Field Notes
The proposition that forms the foundation of my ideas and my work.
Our best science — across evolutionary biology, complexity science, ecology, embodied cognition, quantum physics — converges on the same finding: we are not separate from the world we inhabit. We are expressions of it. What we do to our context, we do to ourselves. This isn't fringe or poetic — it's mainstream science across multiple disciplines.
That understanding hasn't found its way through. Our behavioural patterns, habits, modes of governance and organising still operate as though the opposite were true. These notes explore various dimensions of why — the inherited mechanistic story, either/or thinking, the echo chamber, narrow definitions of value.
At root, there's a tension built into what we are. We each have an individual ego-self — and its development is genuine and necessary. But many traditions recognise a second movement: re-situating that healthy ego within the interdependent reality of its context. We've largely forgotten how to do this, and our economy and social fabric actively disincentivise it. So we stay stuck — bouncing between polarisations of individual and collective interest rather than integrating them. That oscillation shows up everywhere: in our politics, our economics, our organisations, our relationships.
The reason we bounce between individualism and collectivism is that we treat them as competing claims — as though you have to pick a side. Multi-level selection theory dissolves that framing. It shows that selection operates at multiple levels simultaneously: what's adaptive for the individual and what's adaptive for the group are both real, both operative, both legitimate. The tension between them isn't a flaw — it's the engine of how complex living systems organise. It's always been there, at every scale.
That reframe is a critical move, because it means the task isn't choosing individual over collective or collective over individual. It's creating the conditions under which they align. My work is focused on creating those conditions, founded in the belief — backed by the Nobel Prize-winning work of Elinor Ostrom — that when we get the conditions right, groups that learn to work with the tension between self-interest and collective interest will consistently outperform those that deny or suppress either side.
Things I'm thinking about, working through, or want to share. Some of these are essays, some are conversations, some are just notes from the field.
I have — rightly or wrongly — an unshakeable belief that people want to do the right thing. That actions causing harm more often than not do so as a by-product of good intentions, often misinformed ones.
This comes in handy working in sustainability, mainly because it can often seem as though people are actively sabotaging each other’s efforts. One person wants to improve indoor air quality and proposes changes to the building code. Another wants to reduce carbon emissions and proposes different changes. Their proposals contradict each other. They end up competing.
Our logical fallacy is that this isn’t a question of either/or. It’s a question of both/and. We can have buildings that contribute to health and wellbeing and reduce carbon emissions. But first we have to stop competing and align around a shared purpose.
Most of the stuck places I’ve encountered — in projects, in organisations, in policy — share this same structure. A false choice between two things that aren’t actually opposed. Rigour or heart. Science or felt experience. Economic viability or ecological health. Individual freedom or collective wellbeing. These aren’t trade-offs. They’re failures of integration.
The either/or habit runs deep. It’s built into our institutions, our meeting structures, our decision-making processes. It fragments what is whole, and then we exhaust ourselves trying to manage the resulting complexity.
Both/and isn’t naive. It’s more demanding than either/or, because it requires holding complexity rather than collapsing it. In practice, it means slowing down enough to ask: what is each position actually trying to protect? And is there a way to honour both?
Usually, there is.
There’s a version of evolutionary theory that most of us absorbed without realising it: life is competition. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. It’s a convenient story for a culture built on market competition, but it’s a partial reading of the science at best.
The fuller picture — supported by decades of research in evolutionary biology, game theory, and the study of common-pool resource management — is that cooperation is one of the most powerful strategies in evolution. Groups that cooperate effectively outcompete groups that don’t. This isn’t a fringe position. It’s mainstream science.
Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for demonstrating something that conventional theory said was impossible: that communities can and 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 whether you’re looking at alpine meadows, fishing villages, or irrigation systems.
What strikes me about her work isn’t just the findings. It’s what they imply about human nature. We are capable of sophisticated, sustained cooperation. We do it all the time, in contexts where the conditions support it. When we fail to cooperate, it’s usually not because we’re selfish by nature. It’s because the systems we’re operating within make cooperation irrational.
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 see what happens, you revise your understanding, you make again. This is what Donald Schön called the “epistemology of practice” — a way of knowing through doing.
Design, properly understood, is this kind of epistemology. The designer isn’t studying the system from outside or executing a plan from above. They’re in a conversation with materials, 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, embodied, specific to this place, these people, this moment.
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.
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 imposition — building on, constructing over, adding to.
Reclaiming the original use: the fundamental basis of regenerative development 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?”
It applies at every scale. A building that reveals and supports the character of its site and community. An organisation that reveals and supports the unique contribution of each member. A neighbourhood that reveals and supports the particular ecology and culture of its place.
It requires a different posture. Less architect, more midwife.
Every living system 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.
For any living system to thrive — whether a watershed, a family, or a business — the parts that make it up need the conditions to become a fuller expression of what they already are. Not in isolation, but in service of the whole they belong to and depend on.
Through expressing their unique essence, they continually generate the will to engage and re-engage in the ongoing processes of evolutionary change. By doing so in a way that nourishes the whole, they ensure ongoing flourishing for all.
This process of revealing and expressing what’s uniquely yours 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 becomes the best heart it can be, and in doing so serves the body. When we suppress our unique contribution in favour of conformity, we actually deprive the systems we’re part of. They need our specific contribution, not a generic one.
Here’s what can happen when we have a strong focus on outcome:
We focus on the immediate project outcome, or on a cumulative future vision. These images 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 for that future when we started are not the same things that are required now. Blind to the context, we slowly lose sight of what is needed in the present moment. We think we know, so we continue to do what we think is best. But in all likelihood we’re now fighting against the way things are naturally evolving.
The thing is: outcomes emerge from processes. They emerge from what is. The future emerges from the present, from what exists right now.
So it follows that focusing on an outcome to the point where we ignore the process — ignore the opportunities and barriers that exist here and now — cannot lead to that outcome. Because we haven’t created the process that outcome requires in order to emerge.
The way to achieve an outcome, then, is to: identify the outcome, identify the process that leads to it, ensure that process is actualised. Then the outcome is inevitable.
It’s intuitive to many in business that if we want to be a CEO one day, we don’t get there by believing we already are one. We have a loose plan, one eye on the goal, and we assess what we need. But then we focus on now, on the reality of our life, and what we can practically do here to bridge the gap. That’s all I’m describing. But applied to everything.
Large groups of us believe a cultural narrative which tells us that, due to our supreme intellect and ingenuity, we are overlords of the natural world. To lord it over something, you have to be distinct from it, right?
The problem with making this distinction between humanity and nature is that it takes away any responsibility we may have to ensuring the ongoing health and vibrancy of natural systems.
But the science is clear on two things. First: we are deeply — more deeply than we probably know or realise — affected by the systems we exist within. Our health, our cognition, our capacity to function are shaped by the health of those systems. This isn’t sentiment — it’s biology. We have a strong vested interest in the ongoing health of our context, simply out of self-preservation. If we want our children to operate as effectively as they can, the systems they operate within must do the same.
Second: the things we build can be catalysts for positive contribution — to our own health, and to the health of the systems that surround us.
Make no mistake — the planet will go on without us. This isn’t about saving the planet. It’s about self-interest, properly understood. Recognising that we are part of larger systems, and that the health of those systems directly determines our own wellbeing and viability.
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. I’m not denying it’s true. But do we really have a right to harp on about how complex things are when we refuse to do the simple things we know we should be doing?
What simple things are we not doing? Agreeing on a shared purpose. Paying attention to the evidence — for everything from climate change to the scientifically proven benefits of certain behaviours. Empowering each other rather than competing. Questioning our own assumptions. Being honest about our motives.
These aren’t complex systemic interventions. They’re basic. And we consistently fail at them — not because they’re hard to understand, but because they require us to show up differently.
In my experience, it starts with two things. First: how we work. The basic processes, systems, and tools we use to manage and govern ourselves as individuals and teams. Most teams operate on default — inherited habits of collaboration that no one has examined or chosen. Just shifting these basics can transform what a group is capable of.
Second: how we are. Our own patterns of thought and behaviour. 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. The form matters less than the commitment.
This isn’t a detour from the “real work” of systems change. It is the real work. The things we create ultimately manifest from our patterns of thought and behaviour, and carry the same qualities — and the same flaws.
The stories that I was part of growing up 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 differed in 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.
We may yet navigate the climate crisis. But it isn’t the only crisis we face. We face a crisis of story. Of reliance on a story that tells us we are generalised, we are separate.
The truth is that we are unique, and we are absolutely interdependent.
This is one of the things I find hardest to say, because I care deeply about this work.
Regenerative practice has a problem. 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. They recirculate a limited set of case examples without subjecting them to thorough analysis. Concepts gain acceptance through repetition rather than demonstrated efficacy.
This creates an echo chamber effect. And it leaves the movement vulnerable to dismissal as aspirational or idealistic — which is a problem, because the core insights are profoundly important and scientifically grounded.
The irony is that by failing to integrate rigorously with the scientific traditions that support its claims, regenerative practice inadvertently replicates the very fragmentation it diagnoses. It becomes another silo, another in-group with its own language, when the whole point is integration.
The answer isn’t to abandon the vision. It’s to ground it more honestly in the evidence, connect it to established knowledge, and subject our own work to the same scrutiny we apply elsewhere. We bastardise words like “regenerative” and “sustainable” until they mean nothing. There’s little correlation between how frequently we use a label and the delivery of its core meaning. That has to change.
The term “regenerative” gets thrown around a lot these days, rather like “sustainability” in the last few decades. On the one hand, it’s great that it’s resonating. On the other hand, we haven’t exactly nailed the whole “sustainability” thing. Clearly there’s little correlation between how frequently we use a label and the delivery of the core meaning of the word.
Sustainability, at its simplest, means we can keep doing something indefinitely. 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. Those that adapt, survive. Those that don’t, die off.
Here’s where a lot of well-meaning initiatives go wrong. 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 a million other factors. 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.
During a site visit, a CEO was chatting about why flexibility matters. I kept noticing the same words: capability, adapting, flexible. At one point he said: “We don’t know what we’ll be doing next year.” That sentence sums up the problem with getting too caught up in outcome. It’s not a failure of planning. It’s an honest description of working in a complex system.
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. It was handed to us — through education, through institutions, through the way our cities are planned and our organisations are managed. The story says: the world is a machine. Break it into parts, understand the parts, and you understand the whole. Measure, predict, control.
It’s a powerful story. It gave us the industrial revolution, modern medicine, and the ability to put people on the moon. I’m not dismissing it. 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 living systems can’t be reduced to their parts without losing the essential qualities that emerge from their organisation. 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. 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.
By defining “value” in terms of financial capital exclusively, we deny our interventions the opportunity to affect change in the most effective ways: diversely, across multiple system levels.
When we consider adding an extension to our own home, we of course consider the financial cost. But we also consider the social cost, ensuring that the solution is suitable for our family’s needs. This is the level of considered care we need to take in all of our work.
But we don’t. In professional life, in development, in policy — value is overwhelmingly financial. The things that matter most — community cohesion, ecological health, human flourishing, adaptive capacity — are invisible in the ledger. And because they’re invisible, they get optimised away.
This connects to the bastardisation of language. When we say “value” and mean only “money,” the goalposts shift without us realising it. A “successful” development is one that returns a profit. A “performing” building is one with low operating costs. These aren’t wrong — they’re just painfully incomplete. And the things they leave out are precisely the things we most need to get right.
The shift I’m interested in isn’t replacing financial value with some other metric. It’s expanding the definition so that the full picture — financial, social, ecological, cultural — is visible in our decision-making. Not as a nice-to-have. As the basis for genuinely informed design.
We keep banging our head against a particularly stubborn wall. A wall made of bricks, reinforced with concrete and steel. We’re never getting through, yet we keep trying. We’re bloody, bruised, and fed up. And yet on and on we go lumping our head against this brutish thing.
If we look to the left, and take a few steps, barely three metres, there’s a gap in the wall, and we can walk right through.
That’s how I sometimes feel about our tendency to hold on to narrow ideas as holistic solutions.
The trends sweeping the world are signs. They’re telling us something. They’re telling us that what we’re doing isn’t working. They’re inviting us to explore, and to have fun doing it. But if we’re so focused on the outcome, on the future that “could” be created, we’ll miss the signs. We’re missing them right now.
When I talk about living systems, 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 identity while continuously adapting. They generate conditions conducive to the flourishing of the whole.
In our buildings: 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 adapt, that actively contribute to the health of the people and ecosystems around them.
In our organisations: most governance structures assume the need for centralised control — hierarchy, policy, compliance. But complex systems self-organise around shared purpose and clear feedback loops. Ostrom’s design principles for collective governance mirror what we observe in healthy ecosystems: clear boundaries, proportional rules, collective decision-making, monitoring, graduated responses.
In our communities: we keep trying to plan outcomes in advance for a future we can’t predict. Living systems don’t plan outcomes. They develop the capacity to respond — and the outcomes emerge from that capacity.
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.
What are some of the reasons people are interested in improving the built environment? Off the top of my head: buildings should contribute to our health. They should improve local ecology, not harm it. Operating costs are too high. Organisations want market-leading status. Someone loves cool technology.
That list could go on and on. The common thread is a need to improve the performance of our built environment. We can all agree on that.
The problem with focusing on the lower-level purpose — each person’s individual reason — and ignoring the overarching shared purpose is that it brings us into competition, and leads to actions that inadvertently contradict each other.
One person wants to improve the contribution of the built environment to occupant health and wellbeing, so proposes changes to the building code. Unfortunately those changes contradict those proposed by another person, who wants to reduce carbon emissions and improve portfolio energy ratings.
We can have a built environment that makes positive contributions to occupant health and wellbeing and reduces carbon emissions and improves energy ratings. But first we have to stop competing and align around a purpose.
This pattern plays out everywhere. Good people with good intentions working at cross-purposes because nobody stopped to find the shared thread. It’s one of the simplest problems we face, and one of the most consistently overlooked.