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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.

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Three Horizons facilitation (90 minutes) — sometimes all people need is the picture

Diagram of the Three Horizons model with three overlapping curves labeled H1 (red), H2 (blue), and H3 (yellow), showing how different patterns rise and fall over time.

The Three Horizons model is one of our key tools in the Regenerative Design Lab for exploring change. It’s simple enough to grab in a short space of time (see yesterday’s post on a the fit of a good tool), but deep enough to shape a deep, long-term exploration. For example we use the Three Horizons to create the arc of the Lab — in which we start with dreaming about a thriving future, return to the realities of the present, and then going on explore the steps that can create a change from one to the other.

The model also supports a half-day deep dive into innovation (See Kate Raworth’s excellent 6-minute video on facilitation questions to support such a process.)

But sometime the greatest value I see is in simply getting people familiar with the picture. If people can see the three mindsets — the manager (H1), the dreamer (H3) and the entrepreneur (H2) — the conversation can open up by itself.

Below is a 90-minute introduction I’ve been using. It gives people just enough structure to try on the model, and then lets them get on with using it. This is how it goes.

Three Horizons: 90-minute facilitation plan

Getting started

00h00  — Arrivals (10mins)

For the usual how-do-you-dos, and-I’m-sorry-I’m-lates. 

00h10 – Warm-up (5mins)

Ask people to write down on post-it notes as many cool sustainability (or whatever topic you are interested in) initiatives as they have heard of on separate post-it notes. Requirements:

  • It must exist in the real world or as a prototype
  • Or it must have a website. 

You don’t need to say this but we’ll use these later to populate Horizon Two.

00h15 — Introduce the model (10mins)

Acknowledge the familiar dynamic:

  • Dreams of the future
  • Frustrations with the present
  • Lots of opportunities pop up, but it’s hard to know where to start. 

Introduce the Three Horizons as a way to see all of three simultaneously. 

Step 1 — Horizon Three: the future we want

00h25 Breakout (10mins)

Prompt questions: 

  • What are your hopes, dreams and values?
  • What future would be proud to hand on to future generations?
  • What elements of that future already exist?

Get participants to stick their post-it notes to the top right of the diagram.

00h35 Plenary (10mins)

Explore the different responses about the future. 

  • What was easy and hard to discuss?
  • How did it feel to talk about the future?

Step 2 — Horizon One: Our reality

00h45 Breakout (10mins) 

Prompt questions: 

  • What holds your attention?
  • What keeps the current system in place?
  • What is causing pressure for change?

Get participants to stick their post-it notes on the left of the diagram.

00h55 Plenary (10mins)

Explore the different responses about the present. 

  • What was easy and hard to discuss?
  • How did it feel to talk about the present?

This is the part of the process that my colleague Will Arnold would refer to as the Pit of Despair — when hope goes out of the room. It important to acknowledge this, and to welcome in Horizon Two as a way forward.  

Step 3 – Horizon Two: The ideas that move us forward

01h05 — Breakout (10mins)

Prompt questions:

  • What steps could move us from H1 to H3?
  • Which of these opportunities already exist (you can use entries from the warm-up exercise as a prompt)

01h15 — Plenary (10mins)

Explore:

  • Which ideas act as stepping stones?
  • What conditions will enable these seeds to grow?
  • Who else needs to be involved?

Closing

01h25 – Conclusions (5mins)

  • What does the overall picture reveal?
  • How could use the model in your own work?

As a final signpost, I refer people to the Three Horizons entry in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design and in our free online Tools for Regenerative Design. 

01h30. Close.

Why this format works

This short workshop format gives participants:

  • A felt experience of each of the mindsets
  • A shared map of their collective thinking and their shared reality
  • Provides just enough detail to get people familiar with the model so they can use it in more depth themselves. 

Overall I think it shows what the Three Horizons does best:  to help people hold the future, the present and the opportunity for change all at the same time.

Three Horizons