Tag: Variation

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Don’t scale up — scale right

There are no factories in the living world. Or at least if there are, they are very well camouflaged. 

Humans, by contrast, are very attached to factories. By reducing variation and tightly managing the handover between every step of the process – in other words, the relationships – assembly lines can be optimised for throughput.

Profit is often linked to throughput. Both in terms of the per-unit mark-up on a manufactured item, and in terms of dividing fixed costs, the more you make the more money you make. 

And so standardisation becomes the driving factor. Standard inputs, standard processes, uniform outputs. Each variation brings costs and lowers profits. 

Looking out across the understory here at Hazel Hill Wood, I see a certain degree of standardisation. The only plants I see are birch, holly, Douglas Fir, bracken and bramble. But go to a different part of the wood and the variation and balance of species will be different, depending on the specific variations of that location. In each location, the wood finds the best way it can to grow harmoniously. And in each location, that is slightly different.

The regenerative designer seeks to work with that specific variation, not because of some nostalgia for smaller scale construction, but because they recognise the greater potential value that can be unlocked from working with variation. 

Variation does not work at scale. When large teams need be kept up-to-date and coordinated around changes, then the admin overhead quickly balloons. 

All this points towards construction models built around smaller, agile teams—able to turn the specific variations of place into an advantage. Creating designs that are more harmonious (and therefore with fewer hidden costs). And unlocking local, positive feedback loops that strengthen the local economy and ecology. 

If your goal is throughput, scale up. But if your goal is to maximise value across business, ecology and community — then find the scale that lets all these systems flourish.

Scale up for throughput, but scale right for thriving.

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Tools for telling the future

What began as a conversation this week on the blog about how designers predict the future has unlocked some deeper reflections on how we approach regenerative design.

Let’s rewind.

As designers, we are always concerned with the future. Our job is to imagine how things could be and shape the conditions to get there. To do this, we rely on two types of indicators:

  • Lag indicators — evidence of what has already happened. The results of past design decisions. 
  • Lead indicators — signals in the present that suggest how the future will unfold.

When conditions are stable, precedent (ie lag indicators) can be a reliable guide to the future. But in changing, complex systems, the past is no-longer such a reliable guide to the future.

In these situations, rather than predict the future directly, we can try to assess the capacity of the system we are working with to successfully respond to change.

Capacity to change — a key regenerative lens

In regenerative design we use the living world as a template for understanding how to create systems that thrive. Thriving ecosystems adapt continuously to shifting conditions. This capacity to change is a key characteristic of living systems — and is a guiding principle for engineers (and other humans) thinking about how to create thriving systems. 

In the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, we go on to define four factors that indicate a system’s capacity to adapt:

  • Building blocks that can easily be recombined.
  • Coexistence of diverse variations to allow for different responses. 
  • Feedback loops that reinforce adaptations suited to current conditions.
  • Mechanisms for retaining and repeating what works.

From analysis to a design brief

These four factors are both analytical prompts and design levers.

When we encounter a new situation, we try to establish the extent to which each of these is present and use this as a measure of the system’s capacity to survive and potentially thrive through change.

And they can be used as design requirements, giving us factors that we can build into a design brief to create a brief for thriving. 

In a complex situation it is hard to predict the future — instead, regenerative designers seek to make things better by building in the capacity for people and ecosystems to respond together to changing situations in a way that creates thriving for the whole system.