Eiffel Over

Tag: collaboration

  • Begin design with observation (Part 2)

    Yesterday, I wrote about how starting design with observation allows us to take a broader, more holistic view of the systems we’re working within. Another reason to start design with observation stems from the final part of the goal of regenerative design: for humans and the living world to survive, thrive, and co-evolve.

    This isn’t a goal that can be achieved within our current extraction-based economy. Instead, it serves as a guiding “north star,” helping us think about how to shift our economy towards a more holistic way of operating.

    From that perspective, we see ourselves as collaborators with the rest of the living world—humans living and working in partnership with ecosystems, and humans collaborating across communities.

    As I’ve written before on this blog, collaboration requires both interest in the other party and assertiveness for our own ideas.

    Starting design by writing a design brief is an act of assertiveness—it focuses on what we want. Starting design by observing and investigating the needs of others—both the needs of other humans and those of the living world—means we begin the process with interest.

    Given humanity’s historic tendency (and that of certain groups within humanity) to over-assert ourselves on the rest of the living world, there’s no question: we need to increase our interest in other parties.

    Starting design with observation ensures we begin by understanding and addressing those needs first.

  • Free body conflict/a vector joke

    A final thought on conflict. This time, how the different modes of conflict (competition, accommodation, avoidance and collaboration) can be thought of as free-body collisions.

    Avoidance – the two bodies miss each other, and also miss the chance to influence each other

    Competition x Acceptance – This is essentially a dominant collision, where one particle’s direction overpowers the other.

    Collaboration: This behaves like a vector addition, where the resultant trajectory reflects the combined contributions of both particles.

    Maybe the best answers are the product of differences. Whether it’s a cross product depends on how angry you are feeling (sorry couldn’t resist the vector gag)

  • Conflict and collaboration

    The fourth mode of conflict is collaboration.

    In this mode we are interested in the other person but also keen to assert our own view. I want you to know what I think but I also want to know what you think. Knowing that we are disagreeing I become interested in the difference rather than getting stuck into the offence-defence plays of convincing each other who is right and wrong.

    Collaboration is the opposite of avoidance, wherein there is no interest and no assertion.

    In design, we are engaging in change. The aim of the designer is to taking existing situations and improving them. Since the situations we inhabit usually involve other people, we are likely to discover our views are in some ways in conflict with another’s.

    To avoid engagement is to avoid change. To compete is to overrule. To collaborate is to discover the shared interest and create a new way forward. All of which I think can be shown with a free-body diagram – tomorrow.

  • Think of a world without any email

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    This came up in a workshop yesterday so I am sharing it today. There will be a time in the future for a longer set of posts on how engineers and other humans can cope with email, but now is not the time.

    So instead, I recommend reading ‘A World Without Email’, by Cal Newport*. I have even considered making reading this book as a prerequisite for entering into new collaborations.

    There is some irony in writing about a world without email on a blog post that is summarised in a weekly email digest. But ultimately it comes down to intentional communication design.

    Hopefully, if you signed up to this list, you did so with the intention of hearing from me (and you can change your settings here). But the problem with email and other forms of instant communication is how easy it is to fall into unintentional communication.

    Dealing with unintentional communication, and the sense of overwhelm it can cause us, feels important because if we are overwhelmed, we have haven’t got space to think. If we can’t think, we don’t have the capacity to imagine a thriving future. And if we can’t imagine it, it makes it much harder to build it.

    *Newport, C. (2021) A world without email: reimagining work in an age of communication overload. London: Penguin Business.

  • The past, present and future at the same time

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    In conversations about regenerative design I draw heavily on Bill Sharpe’s Three-Horizons Model because it allows us to make sense of a complex situation. For in any group of people collaborating on a project it is possible to find people who are managing the decisions of the past, some who are dreaming about the future and some who are thinking about what we should do next. 

    This co-existence of past, present and future so beautifully showed up for me recently as a parent, watching our daughter manage the transitions of the present, dreaming about her grown-up plans for the future, and still wanting the care of a younger self. 

    And now I am thinking about it, I recognise these different voices, with needs and hopes, from different times, co-exist in my adult head too.

    The power I see in Bill’s teaching is to recognise and welcome all three of these voices at the same time. Last week I wrote about chaos and looking for the signal in the noise. But when we can start to recognise that there are three (or more) things going when we encounter any change, we can start to make more sense of the signals we are working with. 

    The future, present and the past are always present. Recognising them can help us work with them to reach design decisions that are the best next step. 

  • Riding the wave

    I spent most of yesterday afternoon up to my middle in waves learning to surf. (I’ve got a long way to go). So it is no coincidence that today’s post is about waves. Not necessarily physical waves but the waves we experience as humans. 

    As James Norman and I set out in our book, the goal of regenerative design is for humans and the living world to survive thrive and co-evolve. If we are thinking about human thriving then we should consider how we, and the people around us, experience a whole series of waves through our lives. The daily cycle of night and day, the menstrual cycle, the seasonal cycle and the cycle through the different phases of life. These cycles are waves with peaks and troughs. Trying to flatten them or ignore them by pretending that all things are constant stresses the system.  Maintaining a high level of work when there is no energy in the system can be damaging. Equally having an abundance of energy and no means to dissipate it can also cause damage.

    Much better is to try to work with energy of a system when it is available and use the downtime to recover. 

    Imagine a graph showing the power of two systems over time. One system has moments of high power and low power. The other system just operates at a constant power level that is the midline of the peaks and troughs. 

    The total area under these two graphs (which represents energy of each system) is the same. 

    If we have a system that is trying to run with oscillating levels of available energy and we try to flatten it, we risk damaging the system without gaining any more energy.

    When we are thinking about how to organise our own work and how we collaborate with others, it is much better to ride the wave of available energy. Whether that’s through tuning in to our own daily, menstrual, seasonal or life cycles. Or through providing allyship to how others experience theirs. 

    Riding the wave is also much better for surfing. Sadly, I’m a long way off riding it for very long.

  • Regenerative Design: a process not a thing

    Regenerative Design: a process not a thing

    As I continue my exploration of regenerative design in engineering, correspondents have said it would be helpful to gather examples of regenerative design. Templates that we can look at, imitate and integrate.

    From my reading of Wahl (see my recent post), I’m increasingly understanding regenerative design to be a process rather than a thing.

    Regenerative practice of any sort (in design, in education, in living…) is practice that leaves the ecosystem richer and better able to heal itself. It is practice that sees humans as a keystone species that play a unique role in helping their ecosystems thrive.

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  • Book notes – The Hidden Life of Trees

    Book notes – The Hidden Life of Trees

    It feels right as I take on my new role at Hazel Hill Wood to read the Hidden Life of Trees. This is an evolving post based on notes I take as I read through the book.

    From the foreward: ‘The author’s deep understanding of the lives of trees, reached through decasdes of careful observation and study, reveals a world so astonishing that if you read his book, I believe that forests will become magical places for you too.’

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  • Working notes on feedback as a design tool

    This week I ran a workshop with undergraduate students at Imperial College working in design teams at imperial. the aim was to show that it is much easier to give feedback when you a working from a common set of expectations. But this feedback approach can go much further than supporting good team dynamics – itself very important – it can be used as a tool for creative thinking and exploring new ground. Here is a summary of the ten most common points that came up during my conversations with students.

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  • Building creative culture in engineering companies

    Building creative culture in engineering companies

    I am starting to shift my attention away from creative tools for engineers. Tools are still important. But I’ve realised that you need a creative culture for individual creativity to thrive.

    Recently, I rediscovered in Laloux’s ‘Reinventing Organisations‘ the Wilbur four-quadrant model. The model describes how culture, systems and worldviews interact. We can use this model to understand a phenomena in an organisations from four different perspectives:

    • How the phenomenon can be measured from the outside
    • How the phenomenon feels from the inside – intuiting how it feels
    • How the phenomenon appears to the individual
    • How the phenomenon appears to a group of people.

    Like all engineer-friendly models, Wilbur’s is a two-by-two grid. The columns divide the grid into interior perspecitve and exterior perspective. The rows divide the grid into individual and collective perspective. According to Laloux

    Wilbur’s insight, applied to organisations, means we should look at: 1) people’s mindsets and beliefs [individual interior perspective]; 2) people’s behaviour [indvidiual exterior perspective]; 3) organisational culture [collective interior perspective]; and, 4) organisational systems (structures, processes and practices) [collective exterior perspective]”

    From Reinventing Organisations, Laloux (2016)

    Applying the four quadrant model to organisational creativity

    I’ve assembled some quick thoughts on how the four quadrant model might apply to understanding creativity in an organisation. I have written the statements for a fictional, ideal case. This difference between this ideal case and reality can give us some suggestions for what we might need to do to build a more creative organisation. 

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