Regenerating Through Crisis: Disaster Recovery

I was recently invited to take part in a podcast for Tuelo - A new Continuing Professional Development (CPD) learning platform for architects and designers in the built environment. Janelle (Jay) Fenwick is the mastermind behind Tuelo, and interviewed me and Elizabeth McNaughton of Hummingly, a forward-thinking group focused on creating “a world where people, communities and workplaces do stress and uncertainty well. Through proven, practical tools that equip you with the adaptability to achieve positive change and the resilience to thrive even in tough times.”

This article is a summary of my reflections from the session (which you can listen to on Teulo’s website) with Elizabeth and Janelle.

Our Practices Shape Ourselves, and The Outcome

In previous articles I’ve talked about the tools and practices we use as barriers or enablers of the capabilities we need as individuals, communities and businesses to regenerate ourselves and our world. To summarise briefly, by-and-large traditional practices and tools used businesses, projects and communities aren’t designed to develop individual and collective capability, encouraging people to rely on rules of thumb, standards and templates in situations where their application may not be appropriate. These tools fail to develop the critical thinking, systems awareness, emotional intelligence and collaborative skills necessary to ensure healthier collaborative outcomes that deliver solutions suitable to address systemic challenges - which encompasses all social and ecological challenges we face.

Immediately post-natural disaster is a time when stress is high, infrastructure is damaged and life is unpredictable. This is sort of high-stress environment is well equipped to sever one or both of our connection to self (our internal compass and personal integrity) or environment (our awareness of the needs of the people and world around us), particularly without adequate tools to navigate that space in ways that encourage well-being in ourselves and enable us to empathise with others.

Hummingly work almost exclusively in that space, and have developed two awesome tools to support positive change in that context: Doing Well Cards and Cards for Calamity. Both tools are based on 15 years of experience in disaster recovery across the world, and have been used to support healthy, resilient responses in the face of disasters including the on-going Australian bushfires.

In a time of crisis, these tools offer an alternative to our default ways of operating that create the possibility of more healthy outcomes emerging. Without them, those in the midst of crisis are more likely to default to habitual ways of acting or being without conscious consideration of how useful that is in their current context.

The Built Environment Crisis

New Zealand architects, like others globally, have recently declared a climate emergency. The message is simple: “The twin crises of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss are the most serious issue of our time. Buildings and construction play a major part, accounting for nearly 40% of energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions whilst also having a significant impact on our natural habitats.” The solution is less simple.

Architect Declare list a number of things they’re focused on, like raise awareness of the climate and biodiversity crisis, encourage life-cycle costing (LCC) and collaborate to reduce construction waste.

These are all really valid, really necessary things to do, but the means by which we do these things matters.

The collective crises we face are, in part but not in total, a crisis of will. They’re also a crisis of imbalanced power and authority, whereby a limited perspective on the needs of communities and ecosystems dictate the outcome of our governance and design processes. Sometimes this is driven primarily by a profit motive, and sometimes it’s well intended and by people that are well-versed in systems thinking tools. Either way, and more often than not, it’s ultimately driven by those that have only a portion of the story required to design solutions that are genuinely equitable.

If we stay focused on raising awareness of the climate and biodiversity crisis, encouraging life-cycle costing (LCC) and collaborating to reduce construction waste without shifting the tools we use to manage our projects, collaborate as teams, and procure products and services under contract, we’re likely to avoid changing the underlying problems that led to these problems in the first place: A lack of well-being and sense of connection to ourselves, each other and our world, in part perpetuated by a lack of developed capacity to empathise with others.

Rethinking Practice in the Built Environment

In the built environment, the vast majority of projects rely on traditional approaches of project management, contract and service procurement and delivery.

A report commissioned by the Built Environment Industry Innovation Council (authored in May 2009, interesting in as much as little has changed since then!) and funded by the Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research defines traditional procurement as “a process by which the infrastructure is delivered, (in the broadest sense of the term) is still the most commonly used and constructors are compelled to tender with increasingly tighter margins to satisfy falsely aligned economic drivers.”

They further note that traditional procurement approaches can “waste a considerable amount of time and resources in certain circumstances”, and stress “a need to develop a more holistic approach to project delivery processes that drive sustainable innovation”, supporting the “need to move from traditional procurement delivery models (in their various guises) to new methods that are able to incorporate innovative change processes that are required to address sustainable outcomes.“

We need to do what Hummingly does for people facing local disasters and provide an alternative to their default, because we know where our default processes lead us, and it isn’t somewhere we want to be.

Fortunately, we have the solutions to hand, we just need to use them.

Integrating Regenerative Innovation

Integrating regenerative design into built environment designs (one of the activities Architects Declare note as a priority) requires stepping into our role as evolutionary partners in the living environments we inhabit. That requires a shift in our thought and practices that the tools of regenerative development help us with. More than simply putting “7 regenerative design principles” as the first section on our specifications without changing anything fundamental about the process we engage in, we need to engage in a process of co-discovery with our environment that allows the perspective (and needs) of broader range of people, each with their own relationship to the broader environment, to inform design outcomes.

This is where the work of DSIL Global (with whom I recently ran a regenerative design session for the Te Taari Taki / Inland Revenue NZ, discussed in another article) dovetails beautifully. DSIL work at the intersection of leadership and design practice, with a diverse range of backgrounds including world leading human-centred design (HCD) practitioners. Collectively, they have decades of combined experience facilitating co-learning journeys that enable people to develop their capacity to engage in effective collaboration for better design outcomes. Combined with my own experience in facilitation, design and sustainability the built environment, and regenerative design and development, collaborating with friends from DSIL has allowed us to offer experiential design facilitation that integrates regenerative development at the core of human-centred process. Practically, this means going on a collaborative journey of understanding the place we’re designing for in more depth, as a living, evolving being, then stepping in to a structured design process that leverages this shared understanding to design solutions that meet the needs of place and client.

Along the way, we utilise context-appropriate tools that encourage collaboration, systems-awareness and collectively positive outcomes. This includes performance-based contracts, workshops that enable collective scoping (vastly reducing scope overlap and inefficiency) and far greater transparency and efficiency in product and service procurement.

The Rise of a Compassionate Built Environment

This is just one example of a learning journey that enables individuals on a project or team to take steps towards their own regeneration, so that the project or team as a whole can begin to regenerate the world it’s apart of. Within the context of the built environment, we also need to adopt new tools that support our collaboration, design process, procurement, contracting and value-assessment that are suited to engaging with the complexity of place our projects interact with.

On the 24th July, Teulo and I will be partnering on an event to offer a platform for architects and engineers across Australia, New Zealand and the world the opportunity to engage with some practical tools to support their next steps to understanding and integrating regenerative design.

The built environment, and practitioners within it, disproportionately impact our world by transforming our environment, too often in ways that result in catastrophic nutrient, soil and biodiversity loss, the degradation of cultures, and our collective spirit and will.

It is a gift to be able to offer this work, at a time when it is so sorely needed.