more with my hands – I wanted more practice to accompany the theory.
This feeling crystallised last summer, visiting family in western Canada last summer, including my cousin Wayne Wenstob, who inspired me to become a structural engineer in my twenties, and to whom the Pattern Book is dedicated.
It was while staying there that they took delivery of a mobile saw mill. I watched while a group of people assembled the machinery on the beech and used it to process cedar drift wood. The timber was going to be used to renovate a traditional First Nation longhouse.
Something clicked.
Half a planet away, at Hazel Hill Wood — home of the Regenerative Design Lab — we have just been granted our new forestry licence.
After having lapsed for a few years, this gives us permission to fell trees as part of a longer-term shift: from areas of single-species forestry to mixed, resilient woodland.
But here’s the catch.
Timber ‘in the round’ — unsown — has very low value. Often not enough to cover the cost of felling and extraction at small scale.
But as I learnt in Canada, cutting the wood into planks significantly increases the sale value of the timber.
And so an idea was born. What if Constructivist set up a new division, Constructivist Timber, to go into partnership with Hazel Hill to create a small, local timber supply chain?
Nothing large-scale, nor industrial. Just enough to process timber into usable planks, for use on site and then for sale is a modest revenue stream?
In regenerative design we often talk about unlocking stacked, multiple benefits in a system. This ideas seems to do that:
At Hazel Hill Wood, this approach also reconnects something that had quietly drifted. The earliest buildings on site used timber from the wood itself. More recent construction has relied on commercial supply chains. Re-establishing an on-site timber flow brings that relationship back into view.
How we live with trees becomes part of the lived experience of the place.
So the next logical step was clear: invest in a mobile sawmill.
And then two remarkable things happened
A local natural artist, Zac Newham (natural-art.uk) asked if he could store his mobile sawmill on site in return for us being able to use it.
And the Engineering Club asked if it could book the wood to run its summer school, in which engineers will use timber from the wood to build infrastructure on site.
It feels like by joining the dots we are already starting to unlock something abundant.
The first chapter of Constructivist Timber begins.
20 people sit in a circle.
The chairs are arranged between seven oak trees, right at the edge of Hazel Hill Wood — the home of the Regenerative Design Lab.
It’s a deliberate place to start. For many, it’s the first time meeting each other face to face. And the first time meeting the wood.
Because the wood isn’t just a venue. It’s part of the work.
A thriving ecosystem. A container for learning. A place for discovery. A reminder of abundance, complexity, and timescales far beyond our projects.
And so we begin our inquiries here — deliberately stepping away from the pressing needs of day-to-day work, and into something slower, more exploratory.
We don’t pretend the real world works like this. But this is a place we can return to — for perspective, recovery, and renewed energy to carry on the work of system change.
Everyone arrives with a Pattern from the Pattern Book, chosen as a guide through the Lab.
Over the first afternoon, we move through the wood. Three distinct habitats, each chosen to represent a different regenerative mindset. Each paired with a simple game and time for reflection.
Some of the work is quiet. Observing. Noticing.
Some of it is more active — testing ideas, asking questions, beginning to see how each person’s inquiry might take shape.
And some of it is unexpectedly playful.
There are moments of seriousness — conversations about organisations, systems, and the challenges of making change stick.
And then, at other times, we find ourselves in something like satsuma jousting.
It’s easy to see these as opposites. But in practice, they are part of the same work. Play creates space. It changes how people relate. It allows new ideas to emerge that wouldn’t surface otherwise.
By the second day, the focus turns more directly to each person’s inquiry.
We work with the Systems Bookcase, exploring how different levels of a system interact — from underlying paradigms through to design decisions.
Then back out into the wood again — in pairs, and then alone.
These aren’t intended to be final answers, rather, best next answers for now.
By the end, the group leaves the shelter of the wood and returns to their projects, organisations, and everyday constraints.
But not quite in the same way.
Because now we are observing, asking questions, looking for opportunities, looking for the lever that we will pull, the change that we will experiment with.
We’ll gather again here in the summer to share what we have discovered so far.
