Tag: FieldNotes

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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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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.

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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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Field notes: operating the Decision Engine

I’ve written lots of posts this week on decision-making, and that’s because I have run three rounds of The Decision Engine workshop — part three in our Critical Thinking programme. 

The Decision Engine imagines decision-making as a production line that we build and operate. A decision travels through this system — starting with how the question is framed, moving through decision criteria, weighing subjective and objective factors, and arriving (eventually) at a decision.

It’s a model I first helped develop at Think Up during our 2015 collaboration with Arup on the Conceptual Design Mastery programme. Since then, I’ve developed it to account for everything from emotional data and gut feel to AI and emergent behaviour.

But the point is not to turn decision-making into a laborious stepwise process, but rather to build critical insight into our personal and group decision-making. 

Interesting questions that have fallen out of this week’s workshops include:

Should you start with developing ideas or agreeing your decision-making criteria?

Are we deciding — or are we building the mechanism by which other people decide?

What’s the role of subjectivity, and how do we get better at working with it?

When is a good time to decide?

And how do we continuously learn from our decisions.

Plenty to chew on, including whether we could run a day-long, stand-alone course on decision-making in future. Watch this space.