There’s a version of evolutionary theory that most of us absorbed without realising it: life is competition. Survival of the fittest. The strong thrive, the weak barely survive. It’s a convenient story for a culture built on market competition, but it’s (at best) a partial reading of the science.

The fuller picture — supported by decades of research in evolutionary biology, game theory and the study of common-pool resource management — is that competition will naturally emerge when considering in-group dynamics (i.e. me versus you) but will naturally be eclipsed by cooperation in between-group dynamics (i.e. us versus them). Groups that cooperate effectively outcompete groups that don’t.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for demonstrating something that conventional theory said was impossible: that communities can – and regularly do – successfully manage shared resources without either privatisation or top-down government control. Not occasionally — reliably, across cultures, across centuries, when certain conditions are met. She identified design principles that characterise successful collective governance, and they’re remarkably consistent regardless of the context.

What strikes me about her work isn’t just the findings, but what they challenge in our current cultural belief system.

Politically and economically, many institutions are trapped in believing that human collaboration happens best either top-down (regulated by centralised entities – a position traditionally viewed as leftist/progressive) or via free-market dynamics (a position typically associated with neoliberalism). That in itself tends to be based on a misunderstanding of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons – which described an unregulated market, not a commons.

Ostrom’s research – and much research since – shows not only that we are capable of sophisticated, sustained cooperation, but how to do it effectively in ways that outcompete alternatives.

That reframe changes everything. The question isn’t “how do we make selfish people cooperate?”

It’s “what conditions enable groups to do what they’re actually quite good at?”

There’s an assumption in most professional life that knowledge comes first and application follows. You study, you plan, you analyse — and then you act, based on what you know.

In complex, indeterminate situations, it works the other way around. Knowledge emerges through iterative cycles of action and reflection. You make something, you do something, you act – then you see what happens, you revise your understanding, and you act again. This is what Donald Schön called the “epistemology of practice” — a way of knowing through doing.

Design at its best is understood as a kind of epistemology. The designer isn’t studying the system from outside or executing a plan from above. We’re in a conversation with the places we design for – contexts, and people — making, reflecting, revising, learning.

This matters because it offers a way of working within complexity that neither abstract systems thinking nor conventional project management can. It generates knowledge that is situated as we engage: embodied, specific to this place, these people, this moment. That can then inform how we act in that place, enhancing the quality of what we design and improving market fit.

It’s also why this work can’t be done at arm’s length. The quality of what emerges depends on the quality of the practitioner’s participation — their perception, their responsiveness, their willingness to be changed by the process. My own journey through engineering, then systems thinking, then embodied practice reflects this. Each phase gave me tools.

But it was only in the third — engaging directly, through practice, in living situations — that knowing and being began to converge in ways that help me navigate complex environments with a level of ease and (dare I say it) joy.

The word “development” comes from the Old French “desveloper” — meaning to unwrap, to unveil, to reveal the meaning of. It’s the opposite of how we use it now. We use “development” to mean building on, constructing over, adding to – imposing our ideas of what something should be onto it.

Reclaiming the original use: the fundamental basis of regenerative development – as put forward by long-term partners in practice Regenesis Group – is the unveiling of the unique essence of living beings in a way that enables continual rebirth to express hidden potential and ultimate purpose.

That’s a fundamentally different design brief. Instead of asking “what should we build here?” it asks “what is this place? What wants to emerge? How do we support its expression?”

This might sound abstract, but we all have an experience of it. The simple fact – which can be checked in your own experience – is that living beings don’t like to be cajoled or manipulated into outcomes that aren’t intrinsic (in some indescribable way) to the way they want to move and grow in relation to their environment.

Give it a go: Try and impose your will onto your partner, child or business partner to force them into a shape or way of being you determine is best for them.

See how it goes.

Every living organism is simultaneously a whole and a part of a greater whole. My heart is a whole in its own right, and it is a part of the whole that is me. I am a whole, and part of a family, a community, a watershed, a biosphere. The sense of separation we experience day-to-day is real for us, but not real in any true, objective sense. This is clear in every branch of science, and can be easily verified in our direct experience with a bit of effort.

For any living being to thrive — whether a watershed, a family, or a business — the parts that make it up need conditions that allow each one to become more fully what it already is — not in isolation, but in service of the whole they belong to and depend on.

By tuning into who I am beneath ideas and stories about who I am, and following my curiosities in ways that add value to my broader context, I increase my sense of vitality (in a process psychologist Carl Rogers called the ‘actualising tendency’) — and secure my own viability as a vital organism in that environment. Over time, I become structurally coupled to that environment such that its movement towards growth and evolution is aligned with my own.

This is the dance of regeneration.

As organisms become structurally coupled to their environment — expressing their vitality in ways useful to the systems they share — the vitality of the system overall increases. Living systems are open systems that maintain local order by drawing on energy from their environment, freeing increasing energy for complex, meaningful work. This process compounds, provided vitality is allowed to express through each unique contributor and viability is encouraged so the whole remains structurally coupled in generative ways.

This process of tuning into, revealing and then expressing what is uniquely you beneath stories or ideas you or others may have of you may seem like a selfish enterprise. It’s actually the most selfless act we can engage in. A heart doesn’t try to be a lung. It is and is ever-becoming heart the best that it can, and in doing so serves the body. When we suppress our unique contribution in favour of conformity, we deprive the systems we’re part of. They need our specific contribution, not a generic one.

We all have a deep and intrinsic desire to improve in our lives, and to see improvement in the context we’re part of. We’re wired to move toward the expression of potential — and to want that for the context we’re part of. Famed 20th century psychologist Carl Rogers called this the actualising tendency.

While most of us can connect with this drive on some level, working with it in useful ways can prove challenging when we each hold vastly different, and mostly invisible, stories about ourselves, our world and what “good” looks and feels like.

In the built environment, there are constant debates about the direction we should be heading in; the things we should be prioritising.

Should Central Government regulate building standards to mandate better outcomes for residents and buyers?

Or should that be left to the private sector to self-organise based on market forces?

The common thread is a desire to see improvement in a direction deemed worthwhile by someone.

And while each of these are valuable in some sense from a particular perspective, they fail to work with what we actually are: social animals whose behaviour is shaped by meaning, story and group identity.

The work of ProSocial World – built on the Nobel Prize winning work of Elinor Ostrom – gives us a framework to see that there is a way through this ineffective landscape, where ever-competing opinions about what good looks like and the right way to get there keep us stuck.

The process sounds fairly simple: Set the context in ways that work with rather than against our evolutionary biology, such that we are more incentivised to collaborate towards common goals that secure our biological viability and enhance opportunities to express our potential. In this way, our group becomes more viable than other groups stuck in ineffective competition driven by self-interest or individual opinion – and over time, the groups that get this right outcompete the groups that don’t.

Much of the last century has been defined by the push and pull between market-driven individualism and collective drives for equality, rights and redistribution — two sides of the same evolutionary tension between self-interest and group interest.

I believe the next phase will be defined by our growing capacity to work with that tension consciously, rather than be trapped by it — to design the conditions in which individual expression and collective flourishing stop competing and start compounding.

There’s a pervasive cultural narrative that tells us that – due to our supreme intellect and ingenuity, our big prefrontal lobes and capacity for executive function – we are overlords of our world. Separate from, and sitting on the top of the evolutionary pyramid. The evidence is all around us.

The problem isn’t just that it’s wrong — it’s that organising around it blinds us to our actual capacities.

We are deeply — far more deeply than most of us know or realise — affected by the systems we exist within. Our health, our cognition, our capacity to function are shaped by the dynamics of those systems. This isn’t sentiment — it’s biology. We are not only social creatures, but contextual creatures. I am who I am because of the way I instinctively respond to my environment. Different environment, different me. This tendency to separate ourselves from our environment leaves us operating in a fairly clumsy manner without that capacity to act and respond in skilful ways in response to our environment, including the ways it shapes us and evokes responses in us.

That narrative is both wrong and costly.

Our capacity for executive function and our capacity for social cooperation are two of the defining features of our species. Combined with our capacity for imagination, they give us the capacity to achieve mind-bending things beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams.

But we’re still very immature in learning how to harness those abilities in predictably useful ways. I believe we’re getting better at it, and that this will be one of the defining patterns of the 21st century.

AI is perhaps the clearest current example. For the first time, we’re confronted with something that can replicate many of the cognitive feats we’ve used to rationalise our sense that we’re at the top of the hierarchy. In doing so, it’s inviting us to reckon honestly with what actually makes us distinctive. Not raw processing power or information retrieval, but the relational, contextual, collaborative intelligence that emerges between us.

Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work showed us this isn’t just aspiration. Later built on by the pioneers at ProSocial World, her work demonstrated the conditions needed to enable us to harness collaboration as a competitive advantage in the world. It’s a framework I return to often in my own work.

Get the conditions right, and we stop fighting our nature — and start working with it.

I’m pragmatic, and I love outcomes – but focusing too tightly on them can cause issues.

Say we focus rigidly on an immediate project outcome, or on a cumulative future vision. We experience the outcome we’re striving towards or the vision of the future as internal images; images that colour our actions and perceptions. We make decisions that we believe will push us towards that future. Meanwhile, the real-time context we’re working in is constantly shifting.

The things that were necessary to move us towards that future from where we were yesterday are not the same things that are required today. Context changes over time, always.

Blind to the context, we risk slowly losing sight of what is needed in the present moment. Over time, we risk moving way off course and ending up at a destination we never intended to move towards.

We think we know – based on our experience, our history, our understanding and (often) our sense of deficiency that makes us somewhat desperate to be certain and right – so we continue to do what we think is best. There’s often a subtle anxiety underneath goal-orientation that makes us grip tighter precisely when loosening would serve us better.

A fit and healthy Ben emerges from a particular pattern of living that involves (but is more than any one of) how I eat, move my body, interact with my friends and peer and more.

Another way of saying this: Outcomes emerge from processes. They emerge from the sum-total of what is.

So it follows that focusing on an outcome to the point where we ignore the process — ignore the opportunities, barriers and dynamics that exist here and now — risk leading us away from that outcome, no matter how determined our mind is to move us closer to it.

Instead, my experience is that working with outcomes as a ‘vector’ – a north-star that we’re heading in the general direction of, but that we never mistake for an actual destination – can help us align and move forward in useful ways, while remaining responsive and open to the road leading us somewhere we hadn’t expected (but that may nevertheless enable the things we hoped to see in our imagined future).

The map is not the territory.

But it’s still useful to know which direction is north.

So often are we reminded that we are living in a time of rapid and accelerating change that you’d have to have been living under a particularly dense rock to not know the narrative by heart. Every generation faces its own version of this story.

And to what degree has our commitment to this narrative paralysed us from doing the simple things in the present that might actually change things for the better?

Our society is not some abstract thing that we are powerless in the face of. Yes, there are forces and dynamics at play that oppress many of us and put us in positions that limit our power. And yes, that is an awful, soul-draining position for anyone to be in.

But when we believe we are powerless in the face of the dynamism of the world, the effort required to muster our energy and show up and play our part in that dynamism grows.

I am white, cis-hetero, male and english-speaking. These things all confer a certain and very real tailwind that others may not experience.

At the same time, I grew up in a family with extensive intergenerational trauma, and experienced plenty of my own while growing up in a country trying to find its way through the fog of generations of war.

What worked for me may not work for others. For me the simple act of getting outside of the stories in my mind and taking small, tangible steps each day to show up and contribute to the world around me slowly started to rebuild a sense of agency in the face of forces I felt powerless against – and sometimes still do.

We strengthen neural pathways through repetition, and the path of least resistance keeps us thinking what we’ve always thought. Breaking these habits requires effort — and some form of practice.

We can’t think our way to change.

We have to engage with the world and remember the fact of our presence and our capacity to participate.

The stories that I was part of growing up – those I inherited and those I authored myself to navigate my early life – told me that the world can be standardised and generalised into generic categories that we all fit into. That story led me to believe that there was such a thing as an “ideal” human — one in perfect physical health, who didn’t struggle with mental health, and was utterly boring in every way. That was the image of humanity I carried, and anything that differed was flawed.

Well, I differ in many, many ways. My conclusion: I was flawed.

It continues to take a lot of effort to cultivate the awareness to see these stories for what they are. Then it takes effort to develop the capability to challenge them — to say “I see this story, and the role it plays, and I see that it’s no longer helpful.” And then it takes effort to change the narrative to one that reflects the way things actually are, so that I can choose my responses rather than reacting automatically.

Our blindness to this story (and others) keeps us trapped in a crisis of imagination: We repeat the same patterns and outcomes without realising that our actions are largely dictated by old stories looping on repeat.

This shows up in everything we do, including our built environment – and changing it isn’t simply a matter of thinking our way to new stories. Even our capacity to imagine something new is shaped by stories running unconsciously in the background.

That’s a big part of the reason we started Living Systems Development.

By building tangible, concrete examples of something new that people can feel, touch and be changed by, we hope to expand our stories from the outside in.

The world has a lot to learn from regenerative science — and yet I found myself veering off from a community that significantly shaped me.

Too often, regenerative “frameworks” operate in isolation from established scientific traditions — despite natural alignments with complexity science, ecology and embodied cognition. They derive legitimacy from values and vision rather than systematic investigation and grounding in direct experience.

Since I first encountered regenerative design 15 years ago, many of these concepts have gained acceptance through repetition rather than demonstrated efficacy, critique and observation with how the world actually works.

The risk is two fold:

First, it creates an echo chamber effect. In turn, this leaves the whole notion of regeneration vulnerable to dismissal as aspirational or idealistic — which is a problem, because the core insights are profoundly important and scientifically grounded.

Second, it leads to regeneration as a culturally-defined meme that is largely disconnected from the scientific and ontological realities that underpin the term and that point to the process it intends to describe. This adds to the ease with which it is dismissed as the culture surrounding it is poorly equipped to deal with critique, and to develop in a thoughtful, lasting way.

The irony is that by failing to integrate rigorously with the scientific traditions that support its claims, regenerative practice can inadvertently replicate the very fragmentation it diagnoses. It could become just another silo, another in-group with its own language, when the whole point is integration.

The answer isn’t to abandon the symbolic vision.

It’s to ground it more honestly in our experience, the available evidence, to connect it to established knowledge, and to subject our own work to the same scrutiny we apply elsewhere.

The term “regenerative” gets thrown around a lot these days, much like “sustainability” in the years and decades before. On the one hand, it’s great that it’s resonating. It gives us a common language to articulate something missing from our current approaches and practices, which helps us collaborate on filling that gap.

On the other hand, it feels like we often lose something when we reduce our understanding of the regenerative processes that orient life’s evolution and organise energy on Planet Earth. There’s always a risk that we orient more to the symbol of regeneration, rather than recognise and participate in the lived process of regeneration all around us in each moment.

The labels are helpful, but it’s helpful to be explicit on their meaning so we know where we stand with each other and in reality.

Sustainability, at its simplest, means we can keep doing something indefinitely. It implies a desired, static outcome. Something is sustainable and can persist over time, or it isn’t.

Regeneration, then, could be thought of as the process by which we remain sustainable in relationship to our context. In biological systems, it’s the way a cell or complex organism adapts in response to its changing environment – organising energy in such a way as to create increasingly vital conditions conducive to diversities of organisms to evolve in structurally coupled ways.

Regeneration isn’t a destination but a process of ongoing adaptation to a context that’s always changing — which is states like sustainability can’t be designed for directly.

In other words, regeneration is the mechanism by which life navigates complexity, and thus by which sustainability is achievable as a dynamic, evolving state. You cannot arrive at it. You can only participate in it.

We keep trying to design for a future we can predict. But in a complex world, outcomes emerge from processes. They emerge from a combination of time, place, circumstance, people, and our context as a whole. Focusing on an outcome to the point where we ignore the process cannot lead to that outcome — because we haven’t created the conditions from which it could emerge.

The future isn’t something we arrive at.

It’s something we’re always in the process of creating, right now, through the quality of our attention and the integrity of our response.

We carry a story about the world that most of us never chose and aren’t even aware of. Part of it was handed to us — through education, through institutions, through the way our cities are planned and our organisations are managed. And part of it we constructed ourselves, as we were growing up, to help us navigate the world we found ourselves in.

Part of the story we inherited says: the world is a machine. It is a series of connected parts, and if you can understand the parts, you understand the whole. Measure the parts, predict how they change over time, control outcomes and your own future.

It’s a powerful story. It gave us the industrial revolution, modern medicine and the ability to put people on the moon. But it is a story — a particular way of seeing — and the science it was built on has moved a long way since Newton.

Quantum physics disrupted deterministic certainty at the subatomic level over a century ago. Complexity science shows us that complex, adaptive systems can’t be reduced to their parts without losing the essential qualities that define them. Evolutionary biology reveals that cooperation — not just competition — drives the development of life. Embodied cognition demonstrates that thinking doesn’t happen in our heads alone; it’s shaped by our bodies, our relationships, our environments.

The converging evidence across disciplines points in the same direction: life is relational, contextual, emergent and participatory. Interconnected parts don’t make a whole frog, but somehow, in a way we don’t yet fully understand, the pattern of the fully developed frog exists before the organism does — and the parts organise to express it as best they can given the context and resources available.

The mechanistic worldview that still dominates our institutions isn’t the “rigorous” position. It’s the inherited one — persisting through institutional inertia long after the science moved on.

This matters because the stories we carry shape what we can see.

And what we can’t see, we can’t work with.

When I use the term living system, I’m not reaching for a metaphor. I’m pointing at the most sophisticated model of adaptive organisation we have access to — one that has been refining itself for roughly 3.8 billion years.

Living systems — from cells to ecosystems — share characteristics that our institutions desperately need: they sense and respond to their environment in real time. They self-organise without central control. They maintain a cohesive identity while continuously adapting. They generate conditions conducive to the flourishing of the whole they belong to.

In our built environment, we continue to design as if a building is a machine that processes inputs and outputs. But a building exists in dynamic relationship with its occupants, its climate, its ecology. When we design with that understanding, we get buildings that are emergent from their context, with the capacity to adapt over time, actively contributing to the health of the people and ecosystem around them.

In our organisations, most governance structures assume the need for centralised control — hierarchy, policy and compliance. In complex settings, these structures often prevent us from responding to a changing context. Complex systems self-organise along mutually beneficial vectors, adapting in response to feedback loops. Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work on collective governance — later built on by ProSocial World — demonstrates this directly: the conditions that produce cooperative, adaptive behaviour in human groups mirror those found in healthy ecosystems. Cooperation, it turns out, confers a competitive advantage over purely self-interested behaviour.

In our communities, we keep trying to repeat the same narrow design and delivery approaches that presume to know what a community values and needs before taking the time to understand what value means in that context. When we start instead from genuine curiosity about a place — its history, its ecology, its people — the resulting design is more appropriate, more resilient, and more likely to be cared for over time.

This isn’t a fringe position. Complexity science, evolutionary biology, ecological systems theory, and embodied cognition have been converging on these conclusions for decades – reinforcing positions emerging in quantum physics and other fields. What they share is a recognition that the properties we most need to understand — resilience, adaptation, emergence, coherence — cannot be observed by reducing a system to its parts. They are properties of the whole, arising from relationship. The mechanistic framework that still dominates our institutions isn’t the rigorous position, just the one we’ve inherited.

The science isn’t asking us to abandon rigour.

It’s asking us to apply rigour to what’s actually in front of us: living, adaptive, relational systems — including ourselves.

I have — rightly or wrongly — an unshakeable belief that people want to do the right thing. We act in the ways we believe are right, as informed by our upbringing, the ideas we inherited and the stories we developed to help us navigate our childhood and early development. Actions causing harm appear to make sense from the perspective of the person enacting them, but cause harm because of the limitations of that perspective and everything it fails to consider.

Earlier in my career, this view came in handy.

Every contributor to a project is always offering the right thing from their perspective. The key challenge is understanding whether or not our perspectives are aligned – or even compatible – and working effectively with that reality.

Many approaches to doing things in the world – whether events, projects or businesses – pit perspectives against each other in a fairly clumsy way, or fail to acknowledge them in the first place. The consequence of not surfacing perspectives is that people pull in different directions and shared resources are under-utilised and under-leveraged.

Most of the stuck places I’ve encountered — in projects, business and social groups — share this same structure: Well-intended contributors with incentives that aren’t aligned working in structures that fail to make visible or align incentives towards a shared outcome in useful ways.

Alignment imposed from outside doesn’t hold because it sits on top of – rather than working with – people’s actual motivations. When push comes to shove, people will act in the way they believe to be in the best interests of them or their group (depending on how they identify and relate to their world).

Rather than trying to impose an outside and abstract shared purpose, in my experience it’s helpful to have a broad north-star (a vector; not a destination) that helps to guide progress – and provides a reference for when you are on or off-track) – and to create conditions for psychological safety and vulnerability such that intrinsic values are at least somewhat visible, and so we can structure the relationship between those values and the incentives in our shared space in useful ways.

This doesn’t mean spending lots of time up-front to generate an artificial shared alignment, but reckoning honestly with the incentives on the table and having the capacity for frank, honest discussion about what matters to us — then structuring our ways of working to suit.