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Beating a new path

You’re out walking one morning and you reach a field of tall grass. Your destination is on the other side but you can’t see a way through. So you wade in, pushing through the tall stems until you emerge on the other side, leaving a path in your wake. 

On the next day’s morning perambulation you encounter the same field. Do you beat a new path — or take the one you made yesterday?

Of course, you follow the path. It’s easier. It’s the path of least resistance. 

And so it is when we develop ideas in response to a design brief. Beating a path through a sheaf of requirements takes effort. But once we have made that mental path, our brains prefer to follow it again. 

Why do the extra work of cutting a new route? 

This is cognitive ease at work: our brains tend to prefer the options they’ve already figured out over ones they haven’t figured out yet. 

There is no reason the first idea should be the best one. But cognitive ease makes it stick. So if we want better ideas, we need to resource ourselves to build beat a new path each morning. 

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Field notes: operating the Decision Engine

I’ve written lots of posts this week on decision-making, and that’s because I have run three rounds of The Decision Engine workshop — part three in our Critical Thinking programme. 

The Decision Engine imagines decision-making as a production line that we build and operate. A decision travels through this system — starting with how the question is framed, moving through decision criteria, weighing subjective and objective factors, and arriving (eventually) at a decision.

It’s a model I first helped develop at Think Up during our 2015 collaboration with Arup on the Conceptual Design Mastery programme. Since then, I’ve developed it to account for everything from emotional data and gut feel to AI and emergent behaviour.

But the point is not to turn decision-making into a laborious stepwise process, but rather to build critical insight into our personal and group decision-making. 

Interesting questions that have fallen out of this week’s workshops include:

Should you start with developing ideas or agreeing your decision-making criteria?

Are we deciding — or are we building the mechanism by which other people decide?

What’s the role of subjectivity, and how do we get better at working with it?

When is a good time to decide?

And how do we continuously learn from our decisions.

Plenty to chew on, including whether we could run a day-long, stand-alone course on decision-making in future. Watch this space. 

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What if we got all the designers together who ever designed a place?

Imagine gathering every designer who has ever shaped a single street for a retrospective design crit?

Every building — from the latest new-build to the medieval cottage still standing.

The streets, the services, the flood defences.

All the engineers (and other humans) who made all the decisions.

What would they discover about their design choices?

What would they regret?

Which decisions would they make again?

What patterns of place might emerge — the things that repeatedly work (or fail), whether we choose to notice or not?

What changes might they observe?

How differently would the place sound to different generations of designer?

And how would they all arrive?

It feels like engineers (and other humans) are constantly redesigning places.

But how do we take the long view?

How do we learn from what has worked — and what hasn’t — over time?

So that from generation to generation, we build a progression of holistic wisdom, not just another round of reinvention.

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Too soon to decide?

Sometimes, when faced with a decision, it’s worth asking: is it too soon to decide?

In permaculture, it’s common practice to wait a whole season before planting anything. That way, you can observe the full cycle: how the sun moves, where water pools, which areas dry out, and what emerges from the seed bank.

Without seeing the full pattern of a cycle in motion, we risk deciding too early — acting on partial data.

And this principle isn’t just for seasonal systems. It applies to any emergent situation. If we make our decision before more factors reveal themselves, we may find we acted too early.

So how do we know when it’s the right time to decide?

We might try to assess the nature of the change: is it cyclical? Is it reaching a steady state?

But in many situations, we can’t know for sure. That’s why we need to engage for the long term — not just to decide, but to learn to work with system over time. This is when we shift from one-off decision-makers to long-term stewards of systems. Over time we can then tune our instincts for how — and when — to intervene.

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All change or no change

How do we know if an organisation is really committed to change?

A big clue is to look at the culture of the organisation. Because in organisations, culture is how things get done.

The Johnson Scholes Culture Web gives us six lenses to read an organisation’s culture. Each gives us a way to test if they are really committed to change. 

Stories — Are they telling different stories about who they are and what they value?

Routines and rituals — Have day-to-day practices shifted? Has what they celebrate changed ?

Symbols — Has the visual language shifted? What’s being shown — or hidden?

Control systems – What are they measuring? Has the weight of KPIs shifted? How much R&D is allocated to this change? How are they measuring their supply chain?

Organisational structure — Where is the work of change located? Is it is the delivery teams or in the marketing team?

Power structure — Are senior leaders backing the change, asking questions about it and backing it even when it’s not the easy option?

These six lenses help us spot shifts in culture. 

What the culture is doing is a strong clue about whether the organisation is really committed to change — or actually planning on changing nothing.

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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.