Tag: SurfaceTravel

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How do we know if we are moving forwards?

Facilitation is an intense business. It requires you to read lots of social cues and to judge what’s the best next step. It’s not surprising therefore that when travelling home in the train from a workshop I usually drift off, the sway of the carriages gently quickly sending me to sleep.

And it was in that just-before-sleep moment that I realised I had no way of knowing if I was moving forwards or backwards. Once the train had reached a steady state there was no impulse forwards or backwards, just the jostling and shaking of the carriages. With my eyes closed, I couldn’t see. And it was dark outside in any case. For all I knew we could have been stationary and just shaking on the spot..

Cue a metaphor for how we perceive change. If we are in the daily hustle and bustle of delivering projects, all we feel is the shaking and the jostling. If we can’t see into the distance we can’t see if we are getting closer and further away.

Back in the train, when the driver accelerates we feel pushed in to our seat (or pulled slightly out if we are facing backwards). But acceleration in organisational systems change is often much more imperceptible. We might not know it until things get out of control or ground to a halt.

So what can we do? Try this:

  • Ask what would it means to see the horizon? Maybe it’s something external to your daily frame of reference. Are you getting closer or further away?
  • Ask what it would it mean to see the rate of change? This might mean trying to find some sort of trace. Eg – Invoices, customer queries, sick days, species count, maintenance outages. How does that of these compare to last year?

If we can access these external frames of reference, we can start to understand our direction of travel, speed and acceleration.

The Living Systems Blueprint is our tool for assessing progress towards regenerative systems outcomes. Its three components – interconnection, symbiosis and capacity to change – give us a direction of travel and a framing for assessing progress.

Whether you use this framing or a different one, we need external reference to check our progress. 

Without them we might just be busily shaking on the spot.

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Flops — the aérotrain

I snapped this photo of a photo at the Flops?! exhibition last month at Paris’s Musée des Arts et Metiers. The exhibition explores the importance of failure in design. Which is an important topic, for another day. For now I just want to share how much I love the story of the aérotrain.

The train floats on cushion of air, like a hovercraft. At the time, British Rail was experimenting with similar floating trains, generating forward propulsion using magnets (you can still see the prototype outside Peterborough station, on the left-hand side as you enter the station going north). The French team were trying something different: strapping a gas turbine engine onto the roof. The prototype reached speeds of over 400km/h!

But jet powered floating trains weren’t to be. Despite positive results from early experiments, the existing industrial railway establishment wasn’t going to tolerate this incursion into its territory by the aerospace sector. The aérotrain experiment was cancelled in favour of the now familiar TGV.

But the traces of this audacious experiment remain — the track still runs parallel to the train from Paris to Orléans, an abandoned piece of futuristic infrastructure from the past. But I love these — they are a symbol of the power to imagine something different, even if it didn’t work out that way.

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The wrong (moment to put on your waterproof) trousers

This is a post for the cycling decision-makers among you. It may resonate even if you don’t cycle. Variations on the question of whether, if it starts raining when cycling, it is worth stopping to put on your waterproofs.

How late am I running? Have I got time to stop? How heavy is the rain? Will it carry on? How quickly could my clothes dry? Will I get wetter stopping to put them on?

If I do decide to carry on, is it wetter to go quicker or slower?

Do I have all the facts? Do I know all the unknowns? Is this a complicated or a complex problem? Am I able to make a good decision? 

Is there an angle I can cycle at in which my rain shadow protects my lower half sufficiently? 

Is how I’m framing the question limiting the result? What opportunities am I not considering? If I stop at a random location to put on my waterproofs, what might I notice that I might never have discovered had I ploughed on?

What happened last time? Was it the right decision? What are other people doing? What would my future self advise?

Am I even in the right frame of mind to make this decision? What could I be thinking about instead?

What happens if I get it wrong? How much does it matter to me if I get it right? Am I deluding myself that I’m in control? 

[This post was originally published on 28th September 2024 on eiffelover.com]

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Clash of system goals

I took this photo at Étampes station. It shows a nineteenth-century roof that spans four platforms with no internal columns. And then, right in the middle of that column-free space, stand the massive posts that support the electric cables — added in the 1920s.

It’s a clear clash of system goals.

The roof was built to create a grand civic space — a place that celebrated the station as a node of travel and encounter.

The cable gantry belongs to a different system altogether: it’s about maintaining a rigid, continuous grid for electrical power.

In the first, place is what matters.

In the second, continuity is what matters.

Retrofitting the roof to carry the cables would have been expensive, yes. But the network engineers could at least have designed special gantries for inside the station — ones that respected the goal of place while still meeting the goal of network.

The station architects began with a blank sheet of paper and could design more or less what they wanted.

The electrification engineers didn’t start with a blank sheet, but arguably designed as if they did.

We rarely start with a blank sheet of paper. Existing and new systems bring different goals. Our task as designers is to reconcile those goals through better design.