Tag: operations

Posted on

Building repair infrastructure

Here are my working thoughts on United Repair Centre, one of the organisations I met at the Future Observatory event The New London Commons: Circular Hubs for Fashion and Construction.

This organisation does not just do repair.

They are building the infrastructure that makes repair possible — at scale — in the fashion industry.

A rich example of both an organisation aiming higher in the system, and the Living Systems Blueprint in action.

In my post earlier this week on steel reuse, I wrote about the emergence of a new ‘blue book’ on the operations shelf of the Systems Bookcase. This is about new operational systems: 

  • Recovery processes
  • Coordination between demolition and construction
  • Storage and logistics
  • New roles and responsibilities

None of this is visible in the final building — it is the hidden infrastructure that enables reuse to happen. 

It is very interesting to see how United Repair Centre is doing taking a similar approach in fashion. 

What’s particularly striking about their work is clearly it reflects the Living Systems Blueprint in action, building:

  • Interconnection
  • Symbiosis
  • Capacity to change

Interconnection

At a materials flow level, there is the connecting together of a waste stream with an input stream. 

But that means connecting many more stakeholders: 

  • Customers
  • Brands
  • Repairers
  • Logistics

And rather than disposable clothing from anywhere and thrown away to anywhere, their work reconnects people with the things they own and the people who repair them.

That is interconnection at many levels. 

Symbiosis

Turning a waste stream into a value stream is only the beginning.

From this, positive feedback loops can start to build.

Repair creates demand for skills.

Skills create livelihoods.

As repair becomes visible and valued, the perceived value of repaired goods increases.

Each part begins to reinforce the others.

This is a fascinating collective reversal of entropy — materials becoming more valuable over time through how we organise ourselves to work with them.

Capacity to change

By running a repair skills academy, they are not just building a pipeline — they are increasing the system’s ability to evolve.

Repair skills are adaptable and transferable.

And there is a learning loop between repairers and designers, enabling garments to be designed for repair from the outset.

This is not just a system that produces outputs.

It is a system that builds its own capacity to change.

There is an interesting difference from the steel case. In steel reuse, the enabling infrastructure remains largely invisible. Here, repair is made visible — badges, stitching, signs that say ‘repaired’.

Making repair visible shifts it from stigma to pride. And at that point, we are no longer just working on operations.

We are working on mindsets.

Posted on

Steel reuse: writing a new blue book

Structural steel reuse is on the rise, as this month’s Structural Engineer articles show.

But what might be seen as a material innovation is actually a shift in something more fundamental.

I see this work as our industry writing a new “blue book” on the operations shelf of the systems bookcase.

In other words, we are building the system that makes it possible for a designer to specify reused steel.

Because to make reuse work, the industry is having to create:

  • toolkits for recovery
  • processes for pre-demolition audits
  • new ways of coordinating demolition and new construction
  • infrastructure for holding and processing stock

None of this is visible in the final building.

But without it, reuse doesn’t happen.

In the systems bookcase, the operations shelf contains the factors that constrain or enable design decisions.

Everything listed above sits there.

In terms of transition, this is Horizon 2 (which we colour blue) — the in-between space where new practices can emerge that are both viable in the existing system but are a significant step towards the system we want to create. 

Let’s be clear: steel reuse is still a long way from being a process that is life-giving.

But it can significantly reduce the embodied impact of construction —

which is, at least, ecological-adjacent.

Posted on

Strategy says no

If your strategy doesn’t tell you what not to do, it is not an effective strategy.

Because saying yes to things is the easy part. In fact I believe it has never been easier for businesses to think they can take on more and more.

But the amount of human attention we have is finite. Switching focus takes cognitive effort. Increasing stakeholders has a quadratic impact on the number of new relationships to manage.

Straddling strategies (doing both, or many things) doesn’t evenly reduce the time for each. It fragments it, the overhead multiplies disproportionately and the depth decreases.  

So if we want to have impact in our work then we have to choose. 

And so that we don’t have to do the hard work of choosing each time, we write a strategy. It saves us from having to renegotiate our priority every week.

Which means, if your strategy isn’t clearly telling you what not to do, it isn’t doing its job. Instead, it’s pushing that hard work downstream, forcing you to decide every day, creating extra effort and reducing impact.

Strategy does the hard work of saying no to make it easier for you to focus on having impact every day. 

Posted on

Aiming Higher in the System

When we try to apply regenerative design at a project level, it can feel like our hands are tied.

The building regs won’t allow it.

I’ll never get insurance for that.

This project is too small to create that sort of change. 

These constraints are real, but they are also information that the leverage need may not sit at the level of the project itself. 

This is why we talk about aiming higher in the system. 

To aim higher in the system is to look at the system of constraints that surround a project — the operating rules, procurement processes, risk appetite and supply chains — and work to change those. 

This work may look different to the work we normally do. It might involve creating new relationships, developing new processes, challenging big assumptions. 

It may not look like regular design. 

Which is why ‘aim higher in the system’ sits at the top of the Brief for Thriving. If we can influence over the higher shelves on the Systems Bookcase — the operating rules, mindsets and goals — then we can begin to change what gets built, and critically, the impact of building stuff.

Regenerative design is systems change. We have to work higher in the system to ensure that what we build actually makes the world better.

Posted on

The Systems Bookcase model

Have you every wondered why we make the engineering decisions we do? Why, despite decades of knowledge about the climate and ecological breakdown, we continue to design in a way that causes harm to our life-support systems. To help understand the driving forces behind design decisions, James Norman and I proposed the Systems Bookcase model in ‘the Regenerative Structural Engineer’.

Continue reading “The Systems Bookcase model”