Solving for Pattern

How might one design for — that is, strive to elicit — creativity or conversation? How about for civic-mindedness or community resilience? I’ve been collecting design principles: guidelines for engaging or structuring interaction.

So far, I’ve posted on principles by Jeff Leitner, Buzz Holling, Gar Alperovitz.

Here is a set by economists Herman Daly and Joshua Farley, from the book Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications: six general principles for policy design. (Descriptions are shortened, without ellipses.)

Economic policy always has more than one goal, and each independent policy goal requires and independent policy instrument.
Should we tax energy and raise its price for the sake of inducing more efficient use, or should we subsidize energy and lower its price to help the poor? One instrument (price of energy) cannot serve two independent goals (increase efficiency, reduce poverty). We need a second instrument, say an income policy. Then we can tax energy for the sake of efficiency, and distribute income (perhaps from the tax proceeds) to the poor for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Policies should strive to attain the necessary degree of macro-control with the minimum sacrifice of micro-level freedom and variability.
It is important to limit total CO2 emissions. But it is not necessary that each and every person emit exactly the per-capita average. Markets are useful in providing micro-variability, but by themselves they do not provide macro-control.

Policies should leave a margin of error when dealing with the biophysical environment.
Since we are dealing often with staying within biophysical limits, and since those limits are subject to much uncertainty and at times irreversibility, we should leave a considerable safety margin, or slack between our demands on the system and our best estimate of its capacity.

Policies must recognize that we always start from historically given initial conditions.
Even though our goal may be far from the present state of the world, the latter remains our starting point. We never start from a blank slate. Present institutions must be reshaped and transformed, not abolished. This imposes a certain gradualism. Even though gradualism is often a euphemism for doing nothing, it is nevertheless a principle that must be respected.

Policies must be able to adapt to changed conditions.
As we apply policies, we will learn how they work in the real world, and thus learn how to improve them. Adaptive management – changing our policies as conditions change and as we learn more – must be a guiding principle.

The domain of the policy-making unit must be congruent with the domain of the causes and effects of the problem with which the policy deals.
This is often called the principle of subsidiarity. The idea is to deal with problems at the smallest domain in which they can be solved.

Got a favorite set of design principles?

This morning, I mentioned Stockholm Resilience Center executive director Johan Rockström’s video about the newly proposed Sustainable Development Goals.

It’s also worth noting what he calls “the 3-6-9 reality.”

We are moving to a world of 3°C warming above pre-industrial levels.

We are living through the 6th mass extinction of species, undermining genetic diversity and ecosystem services, which are fundamental to food production and fresh water supply.

And we are committed to a world of 9 billion people by 2050.

People-planet-profit. Economy-ecology-equity. Society-economy-environment. The problem with these “three pillar” sustainability slogans is that they imply an equal weighting, a balance. And, in that balance, meaningful relationships are lost.

We all know the real deal: People depend on the planet’s life support systems, and profit only matters as it serves people — so why not develop a more accurate diagram?

Last week, in a widely-circulated Nature commentary (“Sustainable development goals for people and planet” sub. req.), along with a wave of ancillary materials, David Griggs and nine coauthors sought to set these relationships right.

They proposed for UN consideration a new definition of sustainable development (“development that meets the needs of the present while safeguarding Earth’s life-support system, on which the welfare of current and future generations depends”) and a set of six Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): thriving lives and livelihoods, sustainable food security, sustainable water security, universal clean energy, healthy and productive ecosystems, governance for sustainable societies.

They also developed an iconic image that integrates these SDGs, placing the economy within society, and society within earth’s life support system:

These dueling diagrams remind me of a story told by ecological economist Herman Daly of his time at the World Bank. From Daly’s 1997 book, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development:

The evolution of the manuscript of [the 1992 World Bank report] Development and the Environment is revealing. An early draft contained a diagram entitled, “The Relationship Between the Economy and the Environment.” It consisted of a square labeled “economy,” with an arrow coming in labeled “inputs” and an arrow going out labeled “outputs” – nothing more.

I suggested that the picture failed to show the environment, and that it would be good to have a large box containing the one depicted, to represent the environment. Then the relation between the environment and the economy would be clear – specifically, that the economy is a subsystem of the environment and depends upon the environment both as a source of raw material inputs and as a “sink” for waste outputs.

The next draft included the same diagram and text, but with an unlabeled box drawn around the economy like a picture frame.

I commented that the larger box had to be labeled “environment” or else it was merely decorative, and that the text had to explain that the economy is related to the environment as a subsystem within the larger ecosystem and is dependent on it in the ways previously stated.

The next draft omitted the diagram altogether.

Daly:

Once you draw the boundary of the environment around the economy, you have said that the economy cannot expand forever (p.7).

Since the ecosystem remains constant in scale as the economy grows, it is inevitable that over time the economy becomes larger relative to the containing ecosystem.

This transition [might be called] from and “empty world” to a “full world.” The point is that the evolution of the human economy has passed from an era in which man-made capital was the limiting factor in economic development to an era in which remaining natural capital is the limiting factor (p.49).

See also:

• David Griggs on “Redefining Sustainable Development“
• A video by Johan Rockström (coauthor on the Nature paper) on same
• Herman Daly’s blogging (at Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy)

I previously published Daly’s diagram (executed here by Wade Larsen) on P&P and wrote about this story of his in a piece entitled, “The Preanalytic Vision of Herman Daly.” I also updated this article slightly, on the day of posting.

SDGs image: Griggs et al. 2013. Sustainable Development Goals for people and planet. Nature.

It goes without saying that societies are not like firms. The dynamics are different, and expertise in business does not necessarily translate to social systems.

For facilitators or activists or designers, context shifting from one domain to the other can be tricky. Here’s one point to keep in mind. When working on social issues and using tools and techniques that were developed for a business context, it’s best to examine their embedded assumptions.

This insight forms the core of Adam Kahane’s 2012 book, Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future.

Kahane, a veteran of scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell and facilitator of the famous 1991-92 Mont Fleur Scenario exercises in South Africa, is co-founder of social innovation consulting firm Reos Partners.

In the new book, he describes distinctions between adaptive planning in a business context at Shell and the transformative planning that’s more suitable in complex social situations:

The transformative scenario planning process that was invented at Mont Fleur originated in the adaptive scenario planning process that had been invented at Shell two decades earlier — but it turns this adaptive process on its head. In an adaptive scenario planning process, the leaders of an organization construct and employ stories about what could happen in the world outside their organization in order to formulate strategies and plans to enable their organization to fit into and survive and thrive in a range of possible futures. They use adaptive scenario planning to anticipate and adapt to futures that they think they cannot predict and cannot or should not or need not influence.

But adaptive scenario planning is useful only up to a point. Sometimes people find themselves in situations that are too unacceptable or unstable or unsustainable for them to be willing or able to go along with and adapt to. In such situations, they need an approach not simply for anticipating and adapting to the future but also for influencing or transforming it. For example, an adaptive approach to living in a crime-ridden community could involve employing locks or alarms or guards, whereas a transformative approach could involve working with others to reduce the levels of criminality. An adaptive response to climate change could involve building dikes to protect against higher sea levels, whereas a transformative approach could involve working with others to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Both approaches are rational, feasible, and legitimate, but they are different and require different kinds of alliances and actions.

The key difference between adaptive and transformative scenario planning is, then, one of purpose. Adaptive scenario planning uses stories about possible futures to study what could happen, whereas transformative scenario planning assumes that studying the future is insufficient, and so it also uses stories about possible futures to influence what could happen. To achieve these two different purposes, adaptive scenario planning focuses on producing new systemic understandings, whereas transformative scenario planning assumes that new understandings alone are insufficient and so also focuses on producing new cross-system relationships and new system- transforming intentions. And to produce these two different sets of outputs, adaptive scenario planning requires a rigorous process, whereas transformative scenario planning assumes that process alone is insufficient, and so it also requires a whole-system team and a strong container.

This whole-system approach represents the first step of Kahane’s five-step transformational process:

• Convene a team from across the whole system
• Observe what is happening
• Construct stories about what could happen
• Discover what can and must be done
• Act to transform the system.

One aspect of the Kahane/Reos process that I find exciting — as I understand it from the book and from videos like this — is the way they have combined scenario planning with other types of group process techniques, including Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.

The idea of getting the whole system in the room, for example, is familiar to group process folks working with a variety of methods. It’s one of the Future Search principles, and here’s how it’s depicted on the Group Works Pattern Language deck of cards:

Another aspect of Kahane’s work and writing that I have a lot of respect for is his emphasis on what he calls in the new book “the inner game of social transformation.” I’ve used his 2000 Global Business Network publication, “How to Change The World: Lessons for Entrepreneurs From Activists” (pdf) in my systems thinking class, and it’s often a favorite with students, especially the conclusion:

This brings me to the end of my remarks and to my final point, which is about where you have to start if you want to change the world. …

Let me end and summarize with a story about a rabbi who, like me, set out to change the world. He found that he wasn’t making much progress, so he tried to change his country. This was also too difficult so he tried to change his neighborhood. When he didn’t have success there, he tried to change his family. Even that was easier said than done, so he tried to change himself. Then an interesting thing happened. When he had changed himself, his family changed. And when his family changed, his neighborhood changed. When his neighborhood changed, his country changed. And when his country changed, the world changed.

So now you know where to start. Thank you.

See also: “What do design labs look like up close?“

Could energy needs be met with renewables? Last week, a New York State feasibility study by Mark Jacobson and coauthors was released by the journal Energy Policy (pdf). In February 2011, when papers by Jacobson and Mark Delucchi examined global energy options, I took a look at their assumptions. Reprinted in full below.

Mark Jacobson (Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford) and Mark Delucchi (Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis) have authored a new pair of papers on meeting the world’s energy needs through renewable energy.

The two papers offer:

• An accounting of renewable energy provision (largely with wind, water and solar) sufficient to meet to projected global energy (electricity, transportation and heating/cooling) demand in 2030;
• An accounting of land use required in such a plan;
• An accounting of material resources required (such as neodymium, lithium and platinum);
• An accounting of current and projected annualized generation and transmission costs of the proposed WWS (wind, water, solar) system versus conventional electricity generation; and
• A portfolio of strategies for overcoming challenges of intermittancy and distribution (the wind and sun don’t blow or shine everywhere at all times).

On that last point, here is their overview of strategies for matching supply to demand:

[T]here are at least seven ways to design and operate a WWS energy system so that it will reliably satisfy demand and not have a large amount of capacity that is rarely used:

(A) interconnect geographically dispersed naturally variable energy sources (e.g., wind, solar, wave, and tidal),

(B) use a non-variable energy source, such as hydroelectric power, to fill temporary gaps between demand and wind or solar generation,

(C) use ‘‘smart’’ demand-response management to shift flexible loads to better match the availability of WWS power,

(D) store electric power, at the site of generation, for later use,

(E) over-size WWS peak generation capacity to minimize the times when available WWS power is less than demand and to provide spare power to produce hydrogen for flexible transportation and heat uses,

(F) store electric power in electric-vehicle batteries, and

(G) forecast the weather to plan for energy supply needs better.

This piece describes their assumptions about how energy demands might be met:

We have assumed that all end uses that feasibly can be electrified use WWS power directly, and that the remaining end uses use WWS power indirectly in the form of electrolytic hydrogen (hydrogen produced by splitting water with WWS power). …

[W]e assume that most uses of fossil fuels for heating/cooling can be replaced by electric heat pumps, and that most uses of liquid fuels for transportation can be replaced by BEVs (battery-electric vehicles).

The remaining, non-electric uses can be supplied by hydrogen, which we assume would be compressed for use in fuel cells in remaining non-aviation transportation, liquefied and combusted in aviation, and combusted to provide heat directly in the industrial sector.

The hydrogen would be produced using WWS power to split water; thus, directly or indirectly, WWS powers the world.

The study follows and extends on the authors’ 2009 Scientific American cover story: “A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables.”

It is one of several large-scale accounting analyses that look at the viability of replacing current energy portfolios with renewables, or with renewables supplemented by other options, such as nuclear and natural gas. According to the authors, it is the only recent plan that is global, WWS-based, and addresses all demand sectors. In 2008, David MacKay published a widely praised energy accounting for the UK, “Without the Hot Air.”

Here is the lede paragraph of the press release, as published by ScienceDaily:

If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources – nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today — why wouldn’t you do it?

The papers, in pre-press at Energy Policy, are:

• Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials (pdf)
• Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part II: Reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies (pdf)

(See also: “Intermittency and the HVDC Supergrid“)

“The significance of institutional diversity to governance systems parallels that of species diversity to ecosystems, conferring resilience to the overall social-ecological system,” write Peter Jones, Wanfei Qiu, and Elizabeth De Santo in “Governing marine protected areas: social-ecological resilience through institutional diversity,” the synthesis paper of a special issue of the journal Marine Policy.

Researchers with the Marine Protected Area Governance project, led by Jones, examined institutional “incentives” — categorized as economic, interpretive, knowledge-based, legal, and participatory — in 20 case studies of marine protected areas (MPAs) around the world, reporting on which institutions were perceived as in place and which were perceived as needed.

Greatest gap between perceived as in place (20 cases) and needed (0 cases), one of the interpretive incentives:
Public communication, education and awareness raising on the importance/vulnerability of marine ecosystems and the benefits of the MPA e.g. through newsletters, web sites, education programmes, media campaigns etc.

Greatest gap between perceived as needed (14 cases) and in place (7 cases), one of the legal incentives:
Ensuring that sufficient national-local-state capacity, political will, surveillance technologies and financial resources are available to enforce all restrictions equitably on all local and incoming users, including addressing driving forces – pressures from immigration, corporate mass tourism, fisheries market forces etc.

See also: Integral quadrants and fishery co-management

[Update: Note this special issue is currently available as corrected proofs. A list of papers is here (pdf).]

The nation seeks locations for toxic waste sites. Would you be willing to accept one near your community? How about if there were a financial compensation, a cash incentive — would that change your mind?

In the 1990s, one nation facing these questions was Switzerland, and, in a contingent valuation survey, the incentives on offer ranged from $2175 to $8700 per person.

It turns out that the amount on offer didn’t make a difference, but the offer itself did. When money was on the line, willingness to accept a waste site dropped significantly: 50.8% to 24.6% in one survey of 305 residents, and 41.0% to 27.4% in another of 206 residents.

This effect is sometimes called crowding-out, and it happens when extrinsic motivators like money or punishments undermine intrinsic motivators, such as civic-mindedness. The Swiss example comes from a 1997 paper, “The Cost of Price Incentives: An Empirical Analysis of Motivation Crowding-Out,” by economists Bruno Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee.

One group collecting a lot of research on how intrinsic and extrinsic values are experienced and expressed is the UK-based Common Cause. When I saw Ezio Manzini’s talk on quality, I thought about the 2011 Common Cause Handbook (online or pdf).

From the Common Cause blog:

Are you saying we shouldn’t talk about things in economic terms?

This approach does not suggest that any and all talk of questions of cost (say) must be dispensed with. Rather, we must be careful not to allow these considerations to dominate our discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of different policies – as though investment opportunities or the loss to national GDP were the overriding concerns.

From the online Handbook:

Early researchers into human motivations discovered a surprising consistency in the things people said they valued in life. After testing this finding many times and across many countries and cultures, they put together a list of repeatedly occurring values.

Rather than occurring randomly, these values were found to be related to each other. Some were unlikely to be prioritised strongly at the same time by the same individual; others were often prioritised strongly at the same time.

The researchers mapped this relationship according to these associations, as presented below.The closer any one value ‘point’ is to another, the more likely that both will be of similar importance to the same person. By contrast, the further a value is from another, the less likely that both will be seen as similarly important. This does not mean that people will not value both cleanliness and freedom, for example – rather, they will in general tend to prioritise one over the other. Values can thus be said to have neighbours and opposites. Based on these patterns of association – as well as their broad similarities – they were then classified into ten groups.

From the Common Cause report, “Think Of Me As Evil? Opening the Ethical Debates in Advertising” (pdf):

Experiments show that extrinsic and intrinsic values act in opposition— placing importance on extrinsic values, for example, diminishes a person’s regard for intrinsic values, and reduces his or her motivation to engage in environmentally or socially helpful behaviour. This is not to say that extrinsic values should be viewed as ‘evil’, or that we ought seek to expunge them. Rather, they are an inherent part of human nature; all people can hold all values at all times, but with differing levels of emphasis. However, the evidence strongly suggests that where extrinsic values are accorded particular importance, pro-social and pro-environmental behaviours will be undermined.

“Quality is a very powerful driver of change,” emphasized Ezio Manzini in this May 2012 talk at Social Innovation Generation.

Manzini is director of the Milan Polytechnic Interdepartmental Centre for Research on Innovation for Sustainability and will keynote the Compostmodern conference later this month.

Beginning at ~30:00:

My impression is that until now, the predominant, or the economic, managerial discussion that was in the mainstream has also been translated, in some way, to the alternative.

So we talk about alternative initiatives that are happening, mainly using the same language, the managerial, economic language. [And] if things are to work, the economy is important. …

But we have to open another level of discussion. This level of discussion is what I define as quality.

Here’s how he discussed this topic in the widely-circulated August 2011 Shareable interview:

Given the title of your magazine, Shareable magazine, I suppose that you think that to share is good. And I agree. But, what are the qualities you consider to give this positive evaluation? How do you discuss them? As a matter of fact you can share something in many different ways. We should be able to judge how much effective and economically viable each one of these different solutions could be. But also, and in my view, here is the major designers’ specific responsibility, we should have the criteria and the words to discuss different ways of sharing, endowed with different sets of soft qualities.

Image from Ezio Manzini’s slides on “Creative Communities and Sustainable Qualities“

Think of everything humans create: from languages, to social institutions, scientific theories, works of art, and all the various artifacts that populate our lives.

In philosopher-of-science Karl Popper’s 1978 lecture “Three Worlds,” he classified these products of human creation as belonging to “world 3.”

According to Popper’s schema, world 1 consists of the physical and biological world, the world of entities and forces, living and non-living, and world 2 represents our minds, the cognitive and psychological world.

“Our minds are the creators of world 3,” said Popper, “but world 3 in its turn not only informs our minds, but largely creates them.” Through us, our creations then have a causal effect on world 1. In other words, we shape our world, and our world shapes us.

Among the many implications of this model, one is the sharp distinction that it presents between scientific theories, which are part of world 3, and the various entities and forces that are scientifically referenced in worlds 1 and 2. For example, the greenhouse effect, although it references a force in world 1, is itself part of world 3, along with the plays of Shakespeare.

Also interesting is the perspective this model enables on the views of both materialists and constructivists, those who emphasize the primacy of world 1 or world 2, respectively.

While Popper offers no summary term for the various creations in world 3, in systems and design writing they would often be called “models” — as I’ve called Popper’s own creation.

It might seem odd to describe the English language, or the U.S. Constitution, or the greenhouse effect, or the plays of Shakespeare as models, per se, but this bridge to the systems and design literature lets us test the strength of some crosswalks.

For example, here’s one list of the functions of models, (slightly edited) from Gordon Lippitt’s 1973 Visualizing Change: Model Building and the Change Process (which I also referenced in a post on attributes of the designer):

1. Representation — A model can be used to represent a complex situation and to provide means of making changes in it. It may also help to uncover new relationships between variables.
2. Guidance — The model inherently provides rules or guidelines for dealing with situational variables. It can illustrate manipulative constraints and the interdependence of the variables.
3. Interpretation — A model can assist in interpreting and testing theory and in establishing a framework for experimentation and discussion.
4. Visualization — A model can be used to visualize a change process or an activity, either as an aid to the researcher or change agent, or as a teaching tool.
5. Prediction — In certain cases where experimentation is impossible, or impractical, a model can help in predicting the outcome of given events or changes. Its value in this function will be determined by the extent to which the interrelationships are accurately delineated and understood.
6. Recreation — Model building can be fun to formulate and can serve as relaxation for the change practitioner. Some of us refer to it as “professional doodling,” but it can be both meaningful and enjoyable.
7. Communication — Perhaps the reason communication is not usually included as an important function is because it is considered to be implied in a model. But communication by implication instead of communication by design may be a reason why so many models are not efficacious. A model should execute only “one-way” communication. There are three requisite components for this type of message sending: the source (model builder), the channel (the model) and the receiver (the one directly or indirectly using the model).

How well does this list cover the functions of the various types of models I mentioned?

[Update: Forgot to mention, for more on Popper’s Three Worlds, see reference below.]

Midgley, G. 2000. Systemic Intervention: Philosophy, Methodology, and Practice.

Russell, J. Y. 2010. “A Philosophical Framework for an Open and Critical Transdisciplinary Inquiry,” in Brown, V. A. et al. (eds.) Tacking Wicked Problems: Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination.

Umpleby, S., et al. 2012. The Science II Team: A Report from the 2012 IFSR Conversation Sankt Magdalena, Linz, Austria. (link pdf)