Category: News

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Lessons learning – field notes from the MPA conference.

Today I spent the afternoon with around a hundred members of the Major Projects Association at the MPA’s annual conference, exploring how we create a culture of learning in major projects. 

I was there to represent the Get It Right Initiative as one of their lead trainers, using one of our Lego exercises to show how errors arise, and used this to pivot into a conversation about culture.

Some things I learnt today and observed today.

The power of switching from nouns to verbs

This from an excellent talk by Dr Simon Addyman, at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction.

  • Organogram to organising
  • Deliverable to delivering
  • Project to projecting.

It brings projects alive and allows them to be seen as a journey of discovery and encounter. 

In my leadership workshops I often talk about how we treat complex problems as if they are complicated. This verb-based language can perhaps unlock how we make this shift to embracing complexity.

Projects as a confluence of paths

And this also from Simon Addyman. It is traditional to think of projects as having a start and an end. But if we think about it, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when a project really started and when it really ends. Instead we can think about it as a convergence of paths: people, individuals, organisations, circumstances converging to make something happen. 

This approach is much more in line with the concept of continuous place-based design which we teach at Constructivist. 

Lessons uploaded

We were shown the tremendous power of AI for learning lessons from project data. If the knowledge is given the right architecture then the depths of projects can be plumbed for unseen lessons.

And there is double looping here. Using AI agents to sift and quality assure the process. 

And yet…

Why do we assume complexity in inevitable

There seems to be an inevitability about complexity. Our projects will inevitably become more complex. So we bring in complex AI models that are hard to understand and make things even more complex.

I can’t help thinking that all of this complexity is a substitute for elegant thinking. Sure: the living world is complex, but it is kept in balance through the tiniest feedback loops running on the minimum of energy. 

It is elegant complexity. Instead of the kind of complexity that we seem to create which relies on increasing amounts of resources – energy, materials, attention – to work with.

Which makes me worry we are heading down the wrong path. Instead, why not:

Simplify first:

  • Clarify outcomes.
  • Gain consensus.
  • Don’t start too soon.
  • Simplify the supply chain.

Do a small bit and see what happens, rather than create grand edifices the depend on the whole thing being complete to work.

And then keep it lean:

Look at what is needed to keep each part of the process flowing.

Use all our senses to see what’s going on.

Change course based on local feedback.

Get all of that working first.

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Two places, two cohorts: the Regenerative Design Lab in 2027

In 2027, we’re running two parallel cohorts of the Regenerative Design Lab for the first time.

RDL Hazel — Cohort 8 will return to Hazel Hill Wood near Salisbury, the home of the Lab since its early days.

RDL Beeches — Cohort 9 will be our first full programme at the Beeches in the Hope Valley, between Sheffield and Manchester — establishing a new home for the Lab in a landscape shaped by its natural and industrial heritage.

Both will run from spring to autumn 2027, bringing together up to 20 people for an eight-month exploration of what it means to put regenerative design into practice.

Explore RDL Hazel
Explore RDL Beeches

Eight months to experiment

The Regenerative Design Lab isn’t a conventional training course.

Participants bring an enquiry into the Lab and use the eight months to explore it in practice: taking action, paying attention to what happens, reflecting with others and deciding what to try next.

That’s important because working with complex systems takes time. The point isn’t simply to learn a set of regenerative design models. It’s to discover what happens when we try to use these ideas in real projects, organisations and lives.

And the enquiry often changes.

Some participants begin with a broad interest and gradually find the particular place where they can act. Others arrive with a specific technical or organisational challenge and discover that it connects to much bigger questions.

Recent participants have explored regenerative business strategy, timber house manufacturing, social infrastructure, circular construction, nature-based transport, engineering commons, organisational redesign, sustainable lighting, urban ecology — and how we choose to spend our time.

Learning to continue without us

The Lab combines residential gatherings, online workshops, individual experimentation and peer-led enquiry.

At the beginning, we provide more of the structure: introducing regenerative thinking, systems approaches and patterns and tools from the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design .

Over time, participants increasingly support one another, forming working groups around shared patterns, questions and interests.

That’s deliberate. Our ambition is to create a group that eventually doesn’t need us: practitioners with the confidence, relationships and capacity to continue experimenting and making change for themselves.

And after the eight months, participants join a growing RDL alumni network that now reaches across organisations and disciplines throughout the built environment.

Who is the Lab for?

We’re interested in people with the capacity to influence.

That doesn’t mean seniority. Previous cohorts have included people at very different stages of their careers, working across engineering, architecture, policy, education, sustainability and other parts of the built environment.

What matters is having somewhere to take the learning — a project, organisation, community or field of practice — and being willing to experiment, question your assumptions, learn with others and bring others with you.

Applications for both 2027 cohorts will open in November. Each is limited to 20 participants, and we’ll begin reviewing and shortlisting applications on a rolling basis from early December.

Find out about RDL Hazel — Cohort 8

Find out about RDL Beeches — Cohort 9

Or, if you’re new to the Lab, find out how the Regenerative Design Lab works

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Book payments back online

Hello, it looks like we’ve been having some difficulty with purchases in our online store. Apologies if you have been trying to purchase the Pattern Book and have had no luck!

For now, you should be able to make payment using the Paypal button, and this will allow you to pay with a credit card or debit card even if you don’t want to set up a Paypal account.

We’ll hopefully be able to set up something more convenient soon.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience!

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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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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.