One of the participants in the Regenerative Design Lab is exploring working with The Purpose Xchange, who work directly with individuals to uncover their dreams and aspirations. The organisation then helps to match those aspirations with work opportunities in the local borough.
A key question the lab participant is exploring is how providing an operating space for this community activity could help enable and scale this initiative, proven elsewhere, to thrive in their local borough.
We can intuitively see the benefits of this approach, but how does this work for more explicitly into a regenerative framing?
The Living Systems Blueprint
In regenerative design, we use the living world itself as a template for understanding how to thrive within ecosystem limits. Instead of extractive, linear systems, we seek to imitate the mechanisms that the living world uses to thrive within its ecosystem limits.
The Living Systems Blueprint, which James Norman and I first proposed in the Regenerative Structural Engineer, outlines three key characteristics of thriving, living systems.
- Increased interconnection – strengthen the number and quality of connections between elements in the local system
- Increased symbiosis – creating mutually beneficial exchange that build local system richness
- Increased capacity to adapt – ensuring the local system can adapt in response to changing environmental conditions.
Creating more local symbiosis in the workforce
Of the three elements of the Living Systems Blueprint, this example relates most closely to creating symbiosis, but it also relates to building interconnection and unlocking capacity to adapt.
Living systems create thriving with the resources that are present in the local ecosystem. By resources we mean materials, energy and labour. These resources go round and round, the waste streams from one process being the input to the next. The work of the system creates structures of growing complexity that give the local system increasing richness.
This approach is distinct from the alternative: importing materials, energy and labour from other places, and treating processes as linear, creating unlimited consumption and drawdown of resources.
Building on this principle, the regenerative economy:
- Works with and seeks to build the latent potential of the local workforce.
- Creates local thriving by working with the unique potential and needs of that place.
- Avoids one-size-fits-all solutions that waste resource and a poor fit for the local system’s needs.
A workforce that is rooted in the local economy and connected to local opportunities:
- Returns money to the local community – but also builds relationships of trust (symbiosis)
- Strengthens people’s connection to their local place and each other (interconnection)
- Builds the local capability to maintain, repair and modify our build environment (capacity to adapt)
The role of the regenerative designer
One of the key roles of the regenerative designer is to connect together and enable the growth of positive initiatives that create thriving. Regenerative design isn’t necessarily about imposing solutions – rather it about seeking out and amplifying what is emergent in the system.
In this case, creating operating space for Purpose Xchange to work from could be a key step in unlocking this change. Sometimes, the barriers to initiatives that build local thriving are not about potential or demand, but lie in being able to join up the pieces. This could be one of the most important roles for the regenerative designer.