Eiffel Over

Tag: complexity

  • Warp from the present to the future

    In a traditional loom, strong fibres are stretched out in one direction, through which a second set of perpendicular threads is tied in. These longitudinal threads are called the warp, and the fibres woven in between are the weft. Together they form the patterns in our fabric.

    The goal of regenerative design is for human and living systems to survive, thrive and co-evolve. This statement describes a future state – a vision for how different things could be. 

    But most of the people we work with, be they clients, colleagues or collaborators – are focused on the present. And if we are honest, so are we. If we were to ask ourselves what we think about most often, the answer probably we would be present-day concerns rather than distant aspirations. 

    Warp threads – linking present and future.

    As futures thinker Bill Sharpe helps us understand, the makings of the future are here in the present. 

    The key to bridging future aspirations and present concerns is use framings that are both relevant to today’s challenges and compatible with the future that we want to build. 

    These framings act as strong warp threads, running through the present and the future. Of the various strands of regenerative thinking, three threads stand out as links between the present and future.

    • Complexity – the character of the present and the future. The present is very complex, and it’s not about to become any less so. Regenerative thinking requires us to work with interconnection and complexity. Seeing and working with complexity is therefore both relevant to the present and the future. 
    • Time – the amplifier of change – whether its through compound interest, network effects or technological acceleration, time has the power to amplify both the good and the bad. Regenerative thinking recognises that things are constantly in flow, evolving and adapting over time time. Applying a long-term view is therefore both relevant to today’s interests and tomorrow’s.
    • Iteration – the means of navigating complexity over time. whether it’s the philosophy of continuous improvement, or the method of iterative problem solving – cycles of action and reaction are part of how we work. Regenerative practice requires long-term cycles of experimentation, feedback and learning.  Therefore iterative working has both currency in the present and the future.

    Complexity, time, iteration – are warp threads that link today and tomorrow. They provide a common language that allows us to address immediate concerns through a frame that is still compatible with our regenerative goals.

    You will see these threads running throughout the patterns in this book. 

    But on their own, they are not enough to guarantee a regenerative future. We can also with with complexity, time and iteration to create other, less desirable futures. 

    What bends these threads is the crosswise threads we weave in between, the weft that bends the present towards the regenerative future. 

  • What is Continuous Place-Based Design?

    Continuous Place-Based Design is distinct from its opposite — Short-Term Design from Anywhere (see yesterday’s post). The following is an extract from a new entry I wrote today on the Constructivist website describing Continuous Place-Based Design. 

    Engineers and architects often design buildings, but their true impact is on places—the communities and ecosystems that inhabit them. If we want our work to create genuinely positive outcomes for both humans and the wider living world, we need to move beyond an isolated focus on buildings and shift towards a deeper understanding of place. So how can we evolve our design philosophy to support the creation of thriving places?

    Places are complex living systems, full of people and other species, shaped by relationships and constant change. In such systems, we cannot fully predict the impact of the changes we introduce. Instead, we learn by doing—by making small interventions, observing their effects, and adjusting accordingly. Long-term engagement with place is essential for truly understanding how it works.

    This gives us our first clue: design must be an ongoing process, not a one-off intervention.

    A second clue comes from recognising that every place is unique, and that uniqueness becomes even more pronounced the deeper we look. How can we possibly create designs that embrace such diversity? The living world offers a model: evolution. Nature doesn’t rely on rigid masterplans—it works iteratively, testing variations, adapting over time, and responding to changing conditions. The result is a best-fit design for the specific ecological, cultural, and environmental context.

    If we take these two starting points seriously, then instead of asking “What do we want to do to this place?”, we should begin by asking:

    • What is already here?
    • What is needed?
    • What is missing?
    • What is beginning to change?

    From this foundation, design can emerge gradually—guided by the dynamics of the place itself. Small interventions can be tested, refined, and expanded, always with an eye on how the system is responding. This shifts design from being a one-time act imposed from outside to an ongoing process that works with that place, learns from that place, and evolves alongside it.

    In our book, The Regenerative Structural Engineer, James and I call this design philosophy ‘Continuous Place-Based Design’.

    Tomorrow I’ll share an overview of the stages in this process.

  • Playing poker by the rules of noughts and crosses

    This week I am writing about how we make decisions in design. I’ve written before about David Snowden’s way of describing systems using a games analogy (see reference below). To recap:

    • A simple system is akin to a game of noughts and crosses. You know the rules and you can quickly work out the answer. 
    • A complicated system is like a game of chess. There are lots of rules, but given enough time you can work out all the options and choose the best one. 
    • A complex system is like a game of poker. The rules are one factor, but the game is made much more difficult by the interaction between the players. This is the domain of unknown unknowns. It is not possible to determine the best course of action from the start – the best approach emerges. 
    • A chaotic system is like a game with children in which they are constantly changing the rules. Here it is very difficult to make sense of what is going on as the ground keeps shifting. 

    Let’s look at decision making through these lenses. 

    A decision might appear to be a simple question of A versus B. But many factors might begin to complicate the process. For example, opportunity cost of one option over another. Or competing priorities that don’t make one option clearly better than another.

    When we start to include human factors, the picture becomes much more complex. First, there are the vast array of factors that push and pull our own decision-making – not all of them conscious; not all of them we want to admit to. And then there is how the groups of people around the poker table of design (whose interests might not necessarily be aligned) show up and play the game.

    The complexity grows when we we start to consider the interconnection between lots of the factors that we might consider in design: the long-term versus short-term business model, community wellbeing, ecosystem wellbeing, etc.

    Finally, we have a chaotic decision-making environment when the rules of the game start changing. This could be the case when, say, in a major project one part of the team starts shifting the goals of the project without informing the rest. No one is clear anymore about the conditions in which they are trying to make a decision.

    All of this is to say that decision-making is often much more complex than a simple A versus B. So we need to prepare ourselves for decision-making in complex environments. 

    As ever, our guiding principles can be: to work iteratively, and to look for the emergent patterns. 

    Playing poker by the rules of noughts and crosses is a losing strategy.

    References

    Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, November 2007 Issue.

  • 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? 

  • You only learn when you do difficult things

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist website: 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 is my catchphrase for the start of workshops: ‘You only learn when you do difficult things.’

    It is a reminder to expect things to be difficult when we try to do something new. We often learn something in order to make something we can’t do easier. And we should expect to put in some activation energy during this process to reach a place of greater ease.

    But if left at that, this is quite a passive interpretation. 

    A more active interpretation is to use your sense of what is difficult to orientate yourself to where the learning opportunities are. And this, I think, is the sense in which this catchphrase was meant when I originally heard it. The words come from my friend and mentor in Problem-Based Learning, Prof Søren Willert.

    In problem-based learning, we are looking for problems as an opportunity for learning. In these instances, learning isn’t general, it is tightly bound to the specificity of the problem.

    Seeking difficult things might actually serve as a good compass for where to focus our learning. A place where there is work to be done, where we can hopefully make a positive contribution and learn along the way. We mustn’t expect it to be easy.

  • 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. 

  • 340-degree vision

    I read on a fact sheet that guinea pigs have 340-degree vision. On a horizontal plane they can see almost all around. Imagine! Their only blind spots are directly behind and a small patch directly in front of them. 

    That’s because they are prey animals. They spend their whole waking time observing their environment for threats (they can even sleep with their eyes open). And while they can’t see far, they build up a detailed mental map of their surroundings by scuttling around, which means they can navigate even in the dark.

    The animals that hunt them, on the other hand, have forward-facing eyes. Their breadth of vision is limited but their acuity is much higher. This focus allows them to spot and lock on to their prey from much further away.

    I note that my eyes are on the front of my head. Does that make me a hunter? 

    And when we design, which way are our eyes pointing? Are we focused on a pre-defined target or are we continually scanning the landscape to build up a picture?

    For the regenerative designer, seeing is much more akin to the latter: building up a picture of the system we are in by continually exploring it. Building our interconnection with place. Searching for symbiosis we can unlock. Looking for emergent patterns we can enable. Then we can know how to act, even without being able to see straight forward.

  • Go (notes on complexity)

    My favourite board game is Go. A 19 by 19 board. White stones versus black. You win by surrounding your opponent’s stones before they surround yours. The game has just three rules, but from this simple concept a game of incredible complexity emerges. 

    My early years of playing Go were frustrating: it didn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t find a way to win. And now that I am more experienced, I find it hard to teach others. I take solace therefore that while the first computer to beat a reigning chess world champion (Deep Blue versus Gary Kasparov) did it in 1997 it took another 20 years for a computer, Deep Mind to beat reining world Go champion Ke Jie.

    The reason Go is so much harder for a computer to play than Chess is the number of branching possibilities that emerge from each move. It is just not possible to play solely on the basis of the player assessing the opposite player’s best move. And therefore a much more complex dynamic emerges in the game that involves the players ability to spot patterns as much as the patterns themselves. 

    I find this fascinating. In this complex situation, the players are part of the solution. Or put it another way, the solution is function of both the physical reality (the stones on the board), the players’ perception of the stones, and the players’ perception of each other’s perception of the stones. In maths terms, the solution y = f(physical world, internal world).

    It highlights for me that with complex situations in which engineers (and other humans) are agents, how we show up and how everyone else is showing up has a big impact on the outcome. We are a long way from optimum answers that can be deduced from calculation.

  • The incredible system that will save us

    Good news. There is an incredible system that can save humanity and will enable us to thrive on planet Earth.

    Here’s how it works. 

    • It is entirely powered by the effect of the sun and the moon.
    • Using simple elements it can establish itself in new locations and in a few iterations it can rapidly scale up, complexifying and adapting to meet its operating conditions. 
    • The system produces no waste at all – all outputs from one process are inputs to others.
    • It creates incomprehensibly complex structures from a small palette of abundant, local materials.
    • The system purifies and circulates water. 
    • It keeps the air in the atmosphere breathable, and maintains levels of greenhouse gases at a level appropriate for system survival.
    • It even screens out harmful rays from the sun.
    • It creates food and nutrients.
    • It even creates abundant construction materials.
    • The system has built-in resilience to enable it to respond to shocks. 
    • It has the capacity to learn and to develop new designs. These designs are optimised to ensure the health of the whole system, not just the individual element within it.

    It is the system of life in the biosphere of planet Earth. If we step back and think about it, there is no system that humans have created that can compete in terms of its resilience, life-giving potential and ability to adapt. 

    This life giving system is out there, it surrounds us, and it is still just about intact. This is good news.

    There is more good news. 

    We, human beings, have been evolved as part of that system, and it is interwoven with us. As I heard fellow Regenerative Design Fellow Michael Pawlyn describe, there are more microbial cells than human cells in our bodies. So there is no meaningful separation between us and this system. 

    And if all parts of the system have evolved to increase the health of the system, then we too have been created by that system to fulfil a role. 

    So, there is this incredible life giving system that we are in extricable part of. So far so good.

    Now some not so good news. Since the Enlightenment, in the Global North we have started to see ourselves as separate from that system. That same school of thought which used reason to take power away from the divine, placed rational ‘man’ at the top of the hierarchy of life. 

    We became separate the system and then we started exploiting it. Initially the system had enough elastic capacity to respond to the damage being rendered by its human population.

    But having become separated from that wider living system ourselves, we no-longer paid attention to the feedback loops that might otherwise have limited our behaviour.

    Enraptured by our our own reason, we lost sight of the incredible power of the capacity of the wider living world to heal us, for it to be important for us, and so we devalue it even more. Dazzled by the spectacle of our own creations, we lose sight of the incredible, overwhelming, delicate, powerful and fragile system that we are part of.

    Now to the really bad news.

    We are like engineers working for a foolish developer who asks us to take bricks out of the foundations to build extra storeys at the top. We have extracted, depleted and destroyed so much of this system that it is about to collapse. Without this life-giving support system, we stand little chance of surviving on this rock in the solar system. 

    And so, what do we do now? Clearly we need to revive the health of our life-support system.

    We can think of our ailing living system on planet Earth as a sick patient displaying multiple symptoms. Without being doctors, we can probably see that if we treat one symptom at a time we may never treat the underlying cause of the disease. Holistic medicine in contrast seeks to consider factors that enable the health of the whole person. Things like diet, sleep, exercise, living environment. Adjusting these factors to increase overall patient health can increase the patient’s ability to respond to illness. Long-term observation of the patient can help work out what factors are having the best effect. 

    This approach recognises the body as a complex system that is not fully knowable and so needs cycles of careful intervention and observation. This approach also recognises that when this system is thriving it is much more resilient and therefore able to respond to shocks and recover. 

    Applying this same logic to the living system on planet earth, if we can enable the conditions within which it can flourish again, then the system can do what it needs to heal. The questions we should be asking are what are the equivalents to diet, sleep, exercise and living environment for our living system on Earth, and what can we do adjust these conditions to bring the system back into a healthy state?

    Creating the conditions for flourishing is an example of intervening higher in the system. Rather than treating the individual elements in the system we are seeking to change the relationships that dictate how the system behaves. 

    But there is one fundamental relationship that we need to change. And that is the one between humans and the rest of the living world. Its decline has led to our almost total separation from the ecosystem that supports us – physically, culturally, psychologicically and in relation to our concept of power. 

    In the analogy above we treated the Earth’s living systems as a patient that we are treating. To change that fundamental relationship between humans and this wider living system, we have to see ourselves as the patient. We are part of that living system. We are inextricably linked to it. When it is healthy, we are healthy. When it is sick, we are sick. 

    So, how can we conclude this news bulletin?

    • We are part of an incredible system. 
    • If we want to heal it we need to treat it holistically. 
    • We need to rediscover our role – not as controllers, not all-seers, but as a unique part of the system that can help the system bounce back and change course where it needs to. 
    • We are new on the planetary scene. We have evolved incredible brain powers, very recently we have seen that, used unwisely, our powers can be hugely destructive, but re-tuned to the system we have evolved in, humans could add terrific resilience to our living world. 
    • If we can create the conditions for the system to thrive, then the system will take care of the rest.
    • And if we help it thrive we will, by dint of being part of that system, be thriving too.

    More blog posts about regenerative design

    Right here

    My work on regenerative design is generously supported by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. Read more about my Fellowship in Regenerative Design.

  • Four characteristics of regenerative systems

    Four characteristics of regenerative systems

    Work on regenerative thinking progresses on all fronts. Book writing with my friend James on Monday (read his excellent blog on this process), developing regenerative practice at Hazel Hill Wood Tuesday and short-listing candidates for the Regenerative Design Lab Wednesday. I love that all of these initiatives inform each other.

    To aid all three I have synthesised my understanding of how regenerative systems operate. This framing is informed in large-part by Donnella Meadows’s book ‘Thinking in Systems’, which is helping to understand the conversations are having across all these fronts.

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  • Towards Regenerative Conceptual Design

    Towards Regenerative Conceptual Design

    I have had the great fortune of having spent three weeks in France, a good portion of it cycling. Touring is a great way to leave behind your pre-occupations and to think about the future – in my case, the themes for my training and writing in 2021-2022.

    This year, all cycle paths point towards regenerative design – design that is win-win-win for individuals, society and the planet. I hear echos here of the triple bottom line of sustainable design, but sustainability, with it’s promise to protect the environment for the benefit of future generations is no-longer enough. This is a keep-things-the-same model. But as the latest IPCC report confirms, keeping things the same will lead to the breakdown of the carefully balanced ecosystem on which we depend. What we actually need is design that builds back the abundance, diversity, complexity and resilience of the ecosystem that quite literally gives us life.

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