Category: For engineers (and other humans)

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The Schedule

I am sharing today a schedule I use in my work every time the noise from distractions gets too much and/or I don’t actually think I am making any progress in what I do. It was inspired by reading ‘The Secrets of Productive People’ by Mark Forster, a book which, while labelled productivity, has a lot to do with creativity.

I call my process simply ‘the schedule’ and it has served me well for the last six years. Feeling stretched? Time to return to the Schedule. The aim is to keep work focused on a single task but also to allow structured time where the brain can wander and new ideas can come into the flow. 

  • 09:10 – 09:50
  • 10mins break
  • 10:00 – 10:40
  • 30mins break
  • 11:10 – 11:50
  • 10mins break
  • 12:00 – 12:40
  • 1h10 break
  • 13:50 – 14h30
  • 10mins break
  • 14:40 – 15:20
  • 30mins break
  • 15:50 – 16:30
  • 10mins break
  • 16:40 – 17:20

The breaks are as important as the focus time. Both count as work. Both count towards time on a job. Often we only value the active brain time, but sometimes our best thinking happens in between. 

One rule of the Schedule is to stop the task at break time, even if the task is almost complete. The temptation is to carry on, but as it usually turns out, an almost finished task is never quite as finished as you think. What ensues is a period of dwindling concentration and diminishing returns. Better to take the break, come back with fresh eyes and finish the task quickly, and move on.

Of course, few days fully work out like this. There’s fitting in with other people’s schedules. And there’s caring responsibilities. But when things start to feel a bit chaotic (see my post on the Chaos Field), re-establishing some order can help me think clearly again. 

My recommendation is not that you follow my schedule (by all means do if you wish) but to establish a pattern of work that works for your cycle of energy and attention, gives you time to think, provides structure and is something that you just do automatically without devoting mental energy to. 

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Start with your scales

I was taught to start my music practice by playing my scales. Starting with your scales:

  • Grounds you in the practice. The basic relationship between you and the instrument and the sound you can make
  • Reinforces and enhances the automatic movements that become how you play.
  • Takes you through the full range of motions of play.
  • Removes the barrier to knowing where to start because where to start is always the same. You pick up your instrument, you play a scale and you have begun.

Starting with your scales doesn’t just apply to instruments. It applies to any work where you develop a practice, be that a practice of design, facilitation or performance. 

In the technique I call Professional Palette in our training on how to have ideas , I encourage participants to warm up to a design exercise by quickly drawing through all the common typologies for the project they are working on.

It applies whether you are designing a bridge span, an investigation, a workshop or a dance performance. 

Make it your default to start with your scales: go through the range of motions, get all the pens out and put them on the table, familiarise yourself with the full breadth of your tools, and then begin.

(This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in September 2024).

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Field notes from chaos

(This is another archive post from September 2024 — re-reading it, I realise there’s potential to create a new pattern book motif on chaos, how we work with it, and how we might reduce it for others).

The wind was getting up. The waves were starting to blow in from different directions. The sea scape seemed to be changing at random. The day before, the waves had been rolling in with a nice rhythm.

This is another blog post that comes from the sea. And this one is about chaos. One characteristic of chaotic systems is the rules of the system keep changing. And this seemed to be what was happening around me. The wind was gusting from different directions, the tide was turning, the sun was coming in and out from behind clouds. And all of this was making a chaotic mess of the surface of the water.

Standing there trying to figure out what was going on I started to think about ways of coping with chaos. Think of these as working notes rather than a developed theory. 

Get into the field – the sea looked messy from the shore but only in the water could I really feel how changeable it was. 

The signal in the noise – there can be a lot of randomness but are there underlying patterns. There did seem to be a beat of waves heading in to the shore, confused by another set rolling in from the side. When you find a pattern in the system it is easier to work with. 

Notice when the pattern ends – the rules of chaotic systems change. A pattern in the system is only useful as long as it persists. Look out for the pattern changing. 

Think on your feet – you can’t rely on the normal patterns of working (see yesterday’s post on creating cycles in work). Instead you have to make the most of the situation you are in. 

Learning is difficult – if learning relies on loops of action and reflection, then learning is much harder when the conditions keep changing.

Chaos is tiring – if you are constantly on alert trying to figure out what is going on then you are not getting time to rest and recuperate. 

Writing these notes up I am left wondering:

  • How can we support ourselves, other people and organisations when they enter into periods of chaos?
  • How might our own actions, behaviours and design decisions cause chaos for others?
  • How might we design for increasing chaos as climate breakdown rolls on?

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Harnessing Waves in Our Work

Sine wave running from trough to trough labelled with numbers 1 through 5 at the first trough, where it crosses the x axis, at the peak, where it crosses the x axis again and finally approaching the next trough

(This post from the archive originally appeared in September 2024, and became a motif in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design)

Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s theme of riding the waves of human energy in our work. The idea is to create a cycle of working that tunes in to our own and others’ level of available energy to create better thriving for all involved. 

For the regenerative designer, the living world often gives us a good template for how to create thriving systems. And so, whether the wavelength we are designing for is a day, a month, a year or even a lifetime, here are some modes of working inspired by the changes that living systems cycle through. I have organised these into five touch points.

1 – Start of a new cycle 

  • Associated with potential and possibilities.
  • Might be a dream-like state.
  • Might be quite slow or dormant – possibly no activity visible on the surface.
  • Gradually shifting into planning.
  • Darkness, low levels of light or energy.

2 – Ascent 

  • Gathering momentum.
  • Plans transition into action.
  • Gaining confidence.
  • Work becomes visible.

3 – Peak

  • Maximum output or yield. Possibly a launch phase.
  • Everything is visible, a point of recognition.
  • The brightest part of the cycle, associated with clarity.
  • Celebration of achievement and milestones.

4 – Descent 

  • Harvest, where outputs are gathered, enjoyed and shared.
  • Reflection on work done, evaluation. 
  • Taking apart or shedding in readiness for the next cycle.
  • Gather resources for dormant phase.

5 – Rest and renewal 

  • Recovery and restoring. 
  • Lower visibility.
  • Less action, slower movement.

Of course, how we spend our time is a negotiation with others. The invitation here is to look for opportunities to acknowledge the cyclical ways in which we work. And to acknowledge more widely the cyclical pattern to the living systems that enable us to thrive.

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Riding the wave

I spent most of yesterday afternoon up to my middle in waves learning to surf [this is a repost from the archive, so this didn’t actually happen yesterday!]. I’ve got a long way to go. So it is no coincidence that today’s post is about waves. Not necessarily physical waves but the waves we experience as humans. 

As James Norman and I set out in our book, the goal of regenerative design is for humans and the living world to survive thrive and co-evolve. If we are thinking about human thriving then we should consider how we, and the people around us, experience a whole series of waves through our lives. The daily cycle of night and day, the menstrual cycle, the seasonal cycle and the cycle through the different phases of life. These cycles are waves with peaks and troughs. Trying to flatten them or ignore them by pretending that all things are constant stresses the system.  Maintaining a high level of work when there is no energy in the system can be damaging. Equally having an abundance of energy and no means to dissipate it can also cause damage.

Much better is to try to work with energy of a system when it is available and use the downtime to recover. 

Imagine a graph showing the power of two systems over time. One system has moments of high power and low power. The other system just operates at a constant power level that is the midline of the peaks and troughs. 

The total area under these two graphs (which represents energy of each system) is the same. 

If we have a system that is trying to run with oscillating levels of available energy and we try to flatten it, we risk damaging the system without gaining any more energy.

When we are thinking about how to organise our own work and how we collaborate with others, it is much better to ride the wave of available energy. Whether that’s through tuning in to our own daily, menstrual, seasonal or life cycles. Or through providing allyship to how others experience theirs. 

Riding the wave is also much better for surfing. Sadly, I’m a long way off riding it for very long.

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in September 2024.

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The Great Flattening

Jim Crace’s book Harvest provides fascinating portrait of rural life in England just before the start of the Industrial Revolution. What is so striking is the way the pattern of life is dictated by the availability of light and labour to do work. They make hay while the sun shines and rest in the winter.

The arrival of energy-dense coal was a game-changer. Now we had energy on tap, factories could be set up and run continuously. The natural rhythms and pace that we had evolved with became smoothed out.

Enter Taylorism in the twentieth century and every hour is a productive unit to be optimised.

I call it the Great Flattening. The removal of all the contours of energy, light and even culture in the name of constant productivity, enabled by cheap energy.

Now, I am not trying to be romantic about living 250 years ago. There are plenty of things not to like (not least the dentistry). But I find it interesting to consider what is the impact of this great flattening of our experience of life and the world that we design.

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in 2024.

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Clash of system goals

I took this photo at Étampes station. It shows a nineteenth-century roof that spans four platforms with no internal columns. And then, right in the middle of that column-free space, stand the massive posts that support the electric cables — added in the 1920s.

It’s a clear clash of system goals.

The roof was built to create a grand civic space — a place that celebrated the station as a node of travel and encounter.

The cable gantry belongs to a different system altogether: it’s about maintaining a rigid, continuous grid for electrical power.

In the first, place is what matters.

In the second, continuity is what matters.

Retrofitting the roof to carry the cables would have been expensive, yes. But the network engineers could at least have designed special gantries for inside the station — ones that respected the goal of place while still meeting the goal of network.

The station architects began with a blank sheet of paper and could design more or less what they wanted.

The electrification engineers didn’t start with a blank sheet, but arguably designed as if they did.

We rarely start with a blank sheet of paper. Existing and new systems bring different goals. Our task as designers is to reconcile those goals through better design.

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Smoothing things out

One of earliest childhood memories of travel is riding in the back of the car driving along a motorway in mountains in the north of Italy. To traverse a terrain of deep valleys and high ridges the engineers had taken a midline. The road leaps across the ravines on high viaducts, plunging straight into a tunnel only to fly out again across the next bridge. With the sea glistening deep below it was an exhilarating journey. (Did this sow the seed of going into civil engineering?)

Faced with a series of peaks and troughs the engineers flattened the journey. They saved journey time and energy on every single car journey on that route, every day for over half a century.

Smoothing things out is something that engineers seem to be generally good at. For example we’ve been straightening rivers to make them more navigable for centuries. 

But building faster, straighter roads also increases traffic. Straightening rivers increases flood risk. 

When we start to consider the unintended consequences smoothing things out we might find that working with the ups and downs and twists and turns is better. The friction slows down the flow. People or water, in these examples, spend longer in each place. There is greater interaction and opportunity exchange and creation of wealth in its many forms.

Next time I cross the Italian Alps hopefully I can do it on a bicycle, following the contours of the river valleys.

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in 2024.

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Go (notes on complexity)

My favourite board game is Go. A 19 by 19 board. White stones versus black. You win by surrounding your opponent’s stones before they surround yours. The game has just three rules, but from this simple concept a game of incredible complexity emerges. 

My early years of playing Go were frustrating: it didn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t find a way to win. And now that I am more experienced, I find it hard to teach others. I take solace therefore that while the first computer to beat a reigning chess world champion (Deep Blue versus Gary Kasparov) did it in 1997 it took another 20 years for a computer, Deep Mind to beat reining world Go champion Ke Jie. 

The reason Go is so much harder for a computer to play than Chess is the number of branching possibilities that emerge from each move. It is just not possible to play solely on the basis of the player assessing the opposite player’s best move. And therefore a much more complex dynamic emerges in the game that involves the players ability to spot patterns as much as the patterns themselves. 

I find this fascinating. In this complex situation, the players are part of the solution. Or put it another way, the solution is function of both the physical reality (the stones on the board), the players’ perception of the stones, and the players’ perception of each other’s perception of the stones. In maths terms, the solution y = f(physical world, internal world).

It highlights for me that with complex situations in which engineers (and other humans) are agents, how we show up and how everyone else is showing up has a big impact on the outcome. We are a long way from optimum answers that can be deduced from calculation.

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in September 2024

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Machine work

Inputs

Outputs

KPIs

Tools

Models

Performance

Quantitative analysis

Scaling up

Accelerator

Dashboard

Timesheet

Human resources 

Bottom line 

When we think of our work as the work of a machine, then is it any surprise that the incredible machines that we have built will one day starting doing it for us.

But we do ourselves a disservice if we only think of ourselves in machine terms. If we leave out empathy, care, collective knowledge, grounded understanding of place, knowing that is not describable in words, trust, passion, play… then we are not bringing our whole selves to the work we need to do. 

There are so many more ways of knowing than the knowledge we can enter into a computer. Let the computers do the computational part – they will be very good at it – and let us step into our wider intelligence as engineers (and other humans).

This blog post was inspired by Reinventing Organizations, by Frederic Laloux. 

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in September 2024.