Author: Oliver Broadbent

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Why everything falls apart — and what to do about it

The second law of thermodynamics says that the universe is heading towards disorder. 

Life is the daily channelling of the flow — temporarily creating new structures: life forms, habitats culture.  

Life on Earth gets a daily boost of energy from the sun, and the movement of the planet and the moon. As long as there is energy available, we can work against the force of entropy to carry on creating complexity and richness. 

But when the energy stops, dismantling begins. And when what we have becomes too expensive to maintain with the energy do we have, the system breaks down too.

This is planning as governed by the second law of thermodynamics.

For millennia, humans have lived within this flux of energy and entropy, working with the available energy and resources. And when civilisations have overreached, they have declined.

Fossil fuels changed all of this. This concentrated energy source allowed us to escape the limits of the solar cycle and unlock extraordinary complexity. 

But again we have overreached. 

While fossil fuels have not peaked as quickly as expected, the climate breakdown caused by greenhouse gas emissions will shake civilisations apart. What have built has become too expensive to maintain – energetically, socially and ecologically. 

Sustainability asked us to think about doing less harm. Regenerative design is a fundamentally different approach.

How can we create life, habitats, homes, culture using the available energy that we have — creating things that are just complex in enough to thrive, but not so complex that  maintaining them uses the entire energy budget?

This requires much more acute awareness of the systems around us. 

  • What is connected to what — how could better connections create better conditions, and where is connection unhelpful? 
  • What is in flow, surplus and abundance – and what could we harness? 
  • What is the system trying to do?  — how could small interventions unlock something much bigger*

Left to their own devices, all systems will fall into decline. That’s the second law of thermodynamics. 

But every day we get an energy boost from the sun and the moon. THat’s our budget – the energy to resist the entropy. 

The question of regenerative design is simply this: 

How do we use that energy to create the conditions for thriving for humans and the rest of the living world?

*These three bullets map directly to the Living Systems Blueprint. See below.

Regenerative Design Lab
Living Systems Blueprint
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Incline? Uncline? Recline?

I caught myself wondering in a workshop this week, what is the opposite to decline?

Incline? Uncline? Recline?

A bit of context. I often look at places in need of repair and think why has nobody fixed that yet? Perhaps, in the past, my automatic response would have been to say because there isn’t a budget for that. And with this reflex programmed in, I stop noticing.

But for some reason I have started noticing. 

A wall needing a new coat of paint.

A planter without any plants in.

A flickering light making a place feel unsafe.

When places are uncared for, unmaintained, they go into decline. Things break, breakages create new weaknesses, which then break further. Places feel unloved, and in turn they get less love. It’s a downward spiral. 

But the opposite is also true. 

When places are cared for, are maintained, they do the opposite. Improving one thing is an invitation to improve the next. We can see love for a place and are more inclined to play our part, even if that’s just by spending more time there. It’s an upward spiral. 

One way to reverse this trend is to put more external investment in. But this money will come at the cost of another place in the system. 

The regenerative designer asks a different question: 

How can the energy and resources needed to build up a place come from that place? 

How can a virtuous spiral of local inputs and outputs reinforce itself to keep making things better, and to keep going within the limits of what that local ecosystem and community can carry?

That is the essence of regenerative design. 

To move from systems that deplete themselves to ones that improve over time. 

The opposite of decline?

Thrive. 

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Easier to talk about what we don’t want than what we do

This riff is a partner to my one this week on humour and sarcasm. If you’ve read that one you’ll spot the connection. 

I’ve noticed recently that workshop groups tend to find it much easier to talk about their shared pain than their shared hopes. I think this is almost certainly cultural. 

Culture is reinforced by rituals and routines. In the UK, we almost ritualistically complain about weather and transport. Another is control systems. 

Culture is also reinforced through control systems — and social media is one. It is no coincidence that social media algorithms long ago started prioritising negative stories over good — we love them.

There is a method of physical theatre training called via negativa, meaning the negative road. It is a method of teaching that doesn’t tell you how to be funny, but it tells you when you are not funny. The idea is that the teacher keeps telling you something is bad until you find something is good. Handled with sensitivity and care for the student it is a powerful teaching technique. It works because the student has to keep proposing ideas and in that process, discovers something that is uniquely theirs. 

But it requires a lot of the student — they’ve got to have the motivation to keep coming up with something new.

I think we can see a negative culture as a collective via negativa. 

Always finding the flaw, what’s going wrong. If an individual has the motivation to keep on showing up, they can overcome it, but that is a lot of effort. 

An alternative, more generous and easier to deploy method is to be encouraging, and inviting people to give something a try. 

Creative psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed that one the best ways to work on building a creative culture in an organisation is not to work on individual creativity, but rather on our culture of listening and encouraging. 

We can seed this culture by shifting the rituals and routines — asking what went right before asking what went wrong. And by shifting the control system — shifting away from doom-scrolling towards practices that tune is into what is possible.

Then we might find that our culture tilts in the direction of what is possible, of what we want to build together, rather than what we don’t.

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How connections slip through our fingers

I’ve been doing work this week with teams thinking about interconnection. More precisely, how connected we are to the places impacted by our design decisions. 

Take the component of a building and a product. Try to trace it back to its origins, and you will probably find that that part in itself is made of sub-components. Each of these sub-components with places from different places. The further we try to trace, the more our grip on the supply chain disappears. Like trying to carry water with your hands cupped together, the water just slips away the further we try to carry it.

Connection is important because it leads to understanding — we get deep feedback on the impacts on of our decisions, and how to make decisions that actually bring positive impacts. 

So what do we do? 

We can’t redesign global supply chains. But we can seek to shorten the distance in what we do. 
Work with supply chains that are shorter and more transparent 

Select materials whose origins we actually understand

Reduce the number of nodes in the system, thereby reducing complexity and increasing predictability. 

In regenerative design we want to make sure our deisgn choices are creating thriving. The shorter the distance between us and material, the simpler the supply chain, the better feedback we get and the better choices we can make.  

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Comfy clothes, favourite tools and the Three Horizons

You probably have a favourite piece of clothing to put on and put you at ease. Maybe a hoody, a jumper, … a favourite onesie. 

When something fits, you wear it with ease, you move with it, you even forget it’s there, it becomes an extension of you.

The same is true of hand tools*. When we learn to use a hand tool, in the early stages, the tool may feel unfamiliar and the action strange. We think about the tool as much as what we are trying to create. But as the feel and the action become familiar, the tool seems to disappear from site, and instead we are just looking at the work. 

These ideas of comfort, fit and adoption are helpful for thinking about how well conceptual tools and models work. A good model is one that is easy to pick up and start using. One that quickly gets beyond thinking about the model and to doing better work.

The Three Horizons model is one of the mainstays of our Toolkit for Regenerative Design, and it has the characteristics of a well-worn tool. People seem to pick it up with surprising ease. I hear people quickly adopting the language of different horizons — talking about Horizon Three dreams, Horizon One realities and Horizon Two opportunities. 

Maybe it fits because it speaks to very human experiences. I think many people recognise times when they have inhabited each of these mindsets, sometimes at the same time.

And because it fits, it gets out of the way — and easily opens up a conversation about our hopes, our realities and our best possible next steps.

*When I write about our relationship to tools and how we think, I’m usually channeling Matthew Crawford’s book, The World Beyond Your Head.

Three Horizons
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Attempts to give up sarcasm

A few years ago I made a New Year’s resolution to stop being sarcastic. 

Some of my favourite comedians use sarcasm. Pointing to what something is by saying the opposite is both a powerful send up and also a great way of directly saying difficult things. But here you get on to a slippery slope, because by not saying what we mean, we enter into a sort of passive aggression, if it’s something we don’t like. And if it’s something we do like, it’s a sort of passive passion. 

Over time, what bleeds out it is sincerity. And then we are on a slippery slope to hopelessness and cynicism. 

I once learnt from clown teacher Frankie Anderson about different levels of humour. One that lies in pain and misfortune — Schadenfreude. And then there is one that lies in disdain — irony, aloofness and sarcasm. This is the humour I had grown up with but found myself leaning on too much. 

But there is a third level that lies in shared connection — the shared human experience, empathy, joy, the absurd, the possible. And it feels like we need more of the possible. What could be. What we hope for. However ridiculous that is. Because that is a much more compelling reason for action than cynicism. 

When I told people around me I was trying to stop being sarcastic, interesting things started happening.People were pleasantly surprised when they knew I was being direct. I found conversations more joyful. And, in case you were worried this all sounds rather sincere and po-faced, I found telling it straight is actually quite funny.

Applied in the hands of skilled comedian, sarcasm is great. But in every day life, I think it grinds us down.

But don’t take it from me. I invite you to give it a go. Try going a whole day not being sarcastic, and see what happens. I think it’ll be great. And you know I mean it.

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Three Horizons facilitation (90 minutes) — sometimes all people need is the picture

Diagram of the Three Horizons model with three overlapping curves labeled H1 (red), H2 (blue), and H3 (yellow), showing how different patterns rise and fall over time.

The Three Horizons model is one of our key tools in the Regenerative Design Lab for exploring change. It’s simple enough to grab in a short space of time (see yesterday’s post on a the fit of a good tool), but deep enough to shape a deep, long-term exploration. For example we use the Three Horizons to create the arc of the Lab — in which we start with dreaming about a thriving future, return to the realities of the present, and then going on explore the steps that can create a change from one to the other.

The model also supports a half-day deep dive into innovation (See Kate Raworth’s excellent 6-minute video on facilitation questions to support such a process.)

But sometime the greatest value I see is in simply getting people familiar with the picture. If people can see the three mindsets — the manager (H1), the dreamer (H3) and the entrepreneur (H2) — the conversation can open up by itself.

Below is a 90-minute introduction I’ve been using. It gives people just enough structure to try on the model, and then lets them get on with using it. This is how it goes.

Three Horizons: 90-minute facilitation plan

Getting started

00h00  — Arrivals (10mins)

For the usual how-do-you-dos, and-I’m-sorry-I’m-lates. 

00h10 – Warm-up (5mins)

Ask people to write down on post-it notes as many cool sustainability (or whatever topic you are interested in) initiatives as they have heard of on separate post-it notes. Requirements:

  • It must exist in the real world or as a prototype
  • Or it must have a website. 

You don’t need to say this but we’ll use these later to populate Horizon Two.

00h15 — Introduce the model (10mins)

Acknowledge the familiar dynamic:

  • Dreams of the future
  • Frustrations with the present
  • Lots of opportunities pop up, but it’s hard to know where to start. 

Introduce the Three Horizons as a way to see all of three simultaneously. 

Step 1 — Horizon Three: the future we want

00h25 Breakout (10mins)

Prompt questions: 

  • What are your hopes, dreams and values?
  • What future would be proud to hand on to future generations?
  • What elements of that future already exist?

Get participants to stick their post-it notes to the top right of the diagram.

00h35 Plenary (10mins)

Explore the different responses about the future. 

  • What was easy and hard to discuss?
  • How did it feel to talk about the future?

Step 2 — Horizon One: Our reality

00h45 Breakout (10mins) 

Prompt questions: 

  • What holds your attention?
  • What keeps the current system in place?
  • What is causing pressure for change?

Get participants to stick their post-it notes on the left of the diagram.

00h55 Plenary (10mins)

Explore the different responses about the present. 

  • What was easy and hard to discuss?
  • How did it feel to talk about the present?

This is the part of the process that my colleague Will Arnold would refer to as the Pit of Despair — when hope goes out of the room. It important to acknowledge this, and to welcome in Horizon Two as a way forward.  

Step 3 – Horizon Two: The ideas that move us forward

01h05 — Breakout (10mins)

Prompt questions:

  • What steps could move us from H1 to H3?
  • Which of these opportunities already exist (you can use entries from the warm-up exercise as a prompt)

01h15 — Plenary (10mins)

Explore:

  • Which ideas act as stepping stones?
  • What conditions will enable these seeds to grow?
  • Who else needs to be involved?

Closing

01h25 – Conclusions (5mins)

  • What does the overall picture reveal?
  • How could use the model in your own work?

As a final signpost, I refer people to the Three Horizons entry in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design and in our free online Tools for Regenerative Design. 

01h30. Close.

Why this format works

This short workshop format gives participants:

  • A felt experience of each of the mindsets
  • A shared map of their collective thinking and their shared reality
  • Provides just enough detail to get people familiar with the model so they can use it in more depth themselves. 

Overall I think it shows what the Three Horizons does best:  to help people hold the future, the present and the opportunity for change all at the same time.

Three Horizons
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Big news — Cohort 6 Applications for the Regenerative Design Lab are now open

Our big news this week is that the application process is now open for Cohort 6 of the Regenerative Design Lab. 

Here’s some things that make this moment particularly significant

This is an open lab — unlike the previous two labs where we had focused more explicitly on policy, this lab is for people interested in applying regenerative thinking across a wide range of contexts. We haven’t had an open lab like this for two years, so we are expecting a large number of applicants. 

Policy makers are still very welcome, and you’ll be working alongside designers and built-environment professionals to explore regenerative thinking in practice.

With this lab, our community of past and present participants will exceed 100. The network effect of this many activated change-makers is potentially huge.

The fly-wheel is spinning — with each revolution of the lab, we add more momentum: insights, tools, learning from taking action. It gives each cohort the potential to go further. 

We have a text book — the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is our manual for developing regenerative conservations with a wide range of audiences.

So are you ready to apply to join this journey? If so, we’d love to receive your application.

Regenerative Design Lab — Cohort 6
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I’m so glad the humans have come

Just imagine, you are visiting the site of a new development. And you are suddenly aware that you are surrounded by voices. The voices include the insects, the animals, the trees, the plants, the fungi — all saying in chorus:

“I’m so glad the humans have come!”

Because when the humans come they make things better. 

By creating buildings for themselves they improve habitats for others. 

By harvesting materials they contribute to, rather than deplete local renewable resources. 

They take waste and turn it into valuable inputs. 

And their waste is a valuable asset for the rest of us. 

They are so sensitive to the fragile balance of the ecosystem. 

They listen.

They work with us to find the best next step.

Now that the humans are here, we can thrive even more. 

Just imagine.


Because that is our North Star in regenerative design — that every time we design and build something, the world gets better. So that if we weren’t there, the ecosystem would miss us.

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Field notes: trying on the Systems Change Lab for size

Last week I had the privilege of facilitating an afternoon session for the Engineers Without Borders UK Systems Change Lab in London.

This is such a powerful initiative. It is an action-led community whose purpose is to make global-responsibility the norm in engineering. In their previous meet-up in Birmingham, participants had designed a new community structure. My role this time was to bring that structure to life so people could feel how it might work in practice. 

The community structure has three levels of engagement: 

  • membership; 
  • action groups that self-organise around specific themes; and 
  • a steering group. 

Sounds great — but does it feel like? How might it work? Where do people see themselves fitting in?

Three-part facilitation

Affinity Clustering

We began with one of my favourite warm-ups — walk around the room, catch someone’s eye, do a little hop — to set the playful tone from the start. 

Then came affinity clustering. Participants walk around the room with a large sticker on their chest saying a topic they are interested in exploring in the lab. The aim is to congregate with people with related themes. I called ‘twist’ a couple of times to give players the chance to try out different group configurations before settling where they felt the strongest pull

Simulating an action-group meeting

Newly formed grouped explored their shared interests and how they could collaborate to take action on this theme. Each group chose someone to be their representative at the steering group meeting.

A steering-group fishbowl

The representatives from each action learning group gathered to form the steering group, and held a live meeting in the middle while others observed. Onlookers outside the fishbowl could pause the conversation and offer reflections. 

Across these three stages the community structure came to life. People could feel the dynamics, understand the logistics and make suggestions for how to make it better. 

The fishbowl in particular opened up important early questions: 

  • How much autonomy should the action groups have?
  • How much should the steering committee  steer or respond?
  • How does information get communicated across the whole Lab?

These are important questions in any organisations, but particularly ones that are action learning and self-coordinating. 

If you’re interested in the EWB-UK Systems Change Lab, you can join their mailing list here:

Systems Change Lab