Category: News

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Big news — Cohort 6 Applications for the Regenerative Design Lab are now open

Our big news this week is that the application process is now open for Cohort 6 of the Regenerative Design Lab. 

Here’s some things that make this moment particularly significant

This is an open lab — unlike the previous two labs where we had focused more explicitly on policy, this lab is for people interested in applying regenerative thinking across a wide range of contexts. We haven’t had an open lab like this for two years, so we are expecting a large number of applicants. 

Policy makers are still very welcome, and you’ll be working alongside designers and built-environment professionals to explore regenerative thinking in practice.

With this lab, our community of past and present participants will exceed 100. The network effect of this many activated change-makers is potentially huge.

The fly-wheel is spinning — with each revolution of the lab, we add more momentum: insights, tools, learning from taking action. It gives each cohort the potential to go further. 

We have a text book — the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is our manual for developing regenerative conservations with a wide range of audiences.

So are you ready to apply to join this journey? If so, we’d love to receive your application.

Regenerative Design Lab — Cohort 6
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Field notes: trying on the Systems Change Lab for size

Last week I had the privilege of facilitating an afternoon session for the Engineers Without Borders UK Systems Change Lab in London.

This is such a powerful initiative. It is an action-led community whose purpose is to make global-responsibility the norm in engineering. In their previous meet-up in Birmingham, participants had designed a new community structure. My role this time was to bring that structure to life so people could feel how it might work in practice. 

The community structure has three levels of engagement: 

  • membership; 
  • action groups that self-organise around specific themes; and 
  • a steering group. 

Sounds great — but does it feel like? How might it work? Where do people see themselves fitting in?

Three-part facilitation

Affinity Clustering

We began with one of my favourite warm-ups — walk around the room, catch someone’s eye, do a little hop — to set the playful tone from the start. 

Then came affinity clustering. Participants walk around the room with a large sticker on their chest saying a topic they are interested in exploring in the lab. The aim is to congregate with people with related themes. I called ‘twist’ a couple of times to give players the chance to try out different group configurations before settling where they felt the strongest pull

Simulating an action-group meeting

Newly formed grouped explored their shared interests and how they could collaborate to take action on this theme. Each group chose someone to be their representative at the steering group meeting.

A steering-group fishbowl

The representatives from each action learning group gathered to form the steering group, and held a live meeting in the middle while others observed. Onlookers outside the fishbowl could pause the conversation and offer reflections. 

Across these three stages the community structure came to life. People could feel the dynamics, understand the logistics and make suggestions for how to make it better. 

The fishbowl in particular opened up important early questions: 

  • How much autonomy should the action groups have?
  • How much should the steering committee  steer or respond?
  • How does information get communicated across the whole Lab?

These are important questions in any organisations, but particularly ones that are action learning and self-coordinating. 

If you’re interested in the EWB-UK Systems Change Lab, you can join their mailing list here:

Systems Change Lab
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Starting to see the system

Yesterday we kicked off our new introduction to regenerative design, ‘Seeing the System’. 

The premise is simple: seeing more clearly the systems we are working with as a precursor to changing them for the better.

The system of drawing plans, mining materials, fabricating components, pouring foundations and assembling all these elements to create buildings and infrastructure — the system we call construction — is currently wired to cause net harm. 

Yes we create buildings, yes these buildings for the most part are beneficial, but the side-effects are major contributors to climate change and ecological destruction. 

To understand why, we have to see the system. 

  • What kind of systems are we dealing with?
  • What are the feedback loops that reinforce the way the system works?
  • How is the system organised?
  • How do materials and energy flow?
  • What is the system optimised for?
    What are the mindsets that govern our behaviour as well as our dreams?

Then we can start to ask what if that system were different? What if every time we built something, the places that were touched by that process were better off? Habitats enriched, communities enhanced — all through the act of design and construction. That’s the goal of regenerative design.

Seeing the system helps us to interpret this dream, compare it to reality and then help us figure out what step to take next.

We’ll be running another edition of Seeing the System in the spring — stay tuned for more info.

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Pattern book field notes – action learning and continuous place-based design

The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is propped against a sign saying keep off the grass. In the backdrop is the quad of a Cambridge college

This week I took my copy of the Pattern Book to Cambridge. (Its second visit: in July I dropped it — and my laptop — in a puddle. Both recovered, and this time was less eventful.)

I was there to deliver my annual September workshop for the new cohort of students on the Sustainability Leadership for the Built Environment (SLBE) masters at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Two Pattern Book entries featured strongly.

Continuous place-based design

The workshop was called Design your learning process. We began by asking: what is design? I asked students to sketch a diagram of design as they see it.

This is central to the Constructivist method: start where the learner is, then connect new concepts to what they already know.

After sharing diagrams, I introduced a series of design models, each adding a new dimension, until we reached the Continuous Place-Based Design motif. At each stage, I pointed to overlaps with the students’ diagrams.

The point isn’t to treat any model as a strict procedure, but to use it as something to compare with reality — and then think how we might shift that reality for the better.

Action learning

From there, we turned to the idea that continuous place-based design is really a learning process. Which led naturally to the Action Learning motif.

It’s easy to be passive in learning. The real value comes when we apply theory to practice and then reflect on the results. The Pattern Book entry for action learning even includes a script for running these conversations with colleagues.

This month, I’ve been in workshops on live infrastructure projects where the same theme has surfaced again: organisations struggling to learn from mistakes. Not lessons learned, but lessons lost. For me this underlines that action learning isn’t just a training method — it’s a principle for working in complex systems.

—

It is such a pleasure to teach on this course — this is the start of my eighth cohort! Many graduates are readers here, so if that’s you: thank you for sticking with me all these years.

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Emergent marketing – the RDL Cohorts for 2026

I’ve noticed recently how often a controlling mindset can creep in when I think about how we spread the word around the regenerative design lab. That controlling mindset seems to say, everything needs to be ready before we share any details. It makes assumptions about when people are ready to receive this information. And this mindset assumes that it is possible to control the way in which information is transmitted and digested. 

But in a complex and dynamic system we know such control is not possible. 

An emergent mindset wouldn’t seek to establish control but to work with this uncertainty. Rather than waiting for everything to be finished, it might say it’s enough to share the essence of what we are trying to do, and to let readers colour the picture in. It assumes that some people will get the info they need, and pass it on to others. Not everyone will get the message, but also that unexpected people will.

So it is in the spirit of emergent marketing that I share the outlines of our incomplete plans for our next cohorts of the regenerative design lab.

Cohort 5 of the Regenerative Design Lab will be an experiment in running an-house programme for an organisation. We are conducting this experiment with the Hazel Hill team of staff and trustees. It will be really exciting to bring together people who care for this wood with a process that has been hosted here since 2022, and will help us learn how to do this process for other organisations. 

Cohort 6 will be our next open cohort, running March to November 2026. There won’t be any special theme to this cohort, rather we are interested in attracting people with a wide range of interests in regenerative design as it relates to the built environment. Details including pricing our now available. You can register your interest but applications won’t open until November. 

And Cohort 7 will be our first alumni cohort, also running March to November 2026. We have seen that for many people that come on the lab, the programme is just the start of a journey into unknown territory that continues for many years afterwards. This cohort is here to support alumni as they continue on their journey of exploration and innovation in regenerative design. 

So there you have the outline, which I’ll leave you to colour and share as you see fit, and I’ll let you know when there’s more news.

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Our new online intro to regenerative design launches in November

Here’s my pitch:

Interested in regenerative design?
Are you — or your colleagues — wondering how to introduce regenerative thinking on a live project?
Would a short course help build clarity and confidence, and give you a few practical tools to get started?

Would you like to sign up to Seeing the System, our new short online introduction to regenerative design, starting 12 November?

See what I did? It’s a classic ‘yes spiral’. One from the basic toolkit of advertising. But what this course aims to give you is a different toolkit: the basic tools of regenerative design.

Over four two-hour sessions, we’ll explore the core tools from our regenerative design toolkit. As you’d expect, the course will be delivered in our usual, engaging style — with space for reflection, peer learning, and short practical tasks between sessions to help apply the ideas to real work.

Seeing the System is part of our plan to grow how we teach regenerative design. Alongside the Regenerative Design Lab, this short online format offers a gentler starting point — ideal for those who want to explore the ideas without committing to the full Lab experience.

Are you sold?

Register here
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Canvas and Twill — the patterns for two new short courses in regenerative design

More and more design teams are committing to regenerative principles and goals in their projects. This is very promising. But it also raises the question, how do upskill a team in a way that is both quick and meaningful?

The Pattern Book gives us two starting points:

  • Pattern 01: Canvas — for teams who want to start with observing real systems and move to theory.
  • Pattern 02: Twill — for teams who want to start with theory and move to observation of real systems.

I’ve used these two patterns to create two new short online courses.

Feeling the Future, and

Seeing the System.

Both are designed as a rapid introduction to regenerative design. They don’t do the deep work (you have to do that). But they will give you a strong foundation to build from, ground in the frameworks we use in the Regenerative Design Lab.

Pick the course that suits your learning style. And please tell your friends and colleagues. Thanks!

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Field notes: the Kalideascope meets the Ambition Loop

This week I was invited to run an afternoon session for the Engineers Without Borders UK Systems Change Lab at their event in Glasgow. This event is part of their wider programme to create system change in engineering education to build globally responsible engineering. 

My brief was to prompt some creative thinking as part of the ‘develop’ phase in their programme. The session was an opportunity to pair two tools that I have previously used separately in our facilitation at Constructivist: the Kalideascope and the Ambition Loop. 

For years I’ve been developing and refining the Kalideascope as a structured model for divergent thinking. It helps users move beyond one initial idea by gathering a wide range of inputs, capturing questions and creating the conditions for new connections to emerge. 

While the Kalideascope generates lots of ideas, we need a different tool for the convergent thinking that enables us to choose between ideas and improve on them. So here I brought in the Ambition Loop — a tool that Bill Sharpe introduced us to in the Regenerative Design Lab to help identify what ideas have the potential to create systems change. The Ambition Loop model helps us by going beyond testing our ideas against the brief to testing how ideas can be taken up by and amplified within a systems. 

This pairing of the Kalideascope with the Ambition Loop created a strong arc for the session. The first tool expands the fields of possibilities. The second homes in on the ideas that the system might take up. 

I am seeing that with the Ambition Loop model that it tends to draw out questions about who we need to partner with to make change. 

If you have a copy of the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, I suggest, like me, you annotate the end of the Kalideascope entry to say that it works well paired with the Ambition Loop motif as a divergent-convergent pair.

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Two new short courses on regenerative design — launching next week

Over the last couple of months we’ve been preparing two new online courses introducing regenerative design, and we’re almost ready to launch them.

They’re practice-based introductions for engineers (and other humans) who want to understand the language around regenerative design and how to begin to start thinking regeneratively on projects.

Next Tuesday these two new courses will go live on the Constructivist website:

Feeling the Future — for people who prefer to begin with observation, story, and intuition, and build toward frameworks.

Seeing the System — for those who like to start with systems thinking, then explore how those models show up in lived experience.

Both courses will cover almost exactly the same content, but just organised differently depending on your learning preferences.

Both are four-week online courses. Both are rooted in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. And both are designed to enter more confidently into regenerative thinking.

More details (and booking links) coming next Tuesday.

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Pattern Book Notes: Kalideascope + System Survey

My intention with the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is that users can share with each other how they have used the tools and techniques within. So, kicking off this process, this is how I used two motifs two weeks ago to run a lunch for team at Elliott Wood to support an internal regenerative design competition they are running. 

Building a Kalideascope

If a group of people are working with a written design brief, then my starting point for creative thinking is to get them to build a Kalideascope. The groups write three headings on a large piece of paper: information, questions and ideas. I then get them to read the brief out very slowly and everytime something that comes to mind under any of these headings, they must shout stop, and write it down, before the reader can start again. 

The exercise is a quick method to generate lots of thinking. 

To add a regenerative lens to it, I prefaced the exercise by reading out the motif on Beavers. This motif primes listeners to think about the potential stacked multiple benefits of our interventions. 

Systems Survey

To tune the group deeper into regenerative thinking, I then read out the questions in the Systems Survey. These are questions that combine the theory of the Living Systems Blueprint with a civil engineering site survey perspective. 


The questions are:

  1. What is connected and what is separated?
  2. What is thriving and what is in decline?
  3. What is in flow and what is static?
  4. What is changing and is fixed?
  5. What stories does this place tell?
  6. What is the placing trying to do — and what helps or hinders it?

I read each question out and gave groups 3-4mins to populate their Kalideascopes with any new information, questions and ideas. 

Overall, it felt like a high-energy session and I think people went away with new ideas on how to bring regenerative thinking into their design process.