Author: Oliver Broadbent

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When a group of learners becomes a living system

All week we’ve been interviewing candidates for Cohort 6 of the Regenerative Design Lab. With such a strong range of applicants, it’s been a real privilege to spend time with so many thoughtful, committed humans.

And it’s not just us asking the questions.

Candidates ask us questions too, as they decide whether they want to commit to this journey. One question, in particular, keeps coming up, what does a good outcome for a cohort look like?

Over the week, my answer has been converging on a clear image.

The Lab is a facilitated, carefully scaffolded process. We design the conditions, hold the space, and guide the learning. But that’s not the end goal.

Over time, something else begins to happen.

Cohorts start to form their own connections.
People rely on one another, not just on the facilitators.
Support, challenge and learning begin to circulate within the group.

The process starts to become mutual.

Participants bring energy, insight and care — and receive it in return. The cohort starts to function less like a programme and more like a living system, sustained by the quality of its relationships.

As confidence grows, the group becomes more able to respond to what emerges. New questions surface. Directions shift. The cohort adapts — not because it was pre-designed to do so, but because the conditions allow it.

Our hope is that, over time, a cohort develops enough of its own energy to sustain itself. That it unlocks the abundance already present in the group, rather than relying on continued external input.

When that happens, the role of facilitation begins to fall away.

The cohort can fly on its own.

Not dependent on us.
Not dependent on funding.
Sustained by what participants create, share and renew together.

Interconnection.
Symbiosis.
Capacity to adapt.

A system that draws on renewing, abundant resources rather than depletion — and continues because it wants to, not because it is being held in place.

For me, that is a deeply regenerative outcome.

Living Systems Blueprint
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Hope, fully

Part of the role of the regenerative designer is to develop and nourish a view of a more hopeful future. 

This isn’t passive work — it’s active. Repeatedly returning to questions like: 

  • What would thriving look like here?
  • How might this place be glad that humans are here?
  • What do we hold to be important and worth fighting for.

To return to these questions, on our own and with others, is to hope fully. 

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Unhelpfully agreeing to crap processes

In the Get It Right Initiative leadership workshops we spend time talking about behaviour, and time talking about process. Today I made an interesting discovery when I accidentally squashed the two together.

This is about our complicity in crap processes.

In the behaviour section, we use a simple model that looks at behaviour across two axes:

helpful — unhelpful and agreement — challenge.

This gives us four familiar modes of behaviour:

  • Helpful agreement
  • Helpful challenge
  • Unhelpful challenge
  • Unhelpful agreement

We spend particular time on unhelpful agreement: situations where people go along with something they know isn’t right. The aim is to help people shift towards helpful challenge — speaking up to find a better answer.

What usually emerges is that unhelpful agreement thrives where people feel psychologically unsafe, undervalued, or resigned. Helpful challenge, by contrast, requires psychological safety, being listened to, and a sense of agency.

So far, so familiar.

We then normally move on to talking about ineffective processes. But today, by accident, I left the behaviour chart on the wall.

That’s when something clicked.

Participants quickly identified that continuing to use an ineffective process without challenging it is itself a form of unhelpful agreement.

More than that: managers who allow crap processes to persist on their watch are actively creating the conditions for unhelpful agreement—particularly a lack of agency that easily tips into cynicism.

I immediately recognised this pattern from many infrastructure projects: people bogged down by systems that don’t help them. And yet, in other situations, I’ve seen managers who quietly go the extra kilometre to make things work for their teams. The difference in morale is always obvious.

So this is a plea.

If you’re a manager whose staff have to follow processes, help your team’s morale by remembering Oliver’s process mantra:

Use it. Improve it. Or remove it.

Anything else is unhelpful agreement.

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How do you write a contract based on regenerative values?

Today I’ve been thinking about that question as we finalise the participant agreement for the Regenerative Design Lab. People are about to hand over their money, and that deserves clarity. But it also raised a deeper question: what would a contract look like if it genuinely reflected the regenerative values we teach — interdependence, emergence and abundance?

Most contracts start from a worldview of separation, scarcity and control:

  • You are the customer
  • We are the provider
  • Something might go wrong
  • Let’s protect ourselves

That’s not unreasonable. But it’s also not how the Lab really works.

The quality of the Lab doesn’t come from what we deliver. It emerges from how people show up, support one another, care for each other, sit with uncertainty, and learn together.

So instead of asking “how do we protect ourselves?” we tried asking different questions:

  • How do we bring people together?
  • How can we remain flexible and adapt to what is emerging?
  • How do we unlock the potential of the group?

Interdependence

Interdependence is about our reliance on one another. The Lab works because the group forms a shared connection, grounded in care, trust and mutual support. This isn’t a group of co-located parallel learners — it’s a learning community.

The agreement makes this explicit. It names that interdependence and sets some simple ground rules to help it establish itself.

Emergence

Most contracts try to fix things in place: you get this, I get that. Valuing emergence is different. It means relinquishing some control so that the best outcomes can arise through a series of complex interactions.

There’s nothing wrong with having a plan — and we do have a detailed plan. But we’re also clear that the programme can evolve in response to what happens along the way.

Trust plays an important role in working like this. Being honest upfront about the emergent nature of the work helps turn uncertainty into a shared expectation rather than a disappointment.

Abundance

Abundance was the hardest value to translate into a contract. It’s the opposite of a scarcity mindset, and it doesn’t show up as anything goes.

Instead, it appears in small choices:

  • Offering tiered pricing based on what people can afford, trusting there will be enough overall to cover costs — and ending up with a richer mix of participants as a result.
  • Recognising that circumstances change, and allowing people to move between cohorts where possible.
  • Creating Creative Commons–licensed tools, based on the belief that we don’t need to control what we create — that value grows through sharing, and that there will be enough to continue the work.

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In the end, the agreement isn’t long. This isn’t a perfect or complete solution — it’s an attempt to align a practical document with how the work actually happens.

I hope it feels like an invitation into a particular way of working. Most importantly, it helps transmit our values right at the start of the process.

Changing Mindsets
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On transforming time and system immunity

Malcolm Gladwell claimed in his book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. 

How many days is that?

How many years?

It’s not quick to flip between these very common units of time. Unless we are very good at multiplying and dividing by 24 and 365 respectively. 

The answer is 416 and 2/3 days.

Which is equivalent to roughly 1.14 years.

Solid. No time for breaks.

But the point isn’t about how long this is or with Gladwell’s theory is true or not. My point is, isn’t it strange how awkward it is to convert between our common units of time.

This was sorted out for distance a long time ago. Metres, millimetres and kilometres are easy to switch between: just move the decimal point three spaces to the right or left. 

Why don’t we have this same simplicity for time?

I had been aware of the creation of a calendar based on 10-day weeks in post-Revolutionary France. This calendar was in use for about 6 years, and is in itself a fascinating story. 

But I hadn’t realised until this weekend that during a similar period there was a decimalisation of time. Under this model:

  • A day is broken into ten hours
  • Each hour has 100 minutes
  • Each minute has 100 seconds

With this system, the unitary conversions are easy. If someone were to say that something will take 10,000 hours, you can quickly step up and down through the different units.

  • 1000 days
  • 10,000 hours
  • 1,000,000 minutes
  • 100,000,000 seconds.

Very sensible for quick calculation. No calculators necessary!

But the new system was not popular. The wikipedia page on decimal time cites a paper presented by C.A Prieur at the French National Convention on why decimalisation of time is not a good idea. And the reasons given present a good example of ‘system immunity’ – why systems resist change.

Here are a few of the reasons listed:

  • Since time is not commercially regulated (unlike say, weights and measures), there is no enforcement and so the old system will remain in use. Using our Systems Bookcase model, here the operating rules don’t reinforce the new design. Equally there is no rule stopping the use of this new system — but nothing to help it punch through either.
  • The rural population does not need such an accurate measure of time, and so are unlikely to use the new system. This is an example of there being no reinforcing feedback loop in the system. Shifting to the new system does not confer any benefits to these users, so its uptake will not naturally emerge. 
  • Watches are people’s most expensive possessions – asking people to buy a new watch by decree is not likely to be popular, unless it is supported and comes with a benefit. This is an example of both capital investment and pride.

These are examples of where the purity of an abstract idea meets the realities of the present. 

But is it the present that is the problem, or is it the idea? Because it is only in practice that things work. 

Forcing an idea into a system that doesn’t want it will take energy. If that energy delivers a yield, then it can be overcome. But if there is no benefit, the system will snap back. 

As it stood, decimal time lasted 6 years before it was abandoned.

How many hours is that? That may take some time work out in my head.

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200 new Pattern Books please

So this happened over Christmas – we sold out of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. In fact we sold the last one on Christmas Day. 

That means we have now sold 400 copies. For a niche book about how to hold conversations about regenerative design in the built environment, that’s incredible.

And so I wrote the lovely people at Calverts Design and Print Coop and asked them for 200 new Pattern Books to be printed. They have now landed!

So, sorry if you got an out-of-stock notice. The Pattern Book is back and ready to support you in your regenerative thinking in 2026. Order your copy here. 

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Fellowship complete

Just sharing some news of a big milestone in this work: the Commissioners have signed off the final report for my Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Fellowship in Regenerative Design. 

This warrants news  longer post but for now the short version is this. 

In 2023 I began the Fellowship with the aim of helping the built environment shift from a paradigm of harm to one of healing. 

What became clear early in that process was that regenerative design isn’t something you simply teach, apply or deliver. It’s a way of thinking that develops over time, through action and reflection, across a wide range of actors playing different roles in systems change.

This realisation shaped the work that followed:

Personally the process has been stretching, demanding, and, honestly, sometimes overwhelming — but I feel it has precipitated a huge amount of work that I believe makes a significant contribution to figuring out what we should be doing next as an industry. 

One thing I’m sitting with today – if you are in the midst of thinking about regenerative design, and find it slow-going and challenging then you are probably working in the right space. The elements of a regenerative future surround us; we just need to figure out how to rewire and reinforce them to create something thriving out of our work.

I am deeply grateful to the Commisioners for trusting me with this brief and for supporting this work. I am excited to share more about where this goes next. 

More on that soon.

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The Lasagne Pitch – start with the shape of it

I struggle to follow recipes that pile straight in with a long list of instructions without giving me an idea of how the recipe works. 

Take lasagne. If it just starts with, ‘heat the oil, fry the onions, celery and carrot, then after a bit add some garlic…’ I find the information goes in one eye and out the other.

I need to know the shape of things to give me scaffolding for the details. For example, 

‘a lasagne is a dish consisting of alternative layers of pasta sheets, red sauce and white sauce. First you will make the red and white sauces separately, then layer things up and bake it. The pasta cooks in the moisture from the sauces…’

Give me all that and then I’m set for the details about frying the onions and turning on the oven.

The same can be said for pitching design ideas and engineering concepts.

In my workshops on pitching design ideas, I find participants are often too ready to get into the detail of how they are going to do something before giving us the overall logic. Without structure, the details don’t add up to create a picture.

If you hear me say, use the lasagne pitch, now you know what I mean. Start with the layers, then worry about frying the vegetables.

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Signs of local weather

I’m enjoying being absorbed by The Secret World of Weather, by Tristan Gooley. It reveals to the reader secret signs all around us about how the weather is likely to behave. Signs that hide in plain sight, that we have forgotten to notice.

The repeating theme in the early chapters: modern forecasting models deal with macro effects, the movement of large masses of air or wind high above our heads. These are what the weather apps tell us about. 

These models ignore the local effects: landscape, ground cover type, sun traps. But it is at this scale that we experience the weather, and it is at this local level we need to make decisions: what to wear, where to sit, where to plant things.

Reading those signs is to reconnect ourselves with our local landscape, an example of the sort of local interconnectedness that regenerative design needs. 

When we ignore the local detail, we have to compensate with more effort: more heating, cooling, protection. We end up working against the conditions rather than with them.

When we appreciate the local lie of the land, we can learn to work with what’s already there – and learn to live and even thrive within it. 

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On pattern spotting

Pattern is a word I use a lot. Recently, a reader wrote to say how much they appreciated this use of pattern language in my writing. And that made me pause today and think about why patterns matter so much to me. 

A book I regularly return to, usually towards the start of the summer holidays, is How to Read Water, by Tristan Gooley. In this fascinating guide, Gooley shows us how to understand all the complex things that are going on in a body of water by reading the patterns. 

In fluid mechanics, we can study the bulk properties of water flowing down an idealised channel – its velocity, discharge and whether it will be smooth-flowing or turbulent. Equations give us the means to predict overall behaviour.

But stand on a real river bank and we will find it much harder to predict the detail of what is going on. Sure, the big numbers stay the same, but the detail becomes impossible predict – where an eddy might suddenly appear and then dissolve; or where a submerged stone might set up a standing wave. Multiple factors interact to create a system that is too complex to predict. 

When faced with this sort of complexity, we stop seeking to predict the detail and instead learn to read the patterns, and what these can tell us about the underlying system. That’s what Gooley’s book does so well – gives us patterns to look for that help us understand the underlying structure and behaviour of the water we are looking at. 

Patterns show us what the system is trying to do. Its tendencies, what is reinforced and what is absent or removed. They show us the most likely, energy-efficient response to a set of conditions. 

Complexity emerges in systems with lots of connections and lots of interlocking factors. And so, straight away, we tend to see complexity whenever we are working with ecosystems, communities and organisations – in other words, in the work of regenerative design.

Patterns are a key to working with complexity. And pattern spotting is a key skill.

Spotting patterns doesn’t necessarily mean we need to copy them. Rather, patterns are clues to what is going on so that we can choose the best response to this complex system.