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The dance of innovation or dancing on the spot

Regenerative design aims to shift our system of design and construction to one that creates thriving. 

But when we are working with an incumbent organisation — one built around the current way of doing things — a big question often arises: 

How do I know if I am really making change?

When organisations are heavily invested in the current system, genuine change is rarely part their short-term strategy. 

An avoidance strategy then is to perform the dance of innovation — creating the appearance of transformation while continuing with business as usual. 

Like a magician waving one hand while hiding the real trick with the other: 

Well, you know, we’re really committed to change and we’ve got these great consultants in, and they’re figuring out the strategy… so for now, we’ll just carry on.

For change-makers looking to shift the mainstream, the chance to work with a major supplier or client can feel too good to pass up. But we have to stay alert to innovation being a delaying tactic.

It may look like progress, but if nothing changes under the surface it’s really just dancing on the spot. 

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Decide to remember or decide to forget

When we make decisions in complex scenarios, we can never be certain how they will work out. But every decision is an opportunity to test our thinking and to see how the system responds.

Every decision is a learning opportunity. Each is a chance to learn what happens when I make a decision based on certain factors rather than others.

But only if we decide to remember. 

That means writing down why we did what we did — and remembering to look back the next time we’re making a similar decision.

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Decide now or decide later?

Sometimes it’s worth designing your decision-making process before you make any decisions at all. Setting your decision-making criteria. Defining the minimum requirements. Figuring out the go/no-go questions. Clarifying your preferences. Determining who decides and who signs it all off. 

And sometimes it’s worth starting with the ideas. 

Wouldn’t it be great if…? 

What if we tried…? 

What would it look like if…?

The first approach creates more certainty. It reduces risk, aids delivery and creates a clearer record of how and why you did what you did. 

The second can create magic. It leaves room for surprise. It allows new possibilities that would never have fitted the plan — but which might just be better.

At some point you always have to decide. 

But when you decide changes what you get.

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Feels like magic

Something that feels like magic is happening. This week I’ve been shipping pre-orders of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design to

Canada, the USA, Switzerland, Denmark, Lithuania , Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Australia , New Zealand, Italy, Netherlands , Germany, Sweden.

These are seeds that are spreading, thanks in large part to the people reading this blog telling people about these ideas. 

And so for that, a very big thank you from me.

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The song of the river

In this sequence of posts I’m collecting questions that can help me build a regenerative design palette. In regenerative design we use the living world as a design guide. This goes beyond mimicking living forms — beyond biomimicry — to understanding how  underlying systems work, the processes that give rise to form and that enable living systems to thrive in balance. 

Next on my list: how is information stored in this system?

We often think of information as facts or data — something that can be written down or recorded. The invention of computer memory, which stores information in sequences of ones and zeros, exerts a powerful influence of cultural understanding of what information is.

But the Oxford English Dictionary entry for information includes other definitions that can broaden our understanding and what we look for in living systems.  Information can also be what is expressed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.

DNA is perhaps the living world’s most impressive information code, with a base of four rather than our binary two. But this is only the starting point for thinking about natural memory. 

Tree rings store the story of rainfall and prevailing wind. Wider rings correlate with wetter years; asymmetric ones show the dominant direction of wind. And at a larger scale still, information sequences are also expressed in the shape of the hills, storing information through their form about the sequence of geological events over hundreds of thousands of years. 

At the Regenerative Design Lab, Bill Sharpe offered a beautiful way to think about this. In any system with flow, there are structures that shape the movement — like a river’s banks. But the flow is also shaping the structure — the water gradually re-sculpting the path of the river. 

I think of the river as a stylus. The banks are the groove of an LP. Together they play the song of the river.  A record of what has been played before — one that is updated with every performance. 

Our ecosystems are a rich record library of everything that has happened in a place. What happens, what used to happen, what no longer happens, what could happen again.

Information in genetic bases, in strata, in layers of growth, in physical form, in ways we are only beginning to notice, and I’m sure in many more that we haven’t.

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Six foot slugs

I get asked this question all the time. I present an example of a scheme or an initiative in which engineers have developed a glimpse of the future — a way to work with reclaimed construction materials, to work with place, to create a system of working that demonstrates how to build a thriving future. 

And then the question — how does it scale up?

This question of scaling makes sense in our parallel human-superimposed world of extraction, refining, manufacturing, distribution and assembly. In which the way to scale up is to build bigger, systems of supply.

But it doesn’t make sense in the living world.

In my garden, slugs are enormously successful. Somehow they have found a way to tough out the winter, and wait until the moment when the ground is wet enough, and then zoom up the stems of my runner beans and strip them.

Love them or loathe them, slugs are a great design. 

But in the living world, there isn’t a venture capitalist saying ‘lets 10x these slugs. I see the potential for 6 foot slugs’.

Instead, over time, living systems tend to grow in number and variety of systems. In other words, more slugs and more of lots of other things too.

It’s not so much a scale up but a diversify up. Each of these elements in relationship to each other. 

The question for the regenerative designer shifts from how do we scale up to: how can we allow the number and variety of local elements to grow and evolve?

In other words, from scaling up to creating a widening mosaic. 

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A wobbly table on the non-flat surface of the reality

The faster trees grow, the straighter they tend to be. Compare the straight spears of fast-growing bamboo with the twisting boughs of old oak in ancient woodland. The former grows quickly skyward in a single season, whereas the latter slowly develops, year on year. 

In the twists and turns of an old tree’s branches we see captured in its geometry the changing environmental conditions it has experienced — the availability of light, direction of wind and even how much water it had to drink. A partner dance fixed in its branches. 

This is construction of a sort that responds to the changing conditions. That adapts. That is the best structural response to what happened next.

The shapes we find in the living world are built up on site, layer by layer, ring by ring, branch by branch. Each a best-fit response to what happened that season.

Engineers don’t grow things. Not in this sense of contextual layering up and extending. 

Instead, we cast, extrude and slice. It’s easier to design and cut things in straight lines, cast flat shapes, pack things that are regular cuboids and transport things that all look the same. 

Whereas the living world evolves shapes to suit the site, we’ve evolved our designs to suit the factory, the quarry, the motorway and the drawing board. We make in one place and take it to another. Ready-baked forms with few of the specificities of place built in. 

More fundamentally, the living world designs in context and engineers tend to design in the abstract. 

Abstraction is helpful! It makes things simpler, easier to calculate, define, arrange, and scale up. But it also separates us from context and the consequences of our decisions. 

Given nothing in the landscape, nor in the living world is straight, everything we make straight is an imperfect fit, an inefficient response.

A wobbly table on the non-flat surface of the reality.

Straight lines are sign that things have been done to a place. That variations have been ignored or cut off. That something has been abstracted and rendered easier — but at what cost? What has been flattened? What has been undervalued? What has been overlooked?

Nature does so much so little. And we can learn to do the same. But this asks more of designers. 

Design that layers.

Design that experiments on site.

Design that is a long-term response to place. 

I believe we would recognise this kind of design straight away. And we would find it intrinsically beautiful.

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Sleep, subconscious and napping at work.

This week we ran an online session in our Critical Thinking series exploring a topic not usually found in professional training agendas: sleep and the subconscious.

We often ask the question: When do you get your best ideas? Unsurprisingly, no one said “at my desk.” We usually use the question to explore idea generation, but here it opened the door to a deeper conversation about how insights often arise when we’re not consciously trying—on walks, in the shower, while dozing off.

We introduced the idea that our subconscious is always working, quietly filtering, sorting, and remixing our experiences. But like a party next door, we can only hear it if we turn the mental volume down.

We looked at:

  • The role of sleep cycles (NREM for data sorting, REM for pattern generation)
  • The value of unstructured time in creativity
  • Whether we should actually be paid to nap at work
  • How all this supports critical thinking at every stage of the OODA loop

Perhaps surprisingly, we started with a short guided meditation—done in the middle of a busy office—helped participants notice just how noisy their minds are, and what might be waiting underneath.

Sometimes our best thinking begins when we stop.

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The circumference of a circle of infinite radius

I rounded off last week’s posts with a number of questions for investigating systems in the living world. Answering these questions can help us develop a palette of systemic design principles that can help engineers (and other humans) create thriving with limited resources. The living world does it so well, and we might rely on it for our survival as a species, it is worth spending some time on it.

My first question, why is that the shape it is? 

Sitting where I am, I can see a lot of straight lines. The awning above the cafe, the tiles of the floor, the lamp posts, the window frames, the balconies, the scaffolding, the road leading into the distance.

A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. 

A mathematician once told me that a straight line is the circumference of a circle of infinite radius. That one has caused lots of debates in the pub. 

The path of a beam of light (unless there’s a particularly heavy star in the vicinity).

To this list of definitions of a straight line, we might add ‘a shape made by engineers (and other humans) in their manipulation of the physical world’. 

Whether by scoring into, connecting together, extruding from our driving through the substrate of the earth and its derivative materials, we tend to make a lot of straight lines. 

There are straight lines in the living world, but you have to search for them. A spider’s web is straight line between the nodes of its structure, until the wind blows. At a microscopic level, crystaline structures contain straight lines, and occasionally these are translated to the macro scale, as in the basalt extrusions of the Giant’s Causeway. 

Visitor’s from another planet would easily be able to spot the systems on planet earth where humans have been the chief engineers by the abundance of straight lines. 

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From Ideas to Evidence — testing early concepts in structural design

This week marked the final session in our Introduction to Conceptual Design for Structural Engineers series, where we moved from generating ideas to something more demanding: whether the ideas are any good or not.

The focus of the session was modelling and testing—but not in the technical-detailing sense. Instead, we explored how early-stage models can help test key assumptions, communicate design intent, and show where the design needs to be improved.

We introduced the concept of the key system — in other words, the one factor that in the design the shapes how all other factors will follow.

Sometimes that’s the structural loads. Sometimes it’s the construction sequence. Sometimes it’s something more unexpected.

Participants explored different types of models—sketches, physical forms, mood boards—and reflected on how the right model depends on the audience. A key idea here: this is not about models that you need loads of compute to execute, these are quick sketches for the journey home from site on the train.

This session closed with a review of the whole process, from brief to idea generation to modelling and testing.

 Up next: We’re developing a follow-on course, Advanced Conceptual Design for Team Leaders, which will take the conversation further—looking not just at individual creativity, but how we approach conceptual design as a team.

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