Course Design
Content: Core Concepts
Designing a short-form ecosocial design course intended for a broad audience has many challenges. For us, the first challenge was to resist the temptation to include absolutely everything we thought the students should know. There is so much! Distilling the content to core essentials that add up to a useable skillset and providing a foundation for the students to build upon was the biggest part of our design process. Our lack of certainty about who our core audience was further compelled us to be sure that the information we presented was as fundamental and broadly applicable as possible. This proved prescient as in our group we had everything from a 17 year old high school dropout looking to learn "shit that matters," to a 76 year old environmental activist hoping to improve her effectiveness, to a medical doctor seeking ways to change the fundamental assumptions about his profession. Amazingly, they all reported that they loved the course.
Because we used an experiential/action learning pedagogy, we had to allow sufficient time in each session for the students to learn a new idea, practice with it, and then process their un/learnings in group discussion. This is a time consuming pedagogy which further limited the total amount of information we could convey. Following I will highlight some of the ways we organized this knowledge, and later in this section I'll explain how we formatted it, but first I will outline the sequence we used for all of our sessions:
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Opening Circle
- Welcome and mindfulness practice: we began every session by introducing a mindfulness exercise. Typically this was a guided meditation, a yogic breathing exercise, or even a practice from Aikido. This serves both to settle the students (and teachers!) into the space and is a form of honoring the time we have set aside. It also allowed us to teach a variety of techniques from which the students could choose favorites for their own practice.
- Check-in: Here everybody has an opportunity to share what's on their mind or in their hearts. Often these check-ins had prompts to ease the process. This is an important opportunity for everyone to be heard and seen, and for the instructors to take the barometer of the room.
- Discussion: There's always something to talk about! Usually we were debriefing on any homework assignments or simply checking in on how everyone was integrating the past materials.
- Lecture: This is where the instructors would take the time to introduce new ideas. We made ample use of visual aids, handouts, and short readings to bolster the information.
- Practice: Virtually all of what we taught had an experiential component. This might be as simple as a guided journaling exercise to stimulate integration of the ideas, as elaborate as a group activity to map a complex system, such as homelessness in Boulder County, Colorado (where the course took place), or even a walk in nature with prompts to identify certain Permaculture patterns at work.
- Closing Circle: At the end of each session we reconvened the group for collective processing of the days material, explanation of homework assignments or recommended reading, and a check out.
- Instructor Debrief: The morning after every session Emma and I would meet to process what went well, what was challenging, where we needed to make changes, and what our next steps were.
As discussed in the Design section, the course is structured around the five-stage Theory U process – Co-Initiating, Co-Sensing, Presencing, Co-Creating, and Co-Evolving – with sessions themed as the stages in this process. Within this structure, we introduce our content in manageable chunks which are appropriate to whichever stage of the process we are in. Because of the transdisciplinary and holistic nature of ecosocial design there is a wealth of potential content which would be potentially appropriate to include. In working to discern the bare minimum requirement for creating effective designers, and to help them and us make sense of different disciplines and how they all fit together, we distilled our content into three threads: Personal Development, Ecological Literacy, and Systems Thinking.
Personal Development attends primarily to developing the ability to perceive and understand oneself, and guide one's growth. It focuses on self-awareness through mindfulness, awareness of how our cognitive biases impact our thinking and feeling, and the cultivation of deep listening and applied empathy skills. Some of these skills are inwardly focused, or intra-personal, and others are outwardly focused, or inter-personal. Growing in these areas allows us to be more effective designers by better understanding the spectrum of needs of a situation, appreciating our impact on the outcomes of a design process, and attending effectively to our emotional responses through such a process. Ecological Literacy refers to our ability to read the interactions among organisms and their environments and derive lessons from this. It is the Eco in ecosocial design, and a form of understanding complex systems which is fundamental both to understanding the world around us and to designing interventions that are harmonious with that world. Finally, Systems Thinking can be defined as the art and science of understanding and intervening in systems. It is a toolkit that allows us to integrate our itra- and interpersonal skills and our Ecological Literacy into effective interventions for world change. Since all of these skills work in unison, and all are scalable, we can use them in concert to create interventions on scales ranging from our personal lives to our community, and even on a global scale.
Following, I provide an overview and some core concepts from each of these.
Personal Development
Personal development work is one of the main focuses of Theory U. The quote “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener,” attributed to Bill O’Brian, a successful and innovative corporate executive, suggests that it is not simply what one is doing or how they are doing it, but also the quality of attention, intention, and presence that they bring to their processes that matters. Work towards this includes:
- Cultivating an Open Mind, Open Heart, and Open Will: Open Mind is the capacity to suspend old habits of judgment and see with fresh eyes - It requires curiosity; Open Heart is the capacity to empathize and redirect our perspective to that of other stakeholders - it requires compassion; Open Will is the capacity to let go of the old and let come new possibilities, and the openness to do so without forcing the outcome - it requires courage. Each of these abilities plays an important role in different stages of the U and in different aspects of our lives. As designers, the ability to access these abilities with discernment at critical parts of our process is essential to designing interventions that serve the long-term interests of the greatest number of stakeholders.
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Levels of listening: Theory U’s levels of listening practice opens our awareness to how we show up in relationships and in response to the world around us. Habitual Listening in which we listen to confirm what we already believe is extremely efficient, but closes us off from new ideas and from learning. It is useful for automated actions; Factual Listening engages our Open Mind skills as we listen for new information and consider where we may be mistaken. It is an excellent tool for collaborative technical processes; Empathic Listening employs our Open Heart to allow us to understand another’s feelings and see the world through their eyes. It is ideal for considering the needs of diverse stakeholders facing complex challenges; and Generative Listening uses Open Will to put our egos aside and engage in creative and imaginative processes. It allows us to listen for the maximum potential in a given situation. Learning to recognize how we are listening, and knowing how and when to access each level of listening as needed are powerful skills for our own self-awareness and for getting the maximum benefit from any collaborative process.
- Mindfulness: At the root of all personal development processes is the concept of mindfulness. Simply, it is the practice of being in the present moment, with an awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. Simple but not easy, achieving a state of mindful presence requires practice but rewards us with the ability to face challenges with thoughtfulness rather than reactivity, a necessity in times of disruptive change.
Ecological Literacy
Image: One of my land design project which uses rainwater to irrigate an herb garden.
If ecology can be defined as the study of the interactions among organisms and their environment, then ecological literacy is the ability to read these interactions and draw conclusions and inspiration from doing so. Once a fundamental skill for survival, it becomes progressively rare as we become more urbanized and industrialized and thus isolated from nature. But ecological literacy continues to be essential for understanding how to live on planet earth: regardless of our lifestyle, we continue to be dependent on a healthy biosphere for our survival. The essential premise of eco-social design is to apply ecological literacy to the creation of societal systems, so teaching ecological literacy is one of the main threads of What Would Nature Do? Recognizing the significant challenges of teaching this skill in such a short time in a classroom setting, we focused our efforts in conveying the following universally applicable concepts:
- Permaculture Principles: The twelve principles of Permaculture provide an excellent starting place for the initiate to ecological literacy. By searching for these principles in action in the world, we can rapidly develop our observation and analysis skills. With this foundation, we can learn to apply these principles to our own designs, cross checking our ideas against examples from the natural world. Thus, the principles provide both a framework for understanding and guardrails for designing.
- Ethical Principles: If the permaculture principles represent effectiveness principles intended to achieve an end, then Permaculture’s ethical principles are that end: care for the Earth and for people in an equitable manner. The mere application of ethical imperatives significantly alters the outcomes of any design process. Internalizing these values creates designers with a truly ecosocial intention.
- Patterns in Nature: Biomimicry advocate Janine Benyus suggests that there are three types of patterns in nature: forms and shapes, like the wing of a bird, or a spider web; processes, like digestion, photosynthesis, or the cycle of seasons; and relationships, like that between the sun, plants, the soil, and fungus. Recognizing these patterns and the functions they serve allows us to mimic them for our own purposes. Another pattern is fractal replication which suggests that patterns repeat at different scales. Thus, we find the spiral structure of a snail shell echoed at the scale of a hurricane and all the way up to entire galaxies. Recognizing this scaling property of nature allows us to see that our actions and designs are also scalable. So the work we do as individuals can scale to our community and even globally.
Systems Thinking
Systems thinking can be defined as the art and science of understanding and intervening in systems, and a system can be defined as a set of things working together as parts of an interconnecting whole. The skills of systems thinking are therefore essential to the work of the ecosocial designer whose role is to intervene in systems. WWND distills some of the essential skills of systems thinking to provide students with an immediately applicable introduction to this intricate craft. Besides the Theory U design process, which I explore both on the previous page and in the addenda, we include the following key ideas:
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Systems Mapping: The ability to visualize systems in different ways and isolate and represent various properties in an essential skill in being able to understand complexity. We weave together a variety of mapping techniques derived from Permaculture, Theory U, and Disruptive Design to create a multi-dimensional representation of any system, from our own lives to complex ecologies or economies.
Image: The life narrative map is a mapping tool we use in WWND to visualize ourselves in the time stream of our lives.
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Complexity Theory: Because most of our social and ecological systems are complex, understanding complexity is essential to intervening in systems. Yet most people would be hard-pressed to define complexity, let alone discern it from complicated or sometimes even simple systems. In WWND we use David Snowden’s sense-making framework, Cynefin, to identify the four tiers of simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic. Recognizing the differences and understanding how each functions is essential to designing interventions that work at each level. Learning the specific requirements of working with complexity is a main focus of WWND.
Image: The Cynefin model is an effective sense-making tool for assessing the complexity of systems and deciding how best to intervene in them.
- Emergence: Referring to the Cynefin model above we see that one of the hallmarks of complex systems is that cause and effect are only visible in retrospect. This means that there is a profound element of unpredictability associated with intervening in these systems. Learning to accept this results in a profound shift in our perspective as designers. We are not in control of the outcomes! This realization compels us to be humble and cautious in our approach to interventions, and to be agile in responding to change, for change is constant. I am reminded of a line from one of Octavia Butler's novels which figures prominently in adrienne marie brown's book, Emergent Strategy:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God
is Change.”
―
Course Delivery
Choosing a Format
Choosing the best format for a course like this proved surprisingly challenging. After the thorough design process detailed on the previous page, and based on our experience in running Communities for Change, we determined that we needed a minimum of 24 hours of class time. More would be better, but would likely be harder to sell. We also reasoned that our optimal session length was three hours. This length of time is ample for a comfortable opening circle, plenty of discussion time, and enough space to use an action learning exercises to engage whatever content we are treating in a session. To meet these time estimates, we developed four different configurations, including:
- 8 x 3 hours (weeknights) = 24 hours in eight weeks
- 8 x 3 hours (weeknights) = 24 hours in four weeks
- 3 x 6 hours (weekends) + 3 x 2.5 hour (weeknights) = 25.5 hours in three weeks
- 2 x 6 hours (weekends) + 6 x 2 hours (weeknights) = 24 hours in three weeks
Each configuration offers different benefits: for instance, weekend days can be stretched to seven hours, constituting two three-hour modules with an hour for a potluck lunch in the middle. The leisurely pace and the breaking of bread creates unrivalled opportunity for group cohesion. Conversely, many short sessions reduce the negative impacts for someone who has to miss a session or two, but at the cost of discussion time and bonding opportunities. Also, as we learned in C4C, since each session opens and closes with circles, the more total sessions you have the more time is spent in check-ins and check outs, detracting from teaching time, so fewer longer sessions is a more efficient use of time.
During our planning we surveyed friends and family for feedback on the different potential configurations and interestingly found that we received similar objections to all of them. It seems that in a busy society it is hard for people to imagine taking on more commitment, regardless of the format. Since the results of our survey were inconclusive, in the end we chose the configuration we liked the best: We felt option four offered us the best balance weekends and weekdays, with the benefits that each affords. The only objection our in-course inquiries about the format yielded was that the 2.5 hour sessions were too short, confirming (after the fact) that three hours is an optimal time block.
Marketing and Outreach
Marketing and Outreach
Marketing an offering like this presents a number of challenges. To begin with, we were not certain who our core audience was. To us, this material should be required in High School and we believe it is useful to everyone. As it happened, we ended up with a diverse group. Further, the subject matter is foreign to most people; ask folks on the street their thoughts on systems thinking and they’re most likely to assume you are talking about computer programming. Mention ecological literacy or permaculture and they probably think it is a gardening class. And there are regional cultural issues as well: it is difficult to distinguish oneself in a sea of offerings in a place like Boulder, Colorado with its strong LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) industry. Another challenge was our relative anonymity. While Emma and I both have credible resumes in this field, we are not recognized public figures. Finally, we were running this course on a shoestring budget, so any marketing plan had to be economical.
To address these challenges we developed a marketing plan that included the following components:
- Direct outreach to people who know us and are familiar with the quality of our work in this field. This included former work and school colleagues, clients, past students of C4C (including those who were selected but were unable to attend), and personal friends with similar interests. Both Emma and I are devoted mailing list keepers, so our direct mail campaigns had hundreds of recipients.
- Direct promotions to select Facebook friends. This list reached over 700 people.
- Boosted Facebook posts.
- Promotion through the boulder.earth website. Boulder.earth is a regionally-focused climate action portal which is run by Emma Ruffin. In addition to putting our class on the site’s event calendar, Emma was able to highlight it on the home page’s “Actions for Impact” section. We also used the boulder.earth site to host the course homepage.
- We printed about 250 half-page flyers which we distributed over the course of two months in a variety of public gathering spaces, including coffee shops, libraries, and specialty shops such as herbalists.
- Cross-promotions: We promoted our course through Boulder Permaculture’s “Permaculture in Action” page.
- In-person workshops and webinars. We availed ourselves of any opportunity for public speaking. This included talking about our course at parties and events, giving several two-hour workshops at places like the Front Range Ecosocial Solutions Conference, and presented a pair of webinars to explain the content and answer questions.
All of our marketing efforts directed students to our homepage which includes a brief description of the course as well as a signup link. The signup process includes a questionnaire with a “How did you hear about us?” question. Of nineteen people that pre-registered for both our Spring and Fall courses (we postponed our fall course due to under-enrollment), nine enrolled in the spring course and six in the fall course. The remaining five (26.35) either backed out or postponed their participation primarily due to scheduling conflicts. The results from our various marketing efforts are as follows:
- Boulder Permaculture website: 1 = 5%
- Boulder.Earth website or direct mailings: 4 = 21%
- Flyers: 1 = 5%
- Direct contact with James or Emma: 5 = 26.3%
- Word of mouth: 5 = 26.3%
- Facebook: 3 = 15.8%
- Also, our conversion rate for webinars was 50% of attendees
Clearly, word of mouth and public appearances, including personal conversations, are our most successful and cost-effective strategies. In the future, booking as many speaking opportunities as possible will be a priority, as will continuing to promote the course through our personal networks and alumni. While somewhat effective at 15.8%, Facebook was also the second most expensive part of our campaign. Exploring how to improve our advertisements to attract more attention and click-through seems an important priority. Most expensive and least effective was our flyers, returning only one participant for an investment of over $100. We suspect the design and messaging of our flyers was factor and is a major focus for a future redesign.
Our pricing structure included an Early Bird period (approximately 20% off), which attracted four of our nine spring students, and student and scholarship pricing (50% off plus one 90% scholarship) which attracted another three. Only two of our spring students paid the full price of $550.
Conclusions
What went well?
We ran one iteration of the course with a group of nine students plus two guest lecturers and four panelists. We had a wide range of ages, with our youngest participant being 17 and our oldest 76. Our students were enthusiastic and attendance was consistently high. People who did miss sessions contacted us for catch-up work and came prepared for the next session. We surveyed the students once during the course and once after and received helpful feedback on how to improve the course content and our facilitation. Our knowledge and skill in conveying said knowledge improved dramatically. We had a lot of fun with the course and gained a number of new friends and colleagues as well as opportunities for consulting work.
What was challenging?
Preparing and running the course was hard work and Emma and I each invested over 175 hours by the end of the spring session. With a net take of $850 each, that makes our hourly income about $4.75. Hardly worth the effort, financially. We struggled to fill the course. With a target group size of 12, we only managed nine in the spring and a mere six in the fall. Regarding the fall, the timing proved difficult for both of us and we were unable to make a meaningful contribution towards the marketing effort. Finally, because the real-estate market has inflated beyond reason in the Boulder area, it was extremely challenging to find suitable spaces to run the program. We had to switch spaces several times during the course, and rental fees turned out to be our largest expense.
What are our next steps?
All told, we consider What Would Nature Do? to be a success. We met our goal to develop an accessible, teachable ecosocial design course for popular education, and have had the opportunity to improve it with participant feedback. We’ve also gathered important data on what works and what doesn’t as far as marketing. Although our effort to run a second iteration in the fall of 2019 failed, we now have a long runway to plan a spring session. Using the feedback from our students on how to improve the course, feedback we’ve gathered on how to improve our marketing materials, and the data on which marketing strategies work best, we are formulating a plan for a spring 2020 session at full capacity. A key challenge remains finding a suitable space for the course and this will be a priority as we head into winter.
In the final analysis, What Would Nature Do? can be considered a resounding success deserving of continued effort. Looked at as another prototype in an iterative design process, we met most of our goals with some success, gathered significant data on how to improve, and experienced significant personal growth through the process. It is clear that we are poised to run another iteration with considerable improvement. Our delivery approach situated us well to keep refining this content towards a future scalable transformative education product.
Creative Commons license
Core Report Part 2 – Delivering What Would Nature Do?: Ecosocial Design for Popular Education by James Mercé Edwards is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 Unported license.
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