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On transforming time and system immunity

Malcolm Gladwell claimed in his book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. 

How many days is that?

How many years?

It’s not quick to flip between these very common units of time. Unless we are very good at multiplying and dividing by 24 and 365 respectively. 

The answer is 416 and 2/3 days.

Which is equivalent to roughly 1.14 years.

Solid. No time for breaks.

But the point isn’t about how long this is or with Gladwell’s theory is true or not. My point is, isn’t it strange how awkward it is to convert between our common units of time.

This was sorted out for distance a long time ago. Metres, millimetres and kilometres are easy to switch between: just move the decimal point three spaces to the right or left. 

Why don’t we have this same simplicity for time?

I had been aware of the creation of a calendar based on 10-day weeks in post-Revolutionary France. This calendar was in use for about 6 years, and is in itself a fascinating story. 

But I hadn’t realised until this weekend that during a similar period there was a decimalisation of time. Under this model:

  • A day is broken into ten hours
  • Each hour has 100 minutes
  • Each minute has 100 seconds

With this system, the unitary conversions are easy. If someone were to say that something will take 10,000 hours, you can quickly step up and down through the different units.

  • 1000 days
  • 10,000 hours
  • 1,000,000 minutes
  • 100,000,000 seconds.

Very sensible for quick calculation. No calculators necessary!

But the new system was not popular. The wikipedia page on decimal time cites a paper presented by C.A Prieur at the French National Convention on why decimalisation of time is not a good idea. And the reasons given present a good example of ‘system immunity’ – why systems resist change.

Here are a few of the reasons listed:

  • Since time is not commercially regulated (unlike say, weights and measures), there is no enforcement and so the old system will remain in use. Using our Systems Bookcase model, here the operating rules don’t reinforce the new design. Equally there is no rule stopping the use of this new system — but nothing to help it punch through either.
  • The rural population does not need such an accurate measure of time, and so are unlikely to use the new system. This is an example of there being no reinforcing feedback loop in the system. Shifting to the new system does not confer any benefits to these users, so its uptake will not naturally emerge. 
  • Watches are people’s most expensive possessions – asking people to buy a new watch by decree is not likely to be popular, unless it is supported and comes with a benefit. This is an example of both capital investment and pride.

These are examples of where the purity of an abstract idea meets the realities of the present. 

But is it the present that is the problem, or is it the idea? Because it is only in practice that things work. 

Forcing an idea into a system that doesn’t want it will take energy. If that energy delivers a yield, then it can be overcome. But if there is no benefit, the system will snap back. 

As it stood, decimal time lasted 6 years before it was abandoned.

How many hours is that? That may take some time work out in my head.

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200 new Pattern Books please

So this happened over Christmas – we sold out of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. In fact we sold the last one on Christmas Day. 

That means we have now sold 400 copies. For a niche book about how to hold conversations about regenerative design in the built environment, that’s incredible.

And so I wrote the lovely people at Calverts Design and Print Coop and asked them for 200 new Pattern Books to be printed. They have now landed!

So, sorry if you got an out-of-stock notice. The Pattern Book is back and ready to support you in your regenerative thinking in 2026. Order your copy here. 

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Fellowship complete

Just sharing some news of a big milestone in this work: the Commissioners have signed off the final report for my Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Fellowship in Regenerative Design. 

This warrants news  longer post but for now the short version is this. 

In 2023 I began the Fellowship with the aim of helping the built environment shift from a paradigm of harm to one of healing. 

What became clear early in that process was that regenerative design isn’t something you simply teach, apply or deliver. It’s a way of thinking that develops over time, through action and reflection, across a wide range of actors playing different roles in systems change.

This realisation shaped the work that followed:

Personally the process has been stretching, demanding, and, honestly, sometimes overwhelming — but I feel it has precipitated a huge amount of work that I believe makes a significant contribution to figuring out what we should be doing next as an industry. 

One thing I’m sitting with today – if you are in the midst of thinking about regenerative design, and find it slow-going and challenging then you are probably working in the right space. The elements of a regenerative future surround us; we just need to figure out how to rewire and reinforce them to create something thriving out of our work.

I am deeply grateful to the Commisioners for trusting me with this brief and for supporting this work. I am excited to share more about where this goes next. 

More on that soon.

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The Lasagne Pitch – start with the shape of it

I struggle to follow recipes that pile straight in with a long list of instructions without giving me an idea of how the recipe works. 

Take lasagne. If it just starts with, ‘heat the oil, fry the onions, celery and carrot, then after a bit add some garlic…’ I find the information goes in one eye and out the other.

I need to know the shape of things to give me scaffolding for the details. For example, 

‘a lasagne is a dish consisting of alternative layers of pasta sheets, red sauce and white sauce. First you will make the red and white sauces separately, then layer things up and bake it. The pasta cooks in the moisture from the sauces…’

Give me all that and then I’m set for the details about frying the onions and turning on the oven.

The same can be said for pitching design ideas and engineering concepts.

In my workshops on pitching design ideas, I find participants are often too ready to get into the detail of how they are going to do something before giving us the overall logic. Without structure, the details don’t add up to create a picture.

If you hear me say, use the lasagne pitch, now you know what I mean. Start with the layers, then worry about frying the vegetables.

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Signs of local weather

I’m enjoying being absorbed by The Secret World of Weather, by Tristan Gooley. It reveals to the reader secret signs all around us about how the weather is likely to behave. Signs that hide in plain sight, that we have forgotten to notice.

The repeating theme in the early chapters: modern forecasting models deal with macro effects, the movement of large masses of air or wind high above our heads. These are what the weather apps tell us about. 

These models ignore the local effects: landscape, ground cover type, sun traps. But it is at this scale that we experience the weather, and it is at this local level we need to make decisions: what to wear, where to sit, where to plant things.

Reading those signs is to reconnect ourselves with our local landscape, an example of the sort of local interconnectedness that regenerative design needs. 

When we ignore the local detail, we have to compensate with more effort: more heating, cooling, protection. We end up working against the conditions rather than with them.

When we appreciate the local lie of the land, we can learn to work with what’s already there – and learn to live and even thrive within it. 

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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