Creativity training and teaching for engineers
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This week I’ve been going back through my writing to find material on interconnection, feedback and resilience.
The Carrier Wave is one my favourite motifs in the Pattern Book for exploring the difference between mere connection and active exchange of information.
Rather than repeat the metaphor here, I’ll let it speak for itself.
This week at the Regenerative Design Lab, we’ve been working with the Living Systems Blueprint — a model for connecting high-level regenerative thinking with more tangible design decisions.
The Blueprint identifies three qualities common to living systems. One of these is interconnection.
Thriving living systems tend to have high levels of local connectivity:
contact between species, relationships of co-dependency, flows of information and energy.
A good example is the mycelial networks that connect trees in a woodland. These networks allow feedback to travel through the ecosystem, helping the system adapt and stay in balance.
One feature of the industrialised human economy is just how separated we have become from the living systems that support life on Earth.
So interconnection becomes a useful design prompt.
Interconnection as a topic comes up in so many ways:
It’s a common thread running through much of this blog.
If you are interested, you can explore the archive of posts tagged with interconnection.
When you can’t remember why you are doing this work?
When the questions feel too large to answer?
When the wind has gone out of your sails?
When you don’t feel you are making any progress?
Any work of systems change requires work against the grain.
Friction.
Swimming against the flow.
And that’s the moment that you need friends, allies, colleagues in this work.
People who can see where you are at.
Recognise the pattern.
Remind you that you’re not doing it alone.
Systems change can be isolating.
Moments of doubt are part of the territory.
Which is why it’s worth figuring out in advance:
Who you’re gonna call.
This came up in a facilitation call today.
What do you do if the group talks too much?
Or the opposite — no one contributes?
The answer in both cases is the same:
Set up the conditions early.
With a group that talks too much, success usually comes from permission-setting near the start of the session.
I’ll often say something like:
“I’m sure this will be a very engaging conversation, and there may be moments where I need to move us on — is everyone ok with that?”
No one has yet said no.
But later, when you need to step in, you can simply say:
“I need to move us on.”
You’ve already established the ‘contract’ with them.
I’ll often also add that I may ask for contributions from different people so that we hear a range of voices. Again, this creates permission in advance for bringing quieter people into the conversation later on.
Quiet groups need a different approach.
It rarely works to begin by saying:
“I expect contributions from everyone.”
You have to create the conditions where it feels safe to contribute.
The first step is to avoid asking open questions to the whole room before the group has warmed up.
It is almost always better to get people talking in pairs or small groups first.
After that, you can move to a technique I learnt from Nick Francis while developing the Get it Right Initiative Train-the-trainer programme:
Pose an open question.
Pause to allow someone to answer.
And if nobody does, ‘pounce’ — ask someone specific by name.
This works best when used regularly enough that people come to expect it.
And as with any facilitation technique, remember:
These things often feel awkward before they become natural.
That searing noise tearing across the sky.
The first time I’ve heard it this year.
It means only one thing: the swifts are back in Bristol.
They tear through the sky at breathtaking speed, eating flies on the wing. They are definitely on the list of creatures I’d like to spend a day in the life of.
Their UK population has declined by around 65% since 1995, so each return from their epic migration feels more precious than the last.
Maybe I’ll have a swift half to celebrate.
I’ve never been invited to speak on the construction conference circuit before. And this year I’ve got three appearances. Something is shifting (or maybe everyone else was busy…).
First up, I’m at FutureBuild on Tuesday 12th May, on a panel curated by Architects Declare on the Buildings and Materials stage, talking about regenerative practice.
Then on Wednesday morning I head over to Footprint + where I’ll be speaking with Timothy Clement from Morgan Sindall to answer the question ‘what is regenerative design?‘
And then back to FutureBuild for a session in the Future Build Arena at 3pm, curated by The Edge, exploring how regenerative thinking can reshape the built environment,
If you are around, then do come down and say hi.
Borrow some money.
Use it buy an asset — say, a water supply company.
Load the debt onto the company.
Continue to extract profit.
Last week I went to a talk where Hettie O’Brien presented her book The Asset Class.
This, in essence, is the mechanism she describes — used by private equity across sectors, from water to care homes.
The goal of regenerative design is to survive, thrive and co-evolve.
This is a recipe for the opposite.
Systems originally designed to provide life-giving functions — water, care — are reconfigured to service debt and maximise profit.
A recipe for parasitic extraction.
A blueprint for degenerative design.
Next week at the Regenerative Design Lab, our two cohorts will be working with the Living Systems Blueprint.
The Blueprint acts as a bridge between regenerative mindsets and design. It takes the best model we have for regenerative systems — the living world — and asks what we can learn from it.
Thriving living systems tend to share a few characteristics:
Together, these give us a different way to think about design. Importantly, they give us something practical to work into a brief — not just specifying outputs, but shaping the qualities of the system we are creating.
Because in regenerative design, we are not just designing buildings and infrastructure.
We are designing the systems that create them — where building is not the end, but a means.
A means to creating thriving ecosystems and communities.
Looking forward to the conversations.
As I reached the end of my 1851 Fellowship in Regenerative Design I had the feeling I wanted to do more with my hands – I wanted more practice to accompany the theory.
This feeling crystallised last summer, visiting family in western Canada last summer, including my cousin Wayne Wenstob, who inspired me to become a structural engineer in my twenties, and to whom the Pattern Book is dedicated.
It was while staying there that they took delivery of a mobile saw mill. I watched while a group of people assembled the machinery on the beech and used it to process cedar drift wood. The timber was going to be used to renovate a traditional First Nation longhouse.
Something clicked.
Half a planet away, at Hazel Hill Wood — home of the Regenerative Design Lab — we have just been granted our new forestry licence.
After having lapsed for a few years, this gives us permission to fell trees as part of a longer-term shift: from areas of single-species forestry to mixed, resilient woodland.
But here’s the catch.
Timber ‘in the round’ — unsown — has very low value. Often not enough to cover the cost of felling and extraction at small scale.
But as I learnt in Canada, cutting the wood into planks significantly increases the sale value of the timber.
And so an idea was born. What if Constructivist set up a new division, Constructivist Timber, to go into partnership with Hazel Hill to create a small, local timber supply chain?
Nothing large-scale, nor industrial. Just enough to process timber into usable planks, for use on site and then for sale is a modest revenue stream?
In regenerative design we often talk about unlocking stacked, multiple benefits in a system. This ideas seems to do that:
At Hazel Hill Wood, this approach also reconnects something that had quietly drifted. The earliest buildings on site used timber from the wood itself. More recent construction has relied on commercial supply chains. Re-establishing an on-site timber flow brings that relationship back into view.
How we live with trees becomes part of the lived experience of the place.
So the next logical step was clear: invest in a mobile sawmill.
And then two remarkable things happened
A local natural artist, Zac Newham (natural-art.uk) asked if he could store his mobile sawmill on site in return for us being able to use it.
And the Engineering Club asked if it could book the wood to run its summer school, in which engineers will use timber from the wood to build infrastructure on site.
It feels like by joining the dots we are already starting to unlock something abundant.
The first chapter of Constructivist Timber begins.
