Core Report Part 1 – What Would Nature Do? Designing an Ecosocial Design Course for Popular Education

What Would Nature Do? (WWND) is an applied systems thinking course intended for education in the general population.  It is designed to provide students with a practical understanding of Ecosocial Design that they can immediately use in their personal and professional life, and in service to their community, society, and the planet.  This course combines essential learnings from Permaculture Design & Theory U with key tools and concepts from other design and systems thinking methodologies to give students a better understanding of the world and their place in it. Further, WWND guides students on how to design interventions that create the changes they desire in their lives and in the world.  Configured as a short intensive for people with busy lives, the entire 25 hour curriculum can comfortably take place in a few short sessions over days or weeks.

WWND fills a void in popular systems thinking and ecological literacy education.  Excluding online offerings, the most common option for people to gain this knowledge is through the well-established Permaculture Design Course (PDC).  While an excellent program, a typical PDC requires a significant commitment of time and money  with courses usually running 80 to 100 hours over several months and costing in the $1,500 range for tuition. These commitments can be prohibitive for many, especially if they are unsure if the course is appropriate to their needs.   And indeed, it may not be for everyone: with its emphasis on land design, the lessons of the PDC can be difficult to translate into other arenas. At 25 hours and around $500 (with scholarships, student rates, and other discounts available), WWND offers an introduction to similar material at a fraction of the commitment.     

Because many of us were educated to value the memorization of facts over understanding system, the dominion of humanity over nature versus how we fit into nature, and  competition for scarce resources rather than how to collaborate to create resources, many of us arrive into adulthood bewildered by the complexity of the world and its challenges. We’ve been trained to understand the parts, but we fail to grasp the whole.  Our culture’s insistence that we see ourselves as separate from nature and each other, an egocentric worldview, leaves us isolated.  We exist in conflict with ourselves, with each other, and with the greater world when we know in our hearts that the answers lie in harmony.  

What Would Nature Do? provides a new perspective.  By developing our abilities in the three key areas of systems thinking, ecological literacy, and personal development, this course enables us to appreciate the interconnections of our world and see our place in it.  Patterns emerge where before there appeared only chaos or disconnection, and in these patterns the relationships that make up our personal ecosystems come into view. The facts, figures, and history lessons we learned in school can be understood in a greater, nuanced context.  They take their place as part of a web of interactions that we can see, understand, and influence. Our world begins to make a kind of sense it never had before and we begin to understand how to change it.

While it would have been perfectly possible – and indeed easier – for Emma and I to run this course without the participation of other collaborators, we chose to bring in six additional people.  There are several reasons for this.  First of all, we wanted to model one of the core concepts of the course: interconnection.  We promote the idea that all of us are operating within complex ecosystems and that we need to learn to read and work with the patterns and flows in those ecosystems.  For Emma and me, each of these collaborators (including each other) is an important part of our ecosocial action network.  Including them in this program is a way to acknowledge their influence and expose the students first hand to important sources of knowledge and inspiration.  This is good ecological design:  in creating a direct link between the students and these individuals (rather than being the conduit of their knowledge) we increase the number of connections in our social network.  More people that are more interconnected creates more possibilities (for each pair relationship has its own emergent properties) and more resilience (because more deeply interconnected ecosystems are more resistant to disruption).  Finally, there is a simple act of acknowledgement and reciprocity.  By including these guests we are acknowledging the contributions they have made to our thinking and providing them with a platform to spread their wisdom further.

A final comment on collaboration is that good collaboration strengthens the outcome of any project.  The basis of the collaboration between Emma and me, for instance, is that we have similar interests and goals, and some overlap in our knowledge, but different approaches to design and ways of thinking, including blind spots.  By combining our abilities we bring an enriched set of tools, the possibility to think about them in new ways, and the ability to hold a mirror up to each other's blind spots and biases while also acknowledging and highlighting each others genius.  The outcome of a successful collaboration is something that is greater than the sum of the parts because it exalts each of our strengths while softening our challenges.   

WWND was born of our experience co-designing and co-facilitating Communities for Change in 2017 and 2018 as part of a larger team.  Although Emma Ruffin and I were both well-versed students and users of Theory U by the time we came to facilitating C4C,  we developed a different understanding of this model through teaching and facilitating it as a group process for collective impact.  We came to understand its strengths and shortcomings in new and poignant ways (which I detail more explicitly in the appendices).  In particular, the strength of Theory U’s personal development focus stood out, as did its weakness in providing an explicit framework for ecological literacy.  Theory U is also often criticized for using language and concepts that prove elusive or even alienating to the average person.

From our lens as Permaculture designers, Emma and I hold an appreciation for the approachable, clear, and concise way that this methodology teaches ecological literacy.  In facilitating C4C we regularly discussed how elements of Permaculture might fill gaps in the C4C curriculum, and even brought in elements of that to help explain difficult concepts on a few occasions.  The complementarity between Theory U and Permaculture left a lasting impression on both of us after the program concluded. 

A Permaculture principle exhorts, “use and value renewable resources,” and after the Impact Hub Academy closed due to financial difficulties, we decided to carry forward the important work that we had done in developing Communities for Change and to incorporate the refinements we’d discussed. The result was What Would Nature Do?, a course which seeks to combine the successes from Communities for Change with the strongest attributes of Permaculture Design. 

Reasoning that we must practice what we preach, Emma and I settled on Theory U as our design process.  While useful as a design methodology for a wide range of projects, Theory U (read this primer for more) is often described as a "change leadership method," making it particularly appropriate for our work designing a project about engaging with change.   We allowed ourselves approximately six months to engage and build the curriculum around the Theory U stages of Co-Initiating, Co-sensing, Presencing, and Crystallizing Vision and Intention.  This process of “descending the left side of the U” confirmed to us that we were on the right track, and we proceeded into the Prototyping and Co-Evolving stages. Arguably, we remain in a cyclical pattern between Prototyping and Co-evolving as we reiterate and refine our content, which all teaching and curricula should do.  Following I explain how we engaged each stage in more detail. 

The essence of this stage lies in deciding to do something and then finding like-minded collaborators.  In many ways, Co-Initiating began the moment that Emma and I started discussing how to bridge the wisdom of Theory U and Permaculture.  It became intentional once the Impact Hub Academy informed us that they were unable to run Communities for Change again, prompting us to have a serious conversation on carrying this material forward. This led to our formally expressing our intention to create a new course together and outlining how we wanted to work.  Then began the work of Co-Sensing.

This stage starts with overcoming what Theory U calls Downloading, which is the tendency to fall back into old patterns and beliefs.  This means working to access a true Open Mind and to engage with Factual Listening to effectively understand the field one is exploring without bias.

Image:  C4C/WWND process map

An important part of this process for Emma and me was to get past what we individually and collectively believed to be true about Permaculture and Theory U and lean into what we had learned from our experiences and participant evaluations from Communities for Change. As a principal reference point, we made a large format paper map of the C4C journey populated with a detailed syllabus from each day with our review notes on what went well, what was challenging, and what we thought (at the time) our next steps should be. We then added our personal thoughts on conclusions, refinements, and possible next steps.  We kept this map on the wall for several months as we continued to work on it.

Having established a foundation of “lessons learned,” we populated this map with what new content we either thought was lacking from the original course or needed substitution.  A majority of the new material came from the field of Permaculture Design.  

We then considered new content from various systems design authors which influence us.  In addition to icons of Permaculture such as Looby McNamara, David Holmgren, and Bill Mollison, we drew heavily from Adam Brock’s work on applying Permaculture to social processes.  With regard to pure systems thinking and design, the Disruptive Design method of Leila Acaroglu provides a concrete and workable approach to designing interventions that nicely complements both Theory U and Permaculture. On a more esoteric note, adrienne marie brown’s [sic] intriguing  Emergent Design emphasizes engaging with disruptive change in creative ways.  Finally, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass brings important lessons on bridging indigenous wisdom and Western Science. 

As a final step, we shared our process with various individuals whose knowledge and experience we respect for feedback and ideas.

Throughout this process of vetting and combining materials from various sources we remained attentive to our Factual Listening and Open Mind skills by checking in with the following questions:  Why do I/we think this material is important? What purpose does it specifically serve? How can I/we teach it competently? Why is it necessary? Do we know of something different that would work better?  What would happen if we didn’t include it?

Short of actually designing the course, what we had achieved at this point was a keen understanding of what the state-of-the-art of this knowledge was.  Leaning into the work of teachers on the cutting edge of this field and comparing and contrasting their offering with our baseline of knowledge, enabled us to know what was possible and appropriate to teach, identify content gaps, and where our own knowledge and processes fit into the whole.  The decisions on whether and how to actually pursue this idea would reveal themselves in the coming stages.  

A remaining question was whether and where this knowledge was needed.  Should we create a course? If so, who would it be for? Was it our own fascination with this material that was driving us, or was there a real desire for it?  True Empathic Listening, engaging the Open Heart of Theory U, required us to pursue these questions, and the answers to many are still unfolding. Without a prototype to work with it was too early to perform audience tests (these would come later, in prototyping), but in the spirit of working with what we had we considered who our stakeholders were.  Among the list we found:

• Earth and its ecosystems.
• Communities looking for skills and tools to tackle wicked problems.
• Individuals seeking for new ways to look at their lives
• People frightened or frustrated by a challenge in their lives and looking for solutions
• Business leaders wanting to infuse their work with higher purpose

We reached out to colleagues, friends, and family to probe them with some of our notions.  In these informal conversations we were uniformly met with curiosity and encouragement. We acknowledge that this process of empathic inquiry fell short of identifying the true needs, wants, and desires of our potential audiences.  Such was our focus on what we perceived as the needs of the Earth and Society that we may have been blind to the needs of the individuals that might actually take our course, a myopia which no doubt played a role in our challenges to market this course. 

If Co-Sensing is a divergent process of exploring as much different information as one can find on a topic, then Presencing becomes the convergent process of making sense of that information.  There are many ways to do so, but Presencing asks something special from us. Rather than rushing to a solution or forcing an outcome, asserting our will in other words, Presencing asks us to have an Open Will and let go of outcomes.   An Open Will is central to this stage as we put aside our personal desires for outcome and ask ourselves these questions: What is my (our) Self? What is my (our) Work? Only in this way can we be sensitive to what is truly needed and thus become conduits to the future that wants to emerge through us.

It is important to understand that the Stages of the U are not always clearly delineated and often overlap.  This Presencing process had been underway ever since the end of C4C and the demise of the Impact Hub triggered a period of reflection of “what’s next?” and “what do we do with this knowledge and this product that we’ve created?” 

Fast forwarding to our adoption of the Theory U process to help us answer our questions, we transitioned into Presencing with our minds and hearts full of information from Co-Sensing.  In truth it is hard to discern whether we ever achieved true Open Will, as our intention to do something with this material was very powerful.  Nevertheless, taking advantage of the winter holidays as a natural time for retreat and reflection, we allowed ourselves some time apart from each other and from the act of seeking, letting the knowledge percolate.  To give ourselves a little boost, we assigned ourselves the mindfulness and guided journaling practices for stepping into the field of the future from the U Lab Sourcebook (pp.30 & 31). 

We reconvened in January, 2019 to find that we had reached similar conclusions to each other:  that we both wanted to continue what we had started, and that the best way to do so would be to build on the successes of C4C and strengthen that content by incorporating those aspects of Permaculture Design that would best meet the weaknesses we’d perceived.  The next step was to clarify the vision.

Crystallizing is the transition between reflection and action.  Here the reflection we have done during Presencing gives way to a process of discerning our vision and intention.  From a successful crystallization process we will discern long and short-term visions and intentions. It is from these that our initial ideas for prototyping will emerge.

To a certain degree, the outcome of our Crystallizing process was predetermined by our intention to build on the successes of C4C.  The Permaculture Principle of Use Small and Slow Changes guided us to temper our enthusiasm for incorporating too much change.  Building on the extensive work of our Co-Sensing phase, we facilitated each other in a process of imagining an ideal outcome.  What emerged was a collective vision for a course that would (a) bridge the gap between individual action and systemic change, and (b) provide students with a clear and understandable process that they could use immediately and that could be learned with a minimal commitment of time and money.  With this clarity of vision and intention, we began developing our first prototypes.

With our vision clear we can begin prototyping our ideas.  The point of prototyping is to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible, which is best done by starting small and simple.  Not over-committing to any one idea allows us to re-iterate often and thus generate more cycles of feedback. Theory U suggests a 0.8 principal of iteration; not even waiting for version 1.0 before we test it. Others go so far as to suggest that version 0.25 is a good starting point. In any case, the more versions the more feedback and the more we learn, so the higher the chance of success.  This is the integration of our head, heart, and hand, enacting the new through “being in dialogue with the universe.” 

It is my practice to begin with simple paper prototypes and we already had the large map that we created during the co-sensing phase.  Having identified our potential content in that phase we now looked at it with new eyes, asking how can this best serve the purpose? We also worked on a Lean Canvas process, using this agile business planning method to evaluate both our business and content models.  We shared both of these paper models with various advisors for feedback and began building out our content and marketing plans even as we worked further iterations of the paper models.  

What emerged was an outline of the course that followed the structure of C4C which we knew so well.  Into this we integrated the ideas that we wanted to add based on the following questions: where were the biggest gaps in the C4C content? Which concepts had previous students most struggled to grasp?  What were the concepts absent from C4C that either Emma or I believed where fundamental to understanding ecosocial design? In the following order, we developed: 

1. a business plan 
2. a course outline 
3. a syllabus 
4. individual lesson plans  

As we worked through this process, we began our marketing activities.  A powerful tool for both marketing and prototyping were workshops and webinars.  These allowed us to promote the program, testing public response to our content, and rehearse our delivery of key ideas. 

Once a prototype has been sufficiently refined (or in our case, once you’ve scheduled it!) it is time to share it with the greater world.  As we reach outside of the microcosm in which we’ve been working and into the larger ecosystem around us we create the opportunity for growth, replication, and greater impact.  By co-evolving we begin to see, strategize, and act “from Presencing the emerging whole.” We have, in essence, created the future we envisioned. 

We launched and ran WWND 1.0 in May 2019.  While itself a prototype, it also fit the criteria for Co-Evolving due to its very public and collaborative nature.  Much of the content of WWND works with the concept of emergence; of being attentive to how the ecosystem is responding to our interventions and adjusting our actions accordingly.  To stay attuned to this, we adhered to a pattern established during C4C of meeting the morning after each class to evaluate our status and adjust our plans accordingly. We also brought this into our class sessions by intentionally designing enough room into our lesson plans for contributions by the students.

The culmination of our design process was to run an iteration of our course in spring 2019 course.  Some of our most important outcomes were:

• Developed a robust version 1.0 of our content
• Ran the course with nine students
• Gathered content and facilitation feedback at the middle and end of the course
• Collaborated with two guest lecturers on different aspects of the course
• Led a panel discussion with four panelists
• Made a small income
• Learned some of what works and what doesn't for marketing a course of this type
• Skillflex development:  The design, development, and delivery of this course directly bolstered many of my targeted skill flexes.  I tracked these on this table.  (I can imagine Emma Ruffin had similar outcomes although I don’t have tracking data for her.)

From a design standpoint, this project was a huge success.  Starting with the remains of a successful but flawed program from a failed organization, we imagined greater possibilities for it.  We explored its potential, compared and contrasted the content with that of competing programs, brought it up to date with the latest teachings, and emerged with something that took on a life of its own.  The following testimonials from our students support our positive assessment:

“Everything was amazing. My mind was completely blown!”

“Eternal gratitude for this course. If you are local to Boulder, CO I highly recommend taking it when it’s offered next.”

“LOVED the interplay of ways of learning: lecture, embodied, small group work, guest speakers, conversations.  Loved learning from both of you!”

"Emma and James worked really well together. Fun to see the relaxed nature of the course - allowed us to flow with the time."

Ultimately, we designed our program for the benefit and satisfaction of our students.  Judging from the feedback – and while not all of it was glowing, it was all constructive – we delivered something they appreciated and could use.  We still have a lot to learn about how to use, teach, and market this material, but our design process and our execution of our plans have left us with an excellent foundation for future work.  Our information gathering informs what is becoming a practiced approach to iteration.  As we move forward with newer and better versions of this program, we can expect continued growth for ourselves and our students.