Category: For engineers (and other humans)

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Think of a world without any email

This came up in a workshop yesterday so I am sharing it today. There will be a time in the future for a longer set of posts on how engineers and other humans can cope with email, but now is not the time.

So instead, I recommend reading ‘A World Without Email’, by Cal Newport*. I have even considered making reading this book as a prerequisite for entering into new collaborations.

There is some irony in writing about a world without email on a blog post that is summarised in a weekly email digest. But ultimately it comes down to intentional communication design.

Hopefully, if you signed up to this list, you did so with the intention of hearing from me (and you can change your settings here). But the problem with email and other forms of instant communication is how easy it is to fall into unintentional communication.

Dealing with unintentional communication, and the sense of overwhelm it can cause us, feels important because if we are overwhelmed, we have haven’t got space to think. If we can’t think, we don’t have the capacity to imagine a thriving future. And if we can’t imagine it, it makes it much harder to build it.

*Newport, C. (2021) A world without email: reimagining work in an age of communication overload. London: Penguin Business.

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Designers as outsiders… and insiders

As designers we are outsiders. The norm is the middle lane. But we want to make things better. To change the direction of travel. To advocate for something different. 

Choosing to be a designer is choosing to step outside. To take a different perspective. To go against the grain in order to see what might be possible.

And all that takes work. So if design feels hard, it may be because of the extra work we are having to swim  in a different direction. But unless someone is prepared to take that risk, then we’ll all carry on heading the same way.

Here’s the tricky part: we are also insiders. 

That’s because we need to earn the right to work with the people we are designing with and for.

Being an insider means we are trusted and that we are in an empathetic relationship with the people we are seeking to influence.

Just as being an outsider takes work, so does the trust and empathy building process of being an insider. But if we can’t convince people to move with us, our ideas may be good for nothing. 

[This post was originally two separate posts on Eiffelover.com published on 1st and 2nd October 2024]

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The signal and the coincidence

Yesterday at a workshop I am attending (more on this soon), I was given a slip of paper with a question to reflect on. It said:

How do we make decision, and what factors truly influence the choices we think are our own?

I almost laughed out loud because yesterday’s post was a long riff on decision making. I really hesitated before publishing that post because I wasn’t entirely sure of its relevance to this series of posts. But having received this slip of paper, I feel entirely vindicated in my choice of post!

Now, of course, that’s just a coincidence. I could have written a post on any subject yesterday and found something written down somewhere the next day that related to the same topic. 

But it’s also a signal. The signal is that my brain is looking to make connections to, and draw significance to, the topic of decision-making.

As engineers (and other humans) we are bombarded with inputs in our daily lives. There are far too many inputs to process. But quietly, in the background, our subconscious is processing and pattern spotting. 

And there is also resonance with last week’s posts about looking for patterns in chaos. 

As we navigate the world as designers, creators, leaders and enablers, and as we do this in times of overwhelming inputs, our pattern-spotting brains can help us make sense of the possibilities. 

The patterns that our brain is getting us to follow might not make sense at first. That often seems to be the way of the subconscious. But maybe it is worth trusting to this instinct and seeing what emerges. Follow that lead. Go out on a limb. It may turn out that our subconscious has locked on to something useful.

This post originally appeared on Eiffelover.com on 29th September 2024.

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The wrong (moment to put on your waterproof) trousers

This is a post for the cycling decision-makers among you. It may resonate even if you don’t cycle. Variations on the question of whether, if it starts raining when cycling, it is worth stopping to put on your waterproofs.

How late am I running? Have I got time to stop? How heavy is the rain? Will it carry on? How quickly could my clothes dry? Will I get wetter stopping to put them on?

If I do decide to carry on, is it wetter to go quicker or slower?

Do I have all the facts? Do I know all the unknowns? Is this a complicated or a complex problem? Am I able to make a good decision? 

Is there an angle I can cycle at in which my rain shadow protects my lower half sufficiently? 

Is how I’m framing the question limiting the result? What opportunities am I not considering? If I stop at a random location to put on my waterproofs, what might I notice that I might never have discovered had I ploughed on?

What happened last time? Was it the right decision? What are other people doing? What would my future self advise?

Am I even in the right frame of mind to make this decision? What could I be thinking about instead?

What happens if I get it wrong? How much does it matter to me if I get it right? Am I deluding myself that I’m in control? 

[This post was originally published on 28th September 2024 on eiffelover.com]

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You only learn when you do difficult things

This is my catchphrase for the start of workshops: ‘You only learn when you do difficult things.’

It is a reminder to expect things to be difficult when we try to do something new. We often learn something in order to make something we can’t do easier. And we should expect to put in some activation energy during this process to reach a place of greater ease.

But if left at that, this is quite a passive interpretation. 

A more active interpretation is to use your sense of what is difficult to orientate yourself to where the learning opportunities are. And this, I think, is the sense in which this catchphrase was meant when I originally heard it. The words come from my friend and mentor in Problem-Based Learning, Prof Søren Willert.

In problem-based learning, we are looking for problems as an opportunity for learning. In these instances, learning isn’t general, it is tightly bound to the specificity of the problem.

Seeking difficult things might actually serve as a good compass for where to focus our learning. A place where there is work to be done, where we can hopefully make a positive contribution and learn along the way. We mustn’t expect it to be easy.

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The past, present and future at the same time

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.

In conversations about regenerative design we draw heavily on Bill Sharpe’s Three-Horizons Model because it allows us to make sense of a complex situation. In any group of people collaborating on a project it is possible to find people who are managing the decisions of the past, some who are dreaming about the future and some who are thinking about what we should do next. 

This co-existence of past, present and future so beautifully showed up for me recently as a parent, watching our daughter manage the transitions of the present, dreaming about her grown-up plans for the future, and still wanting the care of a younger self. 

And now I am thinking about it, I recognise these different voices, with needs and hopes, from different times, co-exist in my adult head too.

The power I see in Bill’s teaching is to recognise and welcome all three of these voices at the same time. Last week I wrote about chaos and looking for the signal in the noise. But when we can start to recognise that there are three (or more) things going when we encounter any change, we can start to make more sense of the signals we are working with. 

The future, present and the past are always with us. Recognising them can help us work with them to reach design decisions that are the best next step. 

The Three Horizons model is part of our Tools for Regenerative Design collection.

Explore frameworks like Three Horizons, Systems Bookcase and Living Systems Blueprint — practical ways to bring regenerative thinking into everyday design practice.

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On the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and teaching design

In the first year of my undergraduate chemistry course, we learnt about a concept called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This term refers to a phenomenon predicted by classical physics that people could see just didn’t make sense in reality. This was a major problem for physicists because it showed that their theories didn’t stack up. The punchline was that Max Planck came along and explained the phenomenon in a new way, which became the birth of quantum mechanics. 

I remember finding the original Ultraviolet Catastrophe concept difficult to comprehend (although I did think it would make a good band name). And now I realise the only reason we learnt about the theory was to show that it was wrong. In a sense, we were being taught chemistry in the order that the discoveries had been made — in the order that predecessors had learnt.

But does that always make sense? This approach is founded in a ‘positivist’ learning framing. It says, this is how the world showed up to me and I will now pass that story on to you (and then test you on it!). I named our company Constructivist after the more modern learning theory that says that people learn by taking new concepts and mapping them to their previous experiences. Learning is to do with how the world shows up to the learner, not the lecturer. 

And so this leaves design educators with a challenge. In a sense, the ‘Ultraviolet Catastrophe’ moment of classical design thinking is that, as currently formulated, design thinking is not sufficient to make the world better. I see regenerative design as an evolution in design thinking. One that integrates more fully our responsibility for increasing living-system health. And as we are discovering, it has some very different approaches compared to traditional design. 

For the ‘classical’ designers, developing an understanding of regenerative design will indeed be an evolution. But for people new to design thinking, they aren’t burdened with that history. Instead, they have grown up with the climate and ecological crises that previous design and engineering thinking has helped to create. This is not an imagined ultraviolet catastrophe, but a real, unfolding catastrophe. We need to be teaching design for their story, not ours.

[My thanks to Nick Francis at the University of Sheffield for our recent conversation that fed into this post]

[This post was originally published on Eiffelover.com and now has a new home here].

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Design versus shopping

I’ve said it elsewhere, and so now I’m saying it here.

If the client knows exactly what they want at the start of a design process, then it isn’t design – it’s shopping. Shopping for the answer that you’ve already decided upon. Because design isn’t the business of dealing with knowns. It is precisely because there are unknowns that we need a design process.

By all means we should have an initial brief that describes outcomes we are trying to reach. And then begins a journey into realm of unknown possibilities and constraints to find out what might be possible. What we may discover is that that original statement of intent was not quite right. We might find something based on a better understanding of the situation.

And then we get a better brief. Better for everyone involved, including the client.

Consider the opposite. The client sets a tightly defined brief with highly specified outcomes. The designer is forced to the client’s exacting brief, tantamount to a shopping list (and which has probably become formalised as a contract). The designer discovers a better solution but because it is not on the client’s shopping list, it isn’t considered.

And so the client comes back from the shops with what they asked for. But there is no guarantee they are going to fit.

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340-degree vision

I read on a fact sheet that guinea pigs have 340-degree vision. On a horizontal plane they can see almost all around. Imagine! Their only blind spots are directly behind and a small patch directly in front of them. 

That’s because they are prey animals. They spend their whole waking time observing their environment for threats (they can even sleep with their eyes open). And while they can’t see far, they build up a detailed mental map of their surroundings by scuttling around, which means they can navigate even in the dark.

The animals that hunt them, on the other hand, have forward-facing eyes. Their breadth of vision is limited but their acuity is much higher. This focus allows them to spot and lock on to their prey from much further away.

I note that my eyes are on the front of my head. Does that make me a hunter? 

And when we design, which way are our eyes pointing? Are we focused on a pre-defined target or are we continually scanning the landscape to build up a picture?

For the regenerative designer, seeing is much more akin to the latter: building up a picture of the system we are in by continually exploring it. Building our interconnection with place. Searching for symbiosis we can unlock. Looking for emergent patterns we can enable. Then we can know how to act, even without being able to see straight forward.

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Mindset leverage

Are you excited about the possibilities of your next project? Or worried about the unknowns? Do you see the possibility for competition or collaboration? 

There is not a part of design that mindset does not affect. That is because design is an interaction between the outer world of reality and the inner world of perception, imagination and choice.

For me, our mindset is how we see the world – how it shows up for us. Our mindset affects what we look for and what we see when we gather data. It affects the sort of ideas we have. It affects what we hold important when we evaluate options. 

So if we want to change the outcomes of our work as designers, there is merit in considering mindsets. Both the mindsets we bring and the mindsets we create through the processes we set up. 

We shape our individual mindsets through reflective practice. We shape our collective mindsets through changing the working culture. These are invisible tools with huge leverage.

(This is an archive post from September 2024).