Author: Oliver Broadbent

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Field notes: the Kalideascope meets the Ambition Loop

This week I was invited to run an afternoon session for the Engineers Without Borders UK Systems Change Lab at their event in Glasgow. This event is part of their wider programme to create system change in engineering education to build globally responsible engineering. 

My brief was to prompt some creative thinking as part of the ‘develop’ phase in their programme. The session was an opportunity to pair two tools that I have previously used separately in our facilitation at Constructivist: the Kalideascope and the Ambition Loop. 

For years I’ve been developing and refining the Kalideascope as a structured model for divergent thinking. It helps users move beyond one initial idea by gathering a wide range of inputs, capturing questions and creating the conditions for new connections to emerge. 

While the Kalideascope generates lots of ideas, we need a different tool for the convergent thinking that enables us to choose between ideas and improve on them. So here I brought in the Ambition Loop — a tool that Bill Sharpe introduced us to in the Regenerative Design Lab to help identify what ideas have the potential to create systems change. The Ambition Loop model helps us by going beyond testing our ideas against the brief to testing how ideas can be taken up by and amplified within a systems. 

This pairing of the Kalideascope with the Ambition Loop created a strong arc for the session. The first tool expands the fields of possibilities. The second homes in on the ideas that the system might take up. 

I am seeing that with the Ambition Loop model that it tends to draw out questions about who we need to partner with to make change. 

If you have a copy of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, I suggest, like me, you annotate the end of the Kalideascope entry to say that it works well paired with the Ambition Loop motif as a divergent-convergent pair.

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No food on the trolley

A blog-writing gift from the universe. 

A moment after I submitted my last post, the customer service attendant on the train came past and apologised that they didn’t have any food available. 

But outside, just beyond the platform at Didcot Parkway station, the hedgerows are groaning with fruit. 

So what would it take to get that fruit in here?

Well, there’d need to be a hedgerow fruit-picking company. This company would need to train its staff on the safe handling of fruit in the railway environment. 

The fruit would then need to be transported to a logistics hub, sensibly by train but more likely by road.

There would need to be a food logistics processing hub, probably located centrally for transport convenience but potentially a long way from the fruit bush and the fruit eater. 

All this transport means the fruit might spoil, so it needs to be put in plastic packaging, which requires its own supply chain of oil extraction, government lobbying, single-use plastic manufacture and waste gathering and processing stream. 

Because it’s fresh fruit, it also needs cold storage. So now we need refrigerants, which means another supply chain. 

All of this would need to be coordinated by a rail catering logistics company, complete with departments for HR, finance, compliance, managerial oversight and operations.

The fruit, picked, packaged and chilled, would then need to be re-transported to local train catering distribution hubs in Bristol and Swindon, from which stock levels can be managed using GPS-enabled (yep, satellites) apps on every train trolley.

Finally, the blackberries on the trolley, they can now be served, as long as the card reader can get reception.

Quite a journey for blackberries that are mere metres away. 

Of course this is all silly. But then again, I’m not convinced the way we organise our economy is all that sensible. 

  • Have we created systems that are so centralised and specialised that they can’t handle what’s right in front of them? 
  • Have we scaled things to a point where the cost of the support structures outweigh the benefits of what we are actually doing?

This is the essence of the intensification paradox – more scale leading to more layers and multiplying costs. The scaling of each part of the system enables a profit to be extracted, but the overall burden is increased.

If we want systems that enable us to live within planetary boundaries, then we need systems that can:

  • build relationships rather than become abstracted
  • seek to work with abundance
  • respond to changes in place and time
  • scale elegantly

Catering blackberries aside, these are the sorts of question the regenerative designer works with:

  • how do we enhance connection rather than build separation?
  • how do we work with what the rhythm of what is available, enhancing the system even through our harvest?
  • how do we respond to local, emergent changes in the system
  • how do we scale elegantly, where scale enables the primary relationship between production and consumption, not distancing it?

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Abundance!

Close your laptop. Postpone your meetings!

For something amazing is happening in the hedgerows in the south of Britain. You may have noticed that they are laden with fruit. Crab apples like little red lanterns. The surprise of the yellows, purples and greens of so many mirabels, damsons and plums. Blackberries about to burst on the scene, like the negatives of 10,000 fairly lights. And the fattening of soon-to-be-ripe apples.

Of course, bearing fruit is usually an annual fixture. But in my part of England this year’s harvest in parks, hedgerows and allotments is particularly heavy. Even the tree at the end of my garden which hasn’t fruited for seven years is laden ripening damsons.

Why is this? It could be that the combination of wet and dry that we had in the spring means this is a particularly good year for fruit. This could also be a mast year, one in which trees produce extra fruit in order to ensure the animals that eat them leave some behind to turn into seeds.

Whatever the reason, the fruit is there for the picking, eating, pickling, bottling, jamming and, importantly, the sharing.

That’s the thing with abundance. It often comes on its own timetable. There can be plenty for everyone but we don’t get to control it. Instead we need to swim with the peak and prepare our community for the trough that inevitably follows.

Save your meeting for the dip! Consign report writing for leaner times! 

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Two new short courses on regenerative design — launching next week

Over the last couple of months we’ve been preparing two new online courses introducing regenerative design, and we’re almost ready to launch them.

They’re practice-based introductions for engineers (and other humans) who want to understand the language around regenerative design and how to begin to start thinking regeneratively on projects.

Next Tuesday these two new courses will go live on the Constructivist website:

Feeling the Future — for people who prefer to begin with observation, story, and intuition, and build toward frameworks.

Seeing the System — for those who like to start with systems thinking, then explore how those models show up in lived experience.

Both courses will cover almost exactly the same content, but just organised differently depending on your learning preferences.

Both are four-week online courses. Both are rooted in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. And both are designed to enter more confidently into regenerative thinking.

More details (and booking links) coming next Tuesday.

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Zero negative externalities

Bill Sharpe’s definition for a regenerative system is one that creates zero negative externalities. In other words, no harm done. The system makes things better. 

It is a sobering benchmark and a valuable tool to distinguish interventions which dance at the edges from those which tackle the heart of the issue.

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Pattern Book Notes: Kalideascope + System Survey

My intention with the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is that users can share with each other how they have used the tools and techniques within. So, kicking off this process, this is how I used two motifs two weeks ago to run a lunch for team at Elliott Wood to support an internal regenerative design competition they are running. 

Building a Kalideascope

If a group of people are working with a written design brief, then my starting point for creative thinking is to get them to build a Kalideascope. The groups write three headings on a large piece of paper: information, questions and ideas. I then get them to read the brief out very slowly and everytime something that comes to mind under any of these headings, they must shout stop, and write it down, before the reader can start again. 

The exercise is a quick method to generate lots of thinking. 

To add a regenerative lens to it, I prefaced the exercise by reading out the motif on Beavers. This motif primes listeners to think about the potential stacked multiple benefits of our interventions. 

Systems Survey

To tune the group deeper into regenerative thinking, I then read out the questions in the Systems Survey. These are questions that combine the theory of the Living Systems Blueprint with a civil engineering site survey perspective. 


The questions are:

  1. What is connected and what is separated?
  2. What is thriving and what is in decline?
  3. What is in flow and what is static?
  4. What is changing and is fixed?
  5. What stories does this place tell?
  6. What is the placing trying to do — and what helps or hinders it?

I read each question out and gave groups 3-4mins to populate their Kalideascopes with any new information, questions and ideas. 

Overall, it felt like a high-energy session and I think people went away with new ideas on how to bring regenerative thinking into their design process.

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Punching through the canopy

Yesterday I wrote about creating a forest garden from scratch — turning a pasture into thriving food growing space. But what if there is already forest? How do you approach the problem from the other angle? This is one of the questions that came up at the Forest Garden talk I’ve been writing about this week. 

When a forest has grown a thick canopy, little light can get in. So while it may seem counterintutive, the key is to create holes in the canopy to let the light in. Either by cutting back branches or taking down whole trees. It is at the margins between the light and the dark areas that the most interesting growth happens. And so forest gardens need lots of these edges in order to be effective. 

Punching through the canopy to let the light in. It’s a powerful metaphor for breaking through an existing system to let a new one take off. The canopy is a metaphor for anything that stifles. The asphalt of an industrial estate covering acres of soil. Streets clogged with cars that stop chance encounters. Places through which no fresh air ciruclates. The doom of scarcity and control that stifle play and innovation. Organisational hierarchies that lock out change. 

But punch through that layer and a pocket of life can establish itself. A niche of new. And then we can join those niches up to create a network of change.

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Creating thriving from scratch

Yesterday I wrote about the seven levels of a forest garden. I learnt about these at a talk given in the forest garden at Coed Hills Rural Arts Centre. The forest garden there is a flourishing, food producing space, but it hadn’t always been so. We heard how in 2009 the garden had been a field. And so how did the field become the thriving place we see today?

I’m interested in this question because it tells of taking active measures to create flourishing places. Left to its own devices the space would have brambled over, trees would have taken root and eventually the field would have become wood. But through active intervention, the team have created a space that is more flourishing than dense woodland would be — productive and in balance with its ecosystem. 

Key early moves include designing the space for the way the light falls. Forest gardens have lots of openings to let in the light, and so this structure needs to be thought about from the start. 

Another key factor was slowing down water that would run across the site in a storm and directing it through a series of swales. This was another dramatic intervention but one that has protected the soil from erosion and created ponds and multiple habitats. 

And finally, the team spoke about the work of holding things in balance until a natural balance could be achieved. For example, until the high trees grow tall, there can be too much light and the ground level plants grow out of control. Again this speaks to an active intervention needed in the transtion from a monoculture to a thriving polyculture. 

Most of the time, when humans build stuff, we have a negative overall impact on the world. Some say the best thing we can do is to stand back and let nature do its thing. But models such as forest gardening show how we can actively work with ecosystems to meet our needs while creating greater flourishing. We need to find the analogous models in construction, for example, for sourcing our construction materials. And we need to recognise that creating these supply chains will take many years of work before they can exist in harmony. 

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The Seven Levels of a Forest Garden

The following I learnt from Steve Watts, permaculture expert, during a talk he gave about Forest Gardens at the wonderful Coedfest, which he co-leads.


In a forest garden, plants and trees are layered over one another to create a growing system that is far more productive and diverse than farming a single crop on an area of land.

By stacking layers of complementary plants and trees over one another, you increase the amount of carbon that is being locked in, you increase the leaf litter that falls and so you increase the richness of the soil.

As Steve describes we can think of a forest garden has having seven layers:

  • High trees,
  • Lower trees,
  • Tall shrubs,
  • Small shrubs,
  • Ground cover,
  • Plants in which we harvest the roots, and

  • Climbers.

Each of these layers can produce food at different times of the year, and each of these layers provides a complementary role to the others. It is a beautiful model for a stacked system that is creating life. And it is a reminder that when we bring different systems together in complementary ways we can create much greater richness and diversity than we keep things separate.

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Thriving

The Pattern Book uses ‘thriving’ as a shorthand for the goal of regenerative design. The full goal is more precise: for humans and the living world to survive, thrive and co-evolve. Each word has earned its place in this definition: humans, living world, survive, thrive, co-evolve. And when we are doing systems analysis, it is helpful to be precise. The Living Systems Blueprint helps us unpack this definition further into more measurable characteristics in a system.

But in everyday conversation, thriving is enough. It’s a feeling. It stirs a reaction. It’s a familiar word.

Sustainability seeks to meet our needs without compromising the needs of the future. It is a zero-sum game — you end up with no more or less at the end. But aiming for thriving says we want more life. Not just life as a noun but a phenomenon.

As Janine Benyus says, ‘life contains the conditions
for more life’
.
Life that gets more sophisticated over time.
Life that grows in richness.
Life that exists in balance.
Thriving conveys the feeling of life doing this.

So, when we need to get technical, we can talk about the goal of regenerative design and the Living Systems Blueprint.

But when we want a compelling destination,
we’ll just say: thriving.

This post is an extract from the Motif Library in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design.

References

Tippett, K. (n.d.). Janine Benyus Biomimicry, an Operating Manual for Earthlings [Audio recording]. https://onbeing.org/programs/janine-benyus-biomimicry-an-operating-manual-for-earthlings/