Author: Oliver Broadbent

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Does power support change?

Earlier this week I wrote about designers needing to understand the conditions for change. What enables change and what blocks it?

If we understand organisational culture as how things get done in an organisation, then culture gives us some strong clues about what – or who might be enabling or blocking change.

Power is one of the six lenses of culture in the Johnson and Scholes culture web. How people with power wield it in the organisation sets a strong signal for what is valued and what can be ignored. The policy may say one thing, but it is what management or leadership actually do that sets the culture.

And so back to change. Do the people with power visibly support change? If so, a culture of change will enable you to do your work more easily. If not, you will have more work to do.

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Never mind the aurochs

…here’s the Tauros.

I read last week that Aurochs were the third heaviest mammals to wander Europe, after woolly mammoths and their sartorial companions, woolly rhinoceroses. Aurochs were like giant long-horned cows. They crashed their way through woodlands, opening up the canopy by knocking over trees. In doing so they allowed an interconnected mosaic of habitats to form and sustain in the woods of Europe. 

That is until over 300 years ago when they became extinct in the UK. It is believed the last aurochs was killed in Poland four centuries ago.

As engineers (and other humans) become increasingly concerned about habitat loss and restoration, there is increasing interest in the role that extinct mega fauna (giant animals) played in creating and maintaining thriving habitats. 

And so I am excited to hear about this experimental programme which aims to recreate the effects that aurochs had on the landscape. In this scheme, charity Trees for Life is releasing a herd of Tauros into the Dundreggan Estate, near Loch Ness. Tauros have been back-bred from long-horned cattle to create animals that begin to resemble the mega fauna that once roamed the UK.

I see this project as an exciting example of unlocking the living world’s potential to create rich habitats. And of the role humans can play in this process of trying to counter some of the previous harm we have done.

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What’s holding the current situation in place?

Design is about making change. Our aim is to turn an existing situation into a better situation. Sometimes that might be about designing a new thing. But other times it may be about allowing change to happen. 

If we are interested in the latter then a useful question to ask is what is holding the existing situation in place? What is reinforcing the status quo? What is stopping innovation? What is preventing change?

Sometimes we need both. We need to float a new idea, but to stop it from sinking, we need to also create the conditions for change. But other times, it may be sufficient just to design the conditions for change, and then to allow something that has been waiting to emerge the chance to develop.

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Where we make but also where we take

This has become one of my catchphrases in regenerative design*. To think of design as being for ‘where we make but also where we take’. The role of the regenerative designer is to create a transition to an industry in which our designs create human and ecological thriving.

To make that possible we need to bring two separate things into our view at the same time. The place where we are doing the making, and the places that are we are drawing upon to do that making.

Because if our work makes the world better where we are making, but worse where we are taking, we are not creating thriving. We are just shifting it from one place to the other.

*It definitely is a catchphrase – I’ve already written a post this year with this exact same title.

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Just build less

More and more people are asking: how do we move from sustainable design to regenerative design?

In these conversations, we often talk about system change. We talk about strengthening the connection between designers and the origins of their materials. We discuss unlocking symbiotic loops in material supply and enabling designs that best serve the local ecosystem. All of these changes are essential—and they’ll take years, even decades, to fully implement.

But these conversations can be a distraction from a much more pressing, if uncomfortable thing we can do to shift our industry towards more regenerative ways of working. Given the massive contribution that construction makes to greenhouse emissions and the massive impact it has an habitat destruction, it is simply this. 

We must build much less stuff. 

Build less is writ large in the IStructE’s Hierarchy for Net-Zero Design. And while this hierarchy focuses on carbon, given the impact that material extraction has on habitat loss, there is a strong case that building less will significantly reduce our impact on ecosystems too.

Of course, there will be things we need, structures we can’t do without. But once we set the intention to build less, we can redirect our creativity as designers toward adapting and thriving with what we already have.

We’ll still need to build some—but we can, and must, build much less.

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Seeing the latent potential

As Rob Hopkins points out in his wonderful book From What Is to What If, the climate crisis is, at its core, a crisis of the imagination. If we can’t envision a thriving world, we won’t be able to create it.

A key skill in regenerative design is cultivating the conditions that allow us to imagine this thriving future.

This requires us to not only see what exists but also to imagine what could be. For example, looking at an empty park and envisioning it full of people running , or standing on a traffic-filled street and picturing it so quiet that birdsong fills the air and people stop to chat.

In these cases, the elements are already present—they are latent. But to unlock this latent potential, we must recognise both the desertified present and the abundant possibilities. Only then can we begin to design the next step toward that vision.

Equipping ourselves for this imaginative work is, I believe, a critical part of becoming a regenerative designer.

Hopkins, R., 2019. From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT.

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I’m an engineer, I feel your pain and I have a plan

This little refrain is my version of Aristotle’s three artistic truths for making a convincing argument. Aristotle proposed three things were needed to win people over. The first is ethos – or trustworthiness. Is this person someone I trust. The second is pathos – or empathy. Does this person have a shared sense of pain. And the third is logos – or logic. In other words, what’s the plan. 

As engineers we often start with the plan. But the plan won’t work without trust and empathy. Hence the refrain. Showing up as a professional can build trust. Feeling the pain might be the hardest part, because it has to be genuine. Then, we get to the plan, which is probably the part we started off with.

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Think of a world without any email

This came up in a workshop yesterday so I am sharing it today. There will be a time in the future for a longer set of posts on how engineers and other humans can cope with email, but now is not the time.

So instead, I recommend reading ‘A World Without Email’, by Cal Newport*. I have even considered making reading this book as a prerequisite for entering into new collaborations.

There is some irony in writing about a world without email on a blog post that is summarised in a weekly email digest. But ultimately it comes down to intentional communication design.

Hopefully, if you signed up to this list, you did so with the intention of hearing from me (and you can change your settings here). But the problem with email and other forms of instant communication is how easy it is to fall into unintentional communication.

Dealing with unintentional communication, and the sense of overwhelm it can cause us, feels important because if we are overwhelmed, we have haven’t got space to think. If we can’t think, we don’t have the capacity to imagine a thriving future. And if we can’t imagine it, it makes it much harder to build it.

*Newport, C. (2021) A world without email: reimagining work in an age of communication overload. London: Penguin Business.

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Designers as outsiders… and insiders

As designers we are outsiders. The norm is the middle lane. But we want to make things better. To change the direction of travel. To advocate for something different. 

Choosing to be a designer is choosing to step outside. To take a different perspective. To go against the grain in order to see what might be possible.

And all that takes work. So if design feels hard, it may be because of the extra work we are having to swim  in a different direction. But unless someone is prepared to take that risk, then we’ll all carry on heading the same way.

Here’s the tricky part: we are also insiders. 

That’s because we need to earn the right to work with the people we are designing with and for.

Being an insider means we are trusted and that we are in an empathetic relationship with the people we are seeking to influence.

Just as being an outsider takes work, so does the trust and empathy building process of being an insider. But if we can’t convince people to move with us, our ideas may be good for nothing. 

[This post was originally two separate posts on Eiffelover.com published on 1st and 2nd October 2024]

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The signal and the coincidence

Yesterday at a workshop I am attending (more on this soon), I was given a slip of paper with a question to reflect on. It said:

How do we make decision, and what factors truly influence the choices we think are our own?

I almost laughed out loud because yesterday’s post was a long riff on decision making. I really hesitated before publishing that post because I wasn’t entirely sure of its relevance to this series of posts. But having received this slip of paper, I feel entirely vindicated in my choice of post!

Now, of course, that’s just a coincidence. I could have written a post on any subject yesterday and found something written down somewhere the next day that related to the same topic. 

But it’s also a signal. The signal is that my brain is looking to make connections to, and draw significance to, the topic of decision-making.

As engineers (and other humans) we are bombarded with inputs in our daily lives. There are far too many inputs to process. But quietly, in the background, our subconscious is processing and pattern spotting. 

And there is also resonance with last week’s posts about looking for patterns in chaos. 

As we navigate the world as designers, creators, leaders and enablers, and as we do this in times of overwhelming inputs, our pattern-spotting brains can help us make sense of the possibilities. 

The patterns that our brain is getting us to follow might not make sense at first. That often seems to be the way of the subconscious. But maybe it is worth trusting to this instinct and seeing what emerges. Follow that lead. Go out on a limb. It may turn out that our subconscious has locked on to something useful.

This post originally appeared on Eiffelover.com on 29th September 2024.