Author: Oliver Broadbent

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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. 

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Your processes versus entropy

Regular readers of this blog will know all about the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the universe will tend toward disorder over time. 

Thus any organised system will drift towards disorder unless energy is provided to maintain it. In other words, any project process or workflow that we set up will naturally start to fall apart unless the value it creates is worth the energy it takes to maintain it. 

That means, folks, that when we set up a project process or a system it had better deliver some benefit.

My post yesterday was about effective communication systems. With the right design, we can create communication protocols that add value to how we communicate, making everyone’s work easier, perhaps even joyful!

But this process design is an art. 

Make a process too complicated and no one will use it, and the thing falls apart. Mandate people to use it anyway and you will deplete their energy for other valuable thinking.

And processes need love. Fail to show them care and attention, bits will stop working, or no longer be relevant, or worse, people will default to easier-in-the-short-run processes that will cause headaches in the long run.

The pull towards disorder is never far away. The processes we design must supply enough benefit to hold things together. 

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How do we know if we are moving forwards?

Facilitation is an intense business. It requires you to read lots of social cues and to judge what’s the best next step. It’s not surprising therefore that when travelling home in the train from a workshop I usually drift off, the sway of the carriages gently quickly sending me to sleep.

And it was in that just-before-sleep moment that I realised I had no way of knowing if I was moving forwards or backwards. Once the train had reached a steady state there was no impulse forwards or backwards, just the jostling and shaking of the carriages. With my eyes closed, I couldn’t see. And it was dark outside in any case. For all I knew we could have been stationary and just shaking on the spot..

Cue a metaphor for how we perceive change. If we are in the daily hustle and bustle of delivering projects, all we feel is the shaking and the jostling. If we can’t see into the distance we can’t see if we are getting closer and further away.

Back in the train, when the driver accelerates we feel pushed in to our seat (or pulled slightly out if we are facing backwards). But acceleration in organisational systems change is often much more imperceptible. We might not know it until things get out of control or ground to a halt.

So what can we do? Try this:

  • Ask what would it means to see the horizon? Maybe it’s something external to your daily frame of reference. Are you getting closer or further away?
  • Ask what it would it mean to see the rate of change? This might mean trying to find some sort of trace. Eg – Invoices, customer queries, sick days, species count, maintenance outages. How does that of these compare to last year?

If we can access these external frames of reference, we can start to understand our direction of travel, speed and acceleration.

The Living Systems Blueprint is our tool for assessing progress towards regenerative systems outcomes. Its three components – interconnection, symbiosis and capacity to change – give us a direction of travel and a framing for assessing progress.

Whether you use this framing or a different one, we need external reference to check our progress. 

Without them we might just be busily shaking on the spot.

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The hidden cost of a quick message

The easiest thing to do on your design project is to send a quick message. The problem is, it’s also the easiest thing for everyone else to do. And then the messages mount up, and communication is devalued.

And so what started off as easy now becomes difficult.

The hard thing to do on your design project is to set up communication protocols: what gets communicated, in what channel, how frequently and what the level of response needed. With these rules in place, communication is more restricted but more valuable. 

And so what starts off as hard becomes easier.

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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.