Making Sense of Regenerative Design
REFLECTIONS IN CONVERSATION
Welcome NextD Journal readers to Everyday Conversations 2.
Series Purpose: Believing that enhancing clarity can inform forward motion in a changing world, the purpose of this NextD Journal Everyday Conversations Series is to share diverse sensemaking dialogue related to the subject of Design for Complexity and issues of interest to the emerging practice community.
Imperfect, unfinished, in-progress, that is what this conversation series is intended to be. Many of us participating in LinkedIn discussions notice a few recurring dynamics, including lots of repetition and an abundance of bullet-point, fast-food content in the face of complex subjects. We see a lot of repeating starting points being positioned as forward motion..:-)
In addition, with journalistic awareness on our part, we realized that some of the richest content being generated takes place in informal everyday conversations between friends but never gets posted.
Understanding that deeper reading is not for everyone, we will, in this adventuresome NextD Journal Series, attempt to bridge across that terrain and share some of those everyday conversations, as bumpy as they may be.
A downloadable PDF of this conversation is posted at the end of this text.
GK VanPatter:
Delighted to kick off this conversation with you both. Robin I have known for many years and I have interacted with Greg periodically numerous times over a long period via Humantific and NextD Journal activities. Happy to invite you both to wade into this Regenerative Design topic which is directly connected to Design for Complexity.
Perhaps a good place to begin is to ask ourselves this question:
Traditional Design Thinking (Arena 1&2) Stance: If you ask “what is the situation that needs to be converted to a product, service or experience problem and solution then you are taking an traditional design thinking stance.
Service Design (Arena 2) Stance: If you ask “what is the situation that needs to be converted to a service problem and solution then you are taking a service design stance.
Strategic Design (Arena 3&4) Stance: If you ask “what is the situation that is to be observed or considered?” then you are taking a strategic design stance.
Hard Systems (Arena 3&4) Stance: If you ask, “what is the observable hard system (non-living things) that is to be viewed and considered?” then you are taking a hard systems stance.
Soft Systems (Arena 3&4) Stance: If you ask, “what is the observable soft system (living things) that is to be viewed and considered?” then you are taking a soft systems stance.
What, in your view, is the stance of Regenerative Design?
Robin Lincoln Wood:
For me, the stance of Regenerative Design must integrate both the current situation we are in, and the hard and soft systems needed to meet the challenges posed by our Anthropocene overshoot. The way in which “soft” cultural and technological evolution/innovation has accelerated and changed the very nature of biological evolution in the last 100 000 years of the existence of homo sapiens has proven to be both a blessing and a curse.
The blessing has been the advantages and comforts of modernity and the advanced technologies often indistinguishable from magic that modernity has wrought. Human lifespans have doubled, our ability to expand our consciousness and our horizons has taken several giant leaps, and we have created a globalized world in which all the learnings and insights of almost every culture that has ever existed are available to anyone with an ounce of curiosity.
The curse has been rapidly expanding populations that outstrip the resources available to take care of their basic needs, a massive acceleration in inequality and alienation, a sixth mass extinction and a hothouse climate that threatens the lives and livelihoods of a few billion humans driving potential complexity catastrophes of the intricate financial, informatic, economic, social and ecological systems we currently depend on for our survival.
Yet, at the leading edge of all of this turbulence, I’m seeing a new field effect emerging in how we’re responding to our current challenges - the assumptions of the Anthropocene are fast giving way to a new wave of innovation and Schumpeterian creative destruction I call the Symbiocene. Hyper connectivity and personalization are the medium for this emergence, as we embed enough intelligence in ourselves and our environment to help us dramatically shift our physical, psychological and social systems toward regenerative and distributed operating systems and social clusters.
BUCKY'S ADVISE
Bucky’s seminal advice: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete,” is “job one” of regenerative design. Creative problem solving, and the modeling of all design processes, from product design to service design to organizational innovation and social innovation, now all need to be put into the service of designing, building and operating regenerative sociotechnical systems.
As Donella Meadows reminded us, tinkering with incremental changes in the following areas for “sustainability” is slowly killing us: subsidies, taxes, standards; the structure of material stocks and flows; negative and positive feedback loops; the structure of information flows; the rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints); the power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
If regenerative design is to have the positive impact we need to shift from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene, it also needs to focus on shifting:
- the goals of the system
- the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises
- the power to transcend paradigms.
Greg Judelman:
Regarding the question of “stance of Regenerative Design”, for me I think about that starting with a definition that was crafted by me with assistance from ChatGPT.
“Regenerative design is an approach that aims to create systems, services, technologies, processes and policies that not only sustain but actively restore and enhance the health, vitality, and resilience of natural and human ecosystems. Grounded in ecological systems thinking and bioregional regenerative practices, it integrates principles of natural cycles and local ecological conditions into design and development. Beyond merely minimizing negative impacts, regenerative design seeks to transition from an extractive economy—characterized by infinite money creation and growth—to a regenerative economy, where financial resources are seen as tools to fund activities that restore ecological health and promote community and family well-being. By fostering symbiotic relationships between human activities and the environment and aligning with the unique characteristics of specific bioregions, regenerative design aims to create thriving, resilient communities and organizations that support the long-term sustainability and prosperity of both people and the planet.
With this definition in mind, in order to achieve regenerative impact, and to resist being pulled back into our habitual extractive mindset and patterns, we must hold a fractal systems view that encompasses all the stances at once, augmented by a deep understanding of living systems and place-based ecologies.
Thus, the “stance” of regenerative design shifts as the perspective moves from the wide soft systems lens of an ecological and human systems view to the hard systems that must be considered and eventually through the strategic, traditional and service stances as we get into the design of specific regenerative elements (businesses, communities, organizations, economies etc.).
GK VanPatter:
In this NextD Journal we are, by design, intending to bridge theory and practice via a particular interest in complexity suitable methodologies. In this orientation, that is of interest to our primary practitioner readership, we get to talk about issues that tend to not bubble up in other forums.
With this in mind, I would say Regenerative Design folks seek to join other communities of practice, already involved in complex problem solving and transformation beyond the assumptions of product, service or experience. There seems to be a perceived need for a form of intervention not being attended to by other approaches. Others perceive the same need and have different approaches in mind, Open Frame Design, Systemic Design, Complexity Navigation would be among them.
I would say whatever definition one chooses for Regenerative Design lets be careful not to transfer the legacies of the downstream approaches, some of which are anxious to reposition as upstream, causing lots of confusion. Upstream simply means that in the complexity arenas of organizational change (Arena 3) and societal change (Arena 4) it makes no sense to be assuming we know what the challenges and opportunities are before we begin. That would be the most obvious criteria for working upstream from tactical briefs. That essentially eliminates product, service and experience design methods.
METHODOLOGIES PERSPECTIVE
From a methodologies perspective, it’s not difficult to see that Regenerative Design is changing, radically updating the fact-finding field that informs challenge framing. Whatever basis was being used previously for societal change intervention (the drivers) is tossed out the window and new facts, new drivers enter the equation. Regenerative Design is inherently seeking agreement that the basis on which interventions should be occurring has changed and needs to be acknowledged. That would seem to be equivalent to Regenerative Design content 101. Without that acknowledgement there is no perceived need for Regenerative Design.
That’s a built-in tough cookie for Regenerative Design that is a new form of prerequisite being driven by concerned, prescient leaders including a new generation who have timely planetary concerns and are frankly ringing the alarm bells. At this moment the stance of Regenerative Design looks like this to me:
Regenerative Design (Arena 3 & 4) Stance: Taking into account a realistic assessment of the deteriorating world and our communities, acknowledging that sustainability is no longer enough, Regenerative Design asks where do we need to focus our short and long term repair and regeneration in our organizations and in our communities?
As in all changemaking movements, one part is content knowledge and the other part process knowledge. Right now, I often see Regenerative Design leaders leading with content, being content experts which leads me to the next question we might consider.
Several lifetimes ago in grad school I was doing what we would now call Root Origins Analysis focused on the work of Bucky Fuller (1895-1983) and noted that he was borrowing heavily from ideas present in the American Transcendentalist movement of the 19th century, Thoreau, Emerson, Bucky’s aunt Sarah Margaret Fuller and others. Of course that movement was inspired by earlier philosophy and literature including early Indian and Chinese scriptures.
The point is, much of that in the Transcendentalist movement; experimental schemes for living, women’s rights, world citizenship, environmentalism, temperance for all, etc. was philosophy, without any actual changemaking methodology attached.
Let’s think about that in the context of Regenerative Design. Let’s imagine that we check into the movement via an R&D scale from 1 to 10 with 1 being preliminary and 10 being fully robust. Where do you think the methodology behind the Regenerative Design movement is presently on that R&D scale?
Robin Lincoln Wood:
To answer your question, I think we are at a 5/10 in terms of the thinking, and a 3/10 in terms of the practice of regenerative design. Much of what is working today in this field is more the result of lucky accidents, trial and error experimentation project-by-project, rather than any systemically effective design approach.
We need to get to at least 7/10 on both in the next decade, something I am excited about working on within the Regenovation Impact Incubator where we can see clearly how to draw down or avoid 5% of the current global GHG emissions of 41Gt p.a. in that timeframe with 4 of our highest potential agri-food innovations, while producing Mt of biochar, (increasing soil productivity by a factor of 3-10), several billion gallons of clean drinking water in 10k regenerative wealth zones in the Americas and Africa.
I see something of a bifurcation in the theories of change and intervention in shifting the sociotechnical systems we currently take for granted in the Anthropocene, to those associated with a symbiotic future in the Symbiocene. Simply put, they comprise bottom-up, fractal theories of change and practice, more consistent with symbiotic processes, and top-down, “cascade” theories of change and practice characteristic of Anthropocene thinking.
Then there is a “middle-out” fusion of the best of both of these approaches to ensure an holistic logic guiding the deployment of multiple capitals (financial, human, natural, intellectual, relationship, social, manufactured) for the purpose of catalyzing regenerative transitions in the places, value chains, and other real economy systems that matter most for human prosperity.
The Anthropocene is characterized by humanity’s significant negative impact on our Earth’s systems, environment, and biodiversity. During this epoch, human activities have driven global overheating, habitat destruction, and unsustainable natural resource extraction. We have disturbed the health of our planet’s physical, chemical, and biological systems, let alone our own physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual wellbeing.
Even worse, the Anthropocene story, combined with the endless supply of bad news blasted at us 24x7, turns us off, makes us depressed, pushes vulnerable people into the arms of fascists and charismatic weirdos, and encourages us to seek refuge in the familiar old, unsustainable ways that reward ecocidal industries ranging from fossil fuels to extractive industries to toxic chemistry to plastics to industrial agriculture and the list goes on and on.
Meanwhile, well beneath the radar, there is a positive revolution going on behind the scenes around the globe. We need a name and some attention and funding to reward this transformative movement of billions- let’s call it the “Symbiocene”.
SYMBIOCENE
The term "Symbiocene" was coined by Australian philosopher Glen Albrecht in 2011. It envisions a new geological epoch characterized by harmonious interactions between humans and all other living beings. In the Symbiocene, there is deep interconnectedness among all life on Earth, emphasizing mutual benefit and sustainable coexistence.
Unlike the Anthropocene, which highlights human dominance and divides nature from culture, the Symbiocene encourages a future where humans integrate seamlessly with their environment, including beneficial, renewable/ regenerative technologies and infrastructure.
Symbiotic interactions significantly impact ecosystems by shaping their structure, function, and resilience, contributing to species diversity and enhanced ecosystem stability, resilience, and adaptability to environmental changes. They do this both in the natural and human worlds.
Symbiotic relationships in nature showcase fascinating interactions between different species. For example, on land, ants gather leaves for food, but they can’t digest them efficiently, so they cultivate fungus in their nests, which breaks down the leaves into simpler forms. The fungus benefits from the food provided by ants, and the ants gain nourishment from the fungus. In the sea, goby fish live in the burrows dug by shrimp. While providing protection for the goby fish, the goby use their keen eyesight to warn the shrimp of nearby predators.
Symbiotic interactions also influence energy transfer and nutrient recycling. In predator-prey relationships (a form of symbiosis), population dynamics and energy flow through trophic levels are regulated to maintain the overall health of the ecosystem. Pollinators (for example, bees, butterflies and birds) engage in mutualistic relationships with flowering plants, transferring the pollen essential to plant reproduction. Similarly, animals disperse seeds, aiding plant dispersal and colonization.
And the list goes on and on- basically, we would not be here, nor would nature, without symbiosis, which starts bottom up with Phytoplankton. These microscopic, single-celled organisms are the foundation of the marine food web. They capture sunlight and convert it into energy through photosynthesis, producing organic compounds and half of the oxygen in our atmosphere in the process. Phytoplankton are crucial for the health of marine ecosystems and play a vital role in the global carbon cycle, and we would not be able to breathe without these ubiquitous single celled prokaryotes.
NORTH STAR
So why do we hear so little about this process that is so fundamental to our existence?
Probably because right now the Symbiocene is more of a north star on a distant horizon than a lived reality for most people, even though it exists for hundreds of millions of people in unevenly distributed pockets of the future in the present, fueled by regenerative innovators applying systemic, complex adaptive and synergistic solutions in ways that scale fractally.
What is missing from most theories of change is an understanding of the evolution of human culture, which is both social and technological, as we co-evolve with our technologies. And as this co-evolution has become more conscious and intentional, we have gained extraordinary powers through our cultures, organizations and technologies. As Stewart Brand put it: “We have become as gods, so we might as well get good at it”.
In the Anthropocene, people are treated as little black boxes with inputs and outputs, and the prevalent psychological and sociological thinking is about “incentivising” these little black boxes with the carrots and sticks of rewards and punishments. Although we’ve made significant advances from the primitive behaviorism that informed organizational thinking from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, we have not yet escaped the consequences of this thinking, seen especially in the cults of monetarism and shareholder value which have created the most perverse set of incentives since the days of the Kings and Pharaohs.
In the USA, CXO’s, VC’s, investment bankers, hedge fund traders, Silicon Valley “unicorns” and their ilk have created a financialised casino where a “winner” can earn several hundred to thousands of times the pay of the average employee in an organization, often simply by being in the right place at the right time with enough cash. Which also explains why it costs $10 billion to elect a President in 2024.
In turn, we find the most frequently used words are “growth”, “profits” and “employment” in the financial and economic news feeds, along with GDP and other perverse metrics of “success”. With this, “follow the money” has become the number one game in town, and is reflected in our newsfeeds, movies, music and most of our cultural milieu, including the cult-like worship of the Elon Musks created by this system.
TOKEN BAND-AID
This is decisively a top-down system, without any trickle down, and philanthropy/”corporate social responsibility” has become a token band aid for the deep wounds inflicted by our late Anthropocene ways of thinking and doing.
If we understand that the Anthropocene as currently practiced is simply modernism taken to its extremes, with the characteristic “save the planet” postmodernists and activists rising in numbers and power thanks to Gen Z and the centennials (yet still struggling to effect significant shifts out of the Anthropocene), we can get a clearer picture of what is really going on when we talk about social and organizational change and transformation.
To sum up, we have a “one size fits all” theory of change in both modern and postmodern thinking, where universalistic “principles” fuel the book sales of management and political fad makers that in turn shape how our “leaders” think about and practice organizational and social change.
It’s no wonder that 80% of “change initiatives” fail, let alone social change policies, because our economic and political systems are based on simplistic majority rule, winner-takes-all utilitarian thinking well past its 300 year old sell-by-date, modified by pop psychology and organizational change myths. There is little or no real insight into intrinsic motivation and the shifts in value systems that are needed for transformational change.
In the regenerative innovation approach embedded in the Regenovation process and platform, our most important observation is that the action learning embodied in showing up is the driver of transformation. We learn most about our world and ourselves by doing and experimentation, embedding fresh paradigms, values and priorities that themselves co-evolve with successful experiments and confirming evidence of what works better.
Our second key learning from 40 years of being at the forefront of personal, organizational and social development, is that it is all too easy and comfortable to spend most of the time focused on one’s own personal and organizational development at the expense of actually taking action that leads to beneficial change and transformation and creating the new models that disrupt the old.
This is particularly true of the postmodern generations starting with “New Age” magical thinking, deep green environmentalism and “Degrowth” approaches that reject synergistic approaches to shifting into the Symbiocene that incorporate healthy post-Anthropocene green industrial technologies rooted in synergistic, symbiotic social and technological innovations.
HUMAN TRANSFORMATION
So, let’s explore the four key parts to the human transformation that powers regenerative golden innovations in pockets of the emerging Symbiocene future: waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.
Waking Up: Waking up is fundamental to the Symbiocene Civilization now emerging on Earth. This involves practices that help you transcend your ego and experience higher states of consciousness. It’s about becoming aware of the deeper, more profound aspects of reality and your true nature beyond your physical form. “Ego to Eco”, as the meme says.
Growing Up: This refers to our emotional and psychological development through various stages of maturity. It’s about evolving from self-centered behaviors to more complex and inclusive ways of thinking and relating to others, beyond basic systems thinking to second-order cybernetics and complex systems thinking and practice.
Cleaning Up: This stage is about addressing and integrating the unconscious and repressed shadow material within oneself. It involves recognizing and working through personal traumas, biases, and blind spots to achieve a healthier, more whole self, without falling into the trap of victimhood and entitlement that often emerges in this journey.
Showing Up: This is about taking what you’ve learned from the other three processes and applying it to serve humanity and the world. It’s about being present, engaged, and contributing positively to our collective well-being, learning and applying the most effective and scalable regenerative innovations available.
The wicked problems of the 21st century call for a radically new approach to how individuals, organizations and financiers invest their time, money, energy and thinking—one that pursues systems transformation, deploys multiple capitals synergistically (financial, human, natural, intellectual, relationship, social, manufactured) with a broader intent and mindset, is anchored in different methodologies, structures, capabilities, and decision-making frameworks, and moves away from a project-by-project mentality to a strategic blending paradigm.
Systemic multi-capital investing using the Regenovation process and tools answers this call. It is a holistic investment logic guiding the synergistic deployment of multiple capitals for the purpose of catalyzing regenerative transitions in the places, value chains, and other real economy systems that matter most for human prosperity.
Global co-creators giving birth to golden innovations that are regenerative and inclusive, are, now, literally, showing up everywhere on our planet. As someone who has been researching, writing about, supporting and connecting up these imaginal cells of our Symbiocene future for several decades now, it is clear that we are well on our way to doing exactly what Buckminster Fuller recommended all those years ago: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Greg Judelman:
Robin, we haven’t met yet but after reading your response I’m excited to have lunch together (I’m in Toronto, where do you live?🙂)!
I’m in full agreement with your assessment of the Anthropocene and our existential need to transition into the Symbiocene, a movement that is in the early stages of unfolding yet is far from meaningfully influencing the dominant extractive system that is pushing us towards ecological collapse.
Regenerative design is indeed a nascent practice that can help seed and accelerate this transformation from “ego” to “eco” -centric human civilization. The practice differentiates from established design practices in that it demands from the practitioner a continuous personal development at fractal scales ranging from the individual to the cosmic.
Themes of inquiry move in parallel from inner spiritual and consciousness shifting and deep ecology, to exploring the alignment of living systems principles to systems of design or finance, into practical on-the-ground experiments that put theory to the test and enable the continuous iteration of emerging conceptual frameworks.
To ground this conceptual survey of regenerative design in the emerging signals of what this practice is and may yet become, I’d like to share some of the writers and practitioners that have been inspirational for me. When looked at together, we see a shape for an emerging regenerative design field.
Deep ecology and cultural transformation
Thomas Berry‘s books including 1999’s The Great Work that outlines the cultural and spiritual transition that will be needed to transition from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene
Daniel Christian Wahl’s book Designing Regenerative Cultures and subsequent writings
Personal stages of development
Bill Plotkin’s Soulcentric stages of human development (an alternative framework for the transformation stages that Robin shared)
Applied living systems principles
Regenerative Design and Development principles and frameworks developed by Regenesis Group and taught through their Regenerative Practitioner Series
Dr. Anneloes Smitsman and her team’s EARTHwise Constitution for Planetary Civilization
Theory and experiments in action
Joe Brewer’s 2021 book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth and his active initiatives and community through the Design School for Regenerating Earth and Bioregional Earth
Buckminster Fuller Institute’s BFI Design Lab, where they are supporting a range of experiments that bring to life a defined set of systemic and regenerative practice principles
Regenerative finance
BioFi.earth, the Bioregional Finance for Planetary Regeneration community, and their recent (free) e-book “Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet”
The Well-being Economy Alliance (WeAll.org) that offers a frame, without using the more provocative “degrowth” terminology, for an economic system in service of life
Regenerative business
Carol Sanford’s regenerative business books and communities of practice
Paul Hawken’s book Regeneration and associated website with project examples
Regenerative design studio
Spherical and their projects including the Living Infrastructure Field Kit
In a useful extract from one of these references, Paul Hawken’s book Regeneration, we are offered a checklist of questions that can be posed in the shaping of a project or as we make a design decision:
Regenerative Project Questions:
Does the action create more life or reduce it?
Does it heal the future or steal the future?
Does it enhance human well-being or diminish it?
Does it prevent disease or profit from it?
Does it create livelihoods or eliminate them?
Does it restore land or degrade it?
Does it increase global warming or decrease it?
Does it serve human needs or manufacture human wants?
Does it reduce poverty or expand it?
Does it promote fundamental human rights or deny them?
Does it provide workers with dignity or demean them?
In short, is the activity regenerative or extractive?
As we collectively endeavor to bring regenerative design practice to maturity in the coming decade(s) - with our survival as a species on the line - we must explore these kinds of questions:
We have an evolving theoretical basis, a range of early stage experiments, many global and local networks of passionate current and emerging practitioners … now, how do we bring this potential to life and start driving meaningful change into mainstream systems?
Finance and funding is concentrated in the extractive capitalist economy, how do we unlock financial flows into regenerative teams and projects at a scale that enables meaningful system impact?
Related to the funding challenge is the fact that almost the entire global workforce is earning a living in the extractive economy, how do we unlock the workforce in service of regeneration? How do we attract “talent” and enable people to make a good living doing regenerative work?
How do we define a regenerative business? What are the attributes of its services, operating model, governance and financials?
How do we measure impact and success of a regenerative design or business?
How do we position regenerative practice as an alternative to the dominant “green growth” worldview which asserts the myth that we can continue to maintain our consumptive lifestyles while addressing the ecological crisis, if only we can sell more electric cars and solar power?
I realize that I’ve shared more references and questions than any definitive answers, but that’s where my musings took me today.
GK VanPatter:
OK, no shortage of things to work on here in this subject terrain, lots of loose ends, unfinished business and emerging models…:-)
Robin, I have not yet read your new book “Synergise!: 21st Century Leadership” so will look forward to that. I still have your other book on Complexity from the era when we worked together several life-times ago..:-) I believe you were talking about “Thrivability” long before Regenerative Design came along.
I will point out that there appears to be two opposing modes in your dueling statements earlier in this conversation: 1. “For me, the stance of Regenerative Design must integrate both the current situation we are in, and the hard and soft systems needed to meet the challenges posed by our Anthropocene overshoot.”
That’s an Ambidexterity play.
2. Bucky was not an Ambidex guy or an organizational change guy: ”Buckminster Fuller recommended: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Organizational Ambidexterity (doing both creating and optimizing simultaneously) as strategy did not really exist in Fuller’s time. Bucky was essentially an inventor. He was not formally educated in architecture or design so he managed to escape the various mainstream mantras of that era and create his own mantra. Bucky is an entire conversation unto itself for another day..:-)
Lets try to return to the Ambidex question in Part 2 of this conversation. Also in Part 2 we can perhaps take a look at your post-Anthropocene, “Regenovation process” Robin.
To be clear; our interest in focusing NextD Journal on Design for Complexity methods is to help accelerate/broaden the movement towards reinvention of design via the creation of alternate paths that are, by design, different from mainstream, assumption-boxed methods (Product, Service, Experience) and towards changemaking approaches more applicable to the fuzzy complexities of Arena 3. Organizational ChangeMaking and Arena 4 Societal ChangeMaking.
The reason for the difference pursuit is a practical one in that it's already known that entering problematic situations in complex organizational or societal arenas assuming the challenges are known and or can be presumed up front is a widely accepted no-go 101. That commonsense principle applies to all intervention approaches, not just design. No spin or political maneuvering can trump that common sense.
If we take a good look at Regenerative Design, acknowledging that there are already multiple versions, I would say there are some surprises that do pop-up.
In the big picture, compressing considerable complexity here, what I see on the question regarding the present R&D state of Regenerative Design, is a repeating two-part dance occurring in the design community that is not yet very well acknowledged.
Compression A:
To visualize that dance on a single piece of paper, I would draw Part 1 as a large 10 inch circle, representing content knowledge….and Part 2 of that dance as a tiny 1/2 inch circle representing process knowledge, by that we mean actual methods synchronized to the scale of challenges in discussion here…a tilting 2Part Asymmetrical Dance. Often adjacent to that dance is a grab bag, a side-car of unsynchronized loosely related stuff, tools, models, etc.
Compression B:
The energy around future related scanning for signals is hefty. For organizations that output typically becomes the raw fuel for sensemaking which in turn can inform changemaking. In the context of societal change, lots of freelance folks are focused in that direction, particularly in Gen Z. A difficult truth is that scanning, trend watching being repositioned as “foresight” can be super useful, thought provoking, informing, necessary, even entertaining AND is not in itself changemaking methodology. If we mistake the foresight piece for an entire changemaking process, we miss the need for methods related change in order to get to broader problem framing/solving/evolving/ transforming methodology. In already operating Complexity Navigation practice it is known that “foresight” itself is not a new holistic approach paradigm. Mastering foresight is not the heavy lift. Not everyone is getting that and the clock ticks and ticks.
Compression C:
In that context I think it would be helpful to table, sooner rather than later, the already surfaced in practice understanding that we cannot get to the kind of robust complexity addressing capacity needed here via World Café type chit-chats. Those models tend to be great for networking and general easy lift chatting which is useful AND quite different from deliberate changemaking/ intervention dialogue. Right now that seems to be not 100% clear and the latter is no walk in the park. It seems to me that World Cafe stuff is future making level .01 when what is already required in changemaking practice today is level 10 and still rising. World Café is sizzle not steak.
Each of those A,B,C compressions represents significant challenges for the Regenerative Design folks in particular with the future arriving relentlessly.
Whether we all like it or not, the current 2Part Asymmetrical Dance can be seen at most future focused, regenerative events, as well as in related books, videos, podcasts, etc.
Last week I was able to attend the "Futures Friends / Building Hopeful Futures Festival" event here in New York City loosely connected to the United Nations futuring initiatives. Suffice it to say: The high positive energy piece was certainly visible there as was the Tilt Dance with each of the above A,B,C compressions present.
I did not stay for the entire event but in what I saw the focus was 95% content which might be best described as a rapid immersion into looming ecology disaster, but still optimistic! The process side was either elementary or completely absent.
ORIENTATION OF REGENERATIVE DESIGN
At a very fundamental level is the question of whether Regenerative Design is and or wants to be oriented towards problems, framing, evolving etc. or towards something else.
Our readers will know, it’s no secret that there is an aggressive faction inside the design community that is anti-problem orientation. We do not subscribe to that orientation but bump up against that contingent occasionally in the context of journalistically writing about Design for Complexity.
On this question I was interested to see the orientations inside Daniel Wahl’s 2016 book “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” and in Carol Sanford’s 2017 book, “The Regenerative Business”. Both quite different.
With the energy and basic thrust of both books being reinvention they do appear to generally align with what we know of the Rethinking Design/Design for Complexity Movement.
Each book has its peculiarities, omissions and contradictions. Some of the unfinished business within the design community and graduate design education become visible in these books.
Somewhat strangely I noted that the “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” book has a few, odd political fingerprints in it indicative of the Service Design communities influence and reach ambitions that tends to add confusion to the big picture.
Truth be told to our readers: The considerable, aggressive effort to reposition Service Design as equivalent to Strategic Design or Meta Design is a political exercise, not grounded in realities of methodologies. It's been known for some time that Product, Service and Experience design are assumption-boxed methodologies. Strategic Design is not assumption-boxed.
Image Credit: “Designing ReGenerative Cultures”, 2016.
Much of the confusion around the subject of design is generated by the design community itself. It’s a bit of a head-bender, even for veterans to get on the other side of all that maneuvering that tends to undercut recognition of need for change and alternate tracks.
Image Credit: Humantific Rethinking Design Thinking, 2020, NextD Journal: Design Geographies, 2005-2024.
Apart from that hic-up the “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” book remains a good window into at least one version of ReGenerative Design, circa 2016. “The Regenerative Business” book is less philosophical, less design oriented and more directed at organizational capacity building. Certainly both have value.
Regarding the underlying orientation question; we did note that “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” book kicks off with an adaptation of the famous Einstein quote:
Our readers will know that folklore suggests that “Einstein was once asked; If he had one hour to save the world, how would he spend that hour?” His reply: “I would spend the first 55 minutes defining the problem and five minutes solving it.”
In the question driven Wahl book that quote is redepicted as: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solutions, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
At a very base level, even in redepiction, that would appear, at least on the face of it, to be a problem finding/solving/evolving orientation.
Notable is that “problem definition” was replaced in the book with the more vague/general “determining the proper questions to ask.” To be clear for our readers those are surely two different things. Asking questions is not Open Challenge Framing.
CURIOUSLY MISSING
With that introductory umbrella quote in mind it did seem a little odd that the “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” book contains no content related to how framing is actually done in such complex situations. Curiously, there also seemed to be no reference to anyone or anything in the actual, Creative Problem Solving (CPS) community that operates in parallel to the Design community. Ironically, that is where Open Systemic Challenge Framing is found. You will not find that open framing in Systems Thinking or Design. Such are the discombobulations of the Design community….:-)
In practice within the complexity arenas 3&4 it is recognized that framing challenges upstream from briefs, without assumptions baked in, is among the most important aspects of the new changemaking paradigm.
In looking at the “ReGenerative Cultures” book description on Amazon we noted reference to wide ranging problem finding.“This is a 'Whole Earth Catalog' for the 21st century: an impressive and wide-ranging analysis of what's wrong with our societies, organizations, ideologies, worldviews and cultures - and how to put them right.“
In looking at the 288 questions posed to readers in the “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” book, we noted that it never seems to get around to asking itself the rather fundamental design problem finding question: What is the difference between the new scale of challenges being acknowledged and the widespread current state of design / graduate design education?
Nor does the book ask itself: What needs to be done methodology-wise to bridge that gap, that void between perceived complexity of Arena 3 and Arena 4 and where design / design education currently remains focused.
What does this tell us about Regenerative Design?
With problem acknowledgement largely absent from the “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” book so too was any reference to the challenges around framing that design methods face in the complexity arenas. Clearly challenge acknowledgment within graduate design education remains a touchy subject.
CONSCIOUSLY OR UNCONSCIOUSLY
The slight-of-hand message that the book sends consciously or unconsciously is that Design, in particular, “Transition Design, Strategic Design and Service Design” have already overcome the framing obstacle and arrived in the future...:-)
With a sense of humor we recognize that as a form of time-bending that deflects need for change in the tenure track academies. To a significant degree, academically driven time bending has been weaponized in the opposite direction of acknowledging and embracing need for real change. Suffice it to say that not everyone involved in the Design for Complexity Movement subscribes to that misleading narrative. Let’s make that clear.
The heavy subscription to “Design” within the “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” book is not found in “The Regenerative Business” which would probably be better described as Regenerative Innovation.
“A regenerative organization enables its people to effectively address the challenges presented by today’s world.”
“A regenerative business grows the thinking capabilities and caring capacity if its members.”
"Evolve a courageous culture."
There is nothing there that contradicts practices already focused on thinking skills, inclusive culture building and changemaking capacity. Suffice it to say that in team and inclusive culture building practice there are many already operational frameworks and tools that do not appear in the “The Regenerative Business” book. We have ourselves written on the subject of inclusive culture building and enabling psychological safety many times.
THREE HORIZONS
What is included in the “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” book are numerous useful frameworks to aid in making sense of content as well as a rather heavy reference to the 3 Horizons Model, which is in the side-car circle, not core methodology.
A sync up with a broader range of already operational practitioners working in the complexity arenas (Arena 3 & Arena 4) would no doubt reveal that more is already in play in the core methodology circle and the adjoining side-car.
Image Credit: “Designing ReGenerative Cultures”, 2016.
AMBIDEX
Ambidexterity, which pops up in the “Designing ReGenerative Cultures” book linked to horizons would be one example. In real world Complexity Navigation practice, much has already been worked out in terms of how Ambidex applies to changemaking and culture building. This is knowledge not found in traditional design approaches.
Image Credit: Humantific: Ambidexterity / Multiple Simultaneous Tracks, 2005-2024
STILL FORMING
Overall the picture that appears of Regenerative Design seems to be a still forming, somewhat discombobulated combination of lite and heavy, dark and optimistic, weak and robust, already existing fragments, emerging ideas, some very serious content with enormous implications and a relatively short fuse. In terms of the R&D timeline/robustness 1 to 10 question, I would say 2 on current state methodology and 7 regarding state of content. Lets check in on this question again after we complete Part 2 of this conversation.
It seems to me that there is now considerable urgency, not just in saving the planet but in moving the state of collaborative working accross disciplines forward in a timely way too. No more time for going around in circles pretending that no change in Design methods are needed. Those days are gone.
At the end of the day Regenerative Design will want to be as robust as possible and taken seriously as it continues to arrive into, not invent, the complexity intervention party. It seems likely that it will take considerble work to get it there.
Should beer be present at such above mentioned sync ups? Question of the week!
Perhaps in Part 2 of this conversation we can each generate a list of ten most important things to consider when building regenerative capacity in organizations?
Stay tuned readers!
End Part 1.
To be continued In Part 2.
Stay tuned readers!
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