Tag: collaboration

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Your processes versus entropy

Regular readers of this blog will know all about the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the universe will tend toward disorder over time. 

Thus any organised system will drift towards disorder unless energy is provided to maintain it. In other words, any project process or workflow that we set up will naturally start to fall apart unless the value it creates is worth the energy it takes to maintain it. 

That means, folks, that when we set up a project process or a system it had better deliver some benefit.

My post yesterday was about effective communication systems. With the right design, we can create communication protocols that add value to how we communicate, making everyone’s work easier, perhaps even joyful!

But this process design is an art. 

Make a process too complicated and no one will use it, and the thing falls apart. Mandate people to use it anyway and you will deplete their energy for other valuable thinking.

And processes need love. Fail to show them care and attention, bits will stop working, or no longer be relevant, or worse, people will default to easier-in-the-short-run processes that will cause headaches in the long run.

The pull towards disorder is never far away. The processes we design must supply enough benefit to hold things together. 

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The hidden cost of a quick message

The easiest thing to do on your design project is to send a quick message. The problem is, it’s also the easiest thing for everyone else to do. And then the messages mount up, and communication is devalued.

And so what started off as easy now becomes difficult.

The hard thing to do on your design project is to set up communication protocols: what gets communicated, in what channel, how frequently and what the level of response needed. With these rules in place, communication is more restricted but more valuable. 

And so what starts off as hard becomes easier.

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Facilitation technique: The Fish Bowl

The fish bowl is facilitation technique that enables a large group of people to observe a small group. The small group sit around a table and discuss a topic. The participants in the small group hold a discussion around an initial topic. A chair person holds the space, making sure people are contributing appropriately and adding their own observation. 

Standing around the small group are the rest of the audience. They are not allowed to contribute or interrupt. 

Once the small group has had some time discussing the topic at hand, the session facilitator calls cut, and asks the rest of the audience to comment on what they have observed. What did they see emerging from the conversation. What would they like to see the group discussing next. How would they like chair to facilitate the next part. 

The facilitator then instructs the chair on how to proceed. This switching between the small group and large group can go back and forth a few times until the session has met its aims. 

The Fish Bowl is good for exploring both what people talk and how they talk about it. By giving the opportunity to pause, reflect and direct the conversation differently, we get to see how different factors influence the conversation. 

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I’m so glad I came to your meeting

What would make someone say this?

How you greet them?

The thought you put into the structure?

Checking what they need to participate?

The care in deciding who attends?

The discipline and generosity in how you facilitate?

The biscuits?

Whatever it is, when your attendees are glad they are there, they can participate more happily. And when we are happy we can see more possibility. More potential. Willing to take a risk and propose something different.

But when gladness disappears, the creative shutters come down, and with them the possibility of a worthwhile session together.

So, what will make your participants say, yes that was great, I’m so glad I came to your meeting?

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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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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).

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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.