Why do we focus on regenerative Potential rather than problems?
Many people will be familiar with Einstein’ remarks on problem solving and the future. Some with Buckminster Fuller’s views. Einstein said: “The world we have created is a product of our thinking. We can’t change the world without changing our thinking. We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Bucky Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Humans are great problem-solvers. The human heart leaps towards the heroic task of being a problem-solver. In our current economy problem-solving attracts resources: both people and funds. We have many significant problems we need to address — not least climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss, soil, human and ocean health. So why then in regenerative design do we talk more about working with Potential?
All places have innate and inherent potential. So do people. So does life. There is always potential for every place to evolve to something new, something with greater capability and complexity than it had before. That’s how life works. It’s always seeking to evolve into the next best version of itself.
The problem with problem-solving.
If we think back to the post WW2 environment in Europe as an example, we know that there was a food crisis. Six years of war had a significant impact on agriculture and many countries existed on food rationing. There was an urgent need to accelerate food production.Our collective response was to look to the growing fossil-fuel byproduct industry and employ artifical fertilisers, pesticides and insecticides in ever growing quantities as a way to speed up production. It worked. But it eventually had some important and unforeseen consequences which we are dealing with today: increasingly poor soil health, pollinator population collapse, water system pollution from run off amongst those. It is easy to argue that we did not have the knowledge at the time to understand what the negative implications of the agri-chem industry would be.
Yet today, systems thinking is a more widespread discipline and we have plenty of examples now where human intervention in complex systems without due care and attention to unintended consequences, can produce even more problems that the one we set out to solve.
It is also true that our capacity as problem-solvers plays out in practice through the dominant lens of the culture of the times. For us today that’s still a mechanistic lens, where we have been encouraged to think of life as being able to be broken down into parts and components — the better to understand it, manage it and control it — and therefore outcomes to problems. When we focus on problems with a very narrow lens of parts, we miss the implications for the whole system. We miss the complexity we are working on.
So how do we work from a completely different perspective?
How do we work with Potential?
All places have innate and inherent potential. So do people. So does life. There is always potential for every place to evolve to something new, something with greater capability and complexity than it had before. That’s how life works. It’s always seeking to evolve into the next best version of itself.
We find that potential in each place by studying the deep processes and patterns that have always existed in each Place; of ecology — geology biology but also of the human system — the culture and economy that have appeared in a Place throughout time. In each era of human development those processes and patterns will emerge differently through the dominant lens of the paradigm of thought of that age. And when we see the thin red thread — the bio-cultural uniqueness that consistently emerges over time, we can ask ourselves the question of how that will manifest in the next stage of evolution of the living system — both the human system and the natural system -in that place, in harmony.
The dominant paradigm of thought in our lifetime has been a mechanistic way of thinking, that is reductionist, that wants to understand how life works by breaking everything down into its parts in order to study, manage and control it. Problem solving as a human skill which we have in abundance, only becomes a problem when you use it through the lens of parts of mechanism because when you’re focused on just one part of anything you don’t see the whole. You don’t see the whole system and what happens is you don’t see the possibility of unintended consquences elsewhere in the system.
Asking different questions
When we work with Potential instead of problem-solving, the first thing that happens is we orient our perspective towards the future. The problems we have today will have arisen from something that happened in the past. When we orient towards the future we are working in the way in which all living systems work; they evolve fowards. They are always moving forwards into the future. We ask subtly different questions.
A problem solving approach asks the question: How do we reduce air pollution in this city? Which generates a response that works to a degree. We ban high emitting vehicles from city centres. We create pedestrian areas. We charge additional costs for access by private vehicle which we reinvest into air quality measures. Whilst these have impacts, they don’t change the issue of poor public transport which pushes people into cars for convenience; nor changes the car industry to produce more affordable non-combustion products, not puts the infrastructure in place for a transition to renewable transport. A regenerative potential approach asks: What’s the potential of this city to become a healthy environment for all life to live in?
A problem solving approach asks the question How do we get our soils to produce more food more quickly? A regenerative potential approach asks the question: How do you design a healthy biotic food system in this Place?
A problem solving approach asks the question: How do we get people to stop dropping litter on our tourism beaches? A regenerative potential approach asks the question: What’s the potential to create a Place for Life in which visitors, hosts and nature experience, understand and respect each other in harmony?
When you ask a wider question, a question that is focused on where you want to go in the future, a couple of things happen.
- You are able to start to see the systemic interconnected issues that are related to your original problem
- That means you are more likely to be able to see, understand and address any potential new problems that may arise through your solution to a narrow problem.
- You are also able to take into account the eco-socio-economic context in which you are working.
Seeing, Sensing & Acting on Context
The regenerative potential of any Place lies in how it may evolve over time in service of continuing to create the conditions conducive to life. Let’s take something as simple as a park.
The potential of a park lies from its ability to add more life to the wellbeing of the human and ecological community that interacts with it. And from its ability to constantly evolve it role in adding value to that community. So in one city that may at first be about greening the city. It may also be about providing a place for children to play. It may evolve to being a place in which to being wildlife back into the city. It may be a place for community connection. It may become a place for community learning.It may be a place for all those things at once, but it will depend on the immediate need of the community in the particular place. The role of a park in the war torn streets of the suburbs of Kyiv in the future will be different from how we might design a park in a new city in China.
Let’s look at a whole island. Several different teams from the island of Jersey have been our on learning journeys involved in both food system and political and civic system. Many people when they think of Jersey think tax haven.
However, when we look at the consistent processes and patterns across ecology, culture and economy throughout the existence of Jersey as far back as we can, we see tendencies towards being able to create exponential impact from small beginnings — through the fast-growing Jersey potato, through the Jersey cow which is currently the backbone of a project in Rwanda to revitalise agriculture for women post genocide, and obviously in their capacity to manage money. We also see a consistent process of successfully integrating diversity in community, a tendency towards risk and experimentation (a colleague described it as piratical!). These are innate and inherent talents of this culture which are currently being directed towards fiscal wealth but can in the future, be directed elsewhere.
If we ask the question “What is the potential of this island to create more life?” we can turn out attention to creating actions and projects that focus on a regenerative future and away from using that innate talent and potential for extractive benefit.
The regenerative potential of Jersey lies in its ability to generate exponential impact from small resources to create more life in Jersey and in other Places around the world.
A focus on Potential helps us with Polarity
As we struggle to birth the next 3rd horizon for the human system — the regenerative horizon — we are seeing a lot of turbulence in all systems. From politics to community, the steady and vociferous eruption of polarity positions as a way of life is invading all our experience and interactions. Taking away our capacity for understanding, empathy, and partnership. Destroying our ability to move forward — as life does — into the future by keeping us locked in stagnating either/or arguments.
More dangerously in the political field, we are seeing organisations and leaders of the 1st horizon (business-as-usual) being able to take advantage of polarity politics to deliberarely drive uncertainty, mistrust and division. I am horrified by the ability of the extreme ends of politics to hijack narratives and language that is emerging on the 3rd horizon and use it against those people desperately trying to help a new way of seeing the world emerge. Just this morning, this article on the French elections caught my attention. It shows the extent to which Marine Le Pen’s organisation ‘captures’ the narrative of the real need to re-regionalise economies and redesign bioregionally to meet the dangers of climate change to a narrative of nationalism, exclusion, separation. We are already seeing the resurgence of the fracking and fossil fuel lobby in response to the Ukraine crisis. It is subtle (and often not subtle at all) but those of us who hope to see a regenerative world, must be deeply aware of how easy it is for our story to be captured and corrupted.
How does focusing on potential help? Let’s take it down to a local place-based issue. Not far from me is a large piece of land which became available for development.The local council and a housing developer planned to build 1500 homes on it. In the UK councils are mandated by government to build a certain number of houses every year to address our housing crisis, making it a legal duty to build is a response to the problem of housing shortage.
Local nature conservation groups and rewilding groups are trying to create a nature corridor through the south east to preserve nature, rewild places, and bring back biodiversity loss which is considerable here. The nature-lobby mobilised their communities to oppose the development.
What you then have is a situation in which the council and developer see the activists as a problem. The activists see the council and developer as a problem. And you’re stuck.
What we desperately need is a regenerative process which asks the question: What is the potential for this piece of land to contribute to ecological, social and economic health of this Place?
Such a question, such a process — stewarded by back bone organisations such as Donella Meadows suggested in her plan for bioregional learning centres more than 50 years ago — opens the window to an emerging future. Not through compromise but through exploration of a wholly new approach that is not an either/or solution in which parties commit to coming together to explore all the interconnecting issues. In such a process there is room for different questions:
- What’s the impact of continuous building on the use of scarce water in this region?
- What’s the impact on social infrastructure like hospitals, schools etc
- What’s the context of this development in the overall strategy for life in tis Place?
That may imply a very different role for municipalities in the future. It suggests that we need bodies to be responsible for the overall process of life in a given region. Donella Meadows suggested these might be bioregional learning centres but they could also be regional councils. We’re seeing the strengthening roles of city Mayors an collaborative work between Mayors emerge all across Europe and the US which is a collective intelligence response to addressing complexity.
Working on the Potential of the System
In regenerative placemaking we are always thinking about the potential of any place or project in a place to catalyse systemic change. Let’s take a marine regeneration project. Off the south coast where I live there is a major kelp reforestation project in process. You could say it has been created in response to a problem. Poor health in our coastal waters, overfishing for a long period which has decimated biodiversity, the challenge of being one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. It is an amazing collaborative effort.
The systemic potential of the coastal kelp restoration project lies in its ability to create a healthier ocean ecosystem, a healthier source of fisheries to bolster conomy, carbon sequestration and the ability to have a positive impact on the learning and experience potential of tourism in the area, as well as education.
In our Autumn Power of Place online learning journey we had many different teams from around the world working on projects that would catalyse systemic evolution.
One team was from Falkland Estate in Scotland. They were looking at the potential of a field — just a field — which they wanted to develop for community work. The future potential of the field lies in its ability to be a resource for conversation, learning and experimentation in order to foster a culture of experimentation in its wider community, and in connecting that process to the wider bioregion of Fife itself.
The future potential of the community food project in Jersey called SCOOP lies in its ability to first create space for a minority community (organic farmers) to enter the food system by providing an outlet which could use the food in the quantities they produce it in many different ways, secondly for the citiezns of Jersey to experience a different way of sourcing food, and eating through its experimental project to use readily available food sources like clover in green pesto as a product, then in its potential to demonstate a different approach to food systems on Jersey is viable to government, then on its potential for its leaders to facilitate discussion about the future of food on Jersey in collaboration with the government. The system shifts.
A team from Turkey were looking at 2 projects — one a series of urban roof gardens in Izmir the other a degraded flood plain in Sile just outside Istanbul.
There is a frequently dredged small river running to the coast through the town of Sile. It’s on a flood plain but its all targeted for new build. There’s very little wildlife in the area, biodiversity has dropped significantly. A problem-focused response to building on a flood plain might get you hydraulic houses that can withstand floods. But if you ask the queston ‘What is the future potential for this land to serve abundant life in the ecologial, cultural and economic life of this Place?’ — where you get to is a wildlife oasis with an ecology learning centre within it that acts as a project that brings biodiversity back to the land, addresses the problem of flood, provides an innovative educational facilitiy and a tourist attraction.
A team from Pucacaca in Peru were looking at a problem — how to restore a degraded dry forest that had once been significantly larger but had been gradually degraded by wealthy incoming new residents buying up land for farming operations. By looking at the future potential for the whole Place instead of addressing the challenge of incomers vs indigenous and local people wanting to protect the forest, the possibility of bringing the two communities together to combine their qualities, talents, abilities together to arrive at a future vision in which all could participate.
A team from Portsmouth were looking at regenerative potential for the town centre of Cosham. By understanding the ecological, cultural and economic processes and patterns of this Place, in relation to the systems surrounding it — Greater Portsmouth and the South Downs escarpment — the focus on the role of this place in connecting human communities to the land and food was much better understood.
In summary….
focusing on future potential helps us to do a number of critical things:-
- Ask better questions that lead to different outcomes
- Avoid creating future problems through solving one problem
- See the wider system and context in which you are operating
- Address the challenge of tension in polarities approaches — them vs us — in other words it addresses the story of separation that is so prevalent in our cultures humans vs nature, humans vs humans
- See the systemic impact that is possible and the opportunity of all places and projects in places to have a systemic evolutionary impact
Power of Place: An Introduction to Regenerative Placemaking Spring 2022 cohort is open for registration for individuals and teams. Individual registration closes on April 15th, teams on April 19th. The course begins on April 21st.
