Not Knowing How It Ends

Letting Go

Twenty-five acres of Wiltshire woodland. Trickles of brooks, old oaks crawling with moss, sunlit glades, a marshy lake thick with rushes and sedges. A very English pastoral fantasy.

Except it wasn’t always like this. It’s been rewilded.

The land was bought years ago by Jonathan and Keggie, a couple my wife has known for years. Jonathan parlayed consultancy into ecology, while Keggie is an award-winning writer with decades of artistic production. Standing with them in the middle of it this week, I couldn’t tell what they had done to the land.

And that was rather the point.

The key principle of rewilding Jonathan talks (and writes) about is ‘proxies’. Beavers have been extinct in England since medieval times, so Jonathan dug the hole instead. Rain filled it, a pond formed, and within a season came the dragonflies, amphibians, snakes, birds.

You can’t always reintroduce the missing species. But you can recreate the conditions that species would have created.

I think about this in organisations that hand out detailed plans for what their ‘empowered’ people should do. Real empowerment is like Jonathan’s hole: a deliberate act that creates space for something you can’t fully control or predict.

Question: Where could you dig a hole, rather than write a plan?

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The World’s Best Jumble Sale

The Victoria and Albert has opened a new ‘anti-museum’ in East London. I haven’t had so much fun in ages.

It’s literally their store room. Rather like a chef’s table in a restaurant, they put on show the ingredients and the process.

A Moghul collonade carved in the 1670s sit next to a chunk of demolished housing estate. Plastic toys face off against a Balenciaga gown a few shelves along.

I went for an hour and stayed all afternoon.

Jane Jacobs wrote about this exact instinct in cities sixty years ago. She hated planners who zoned everything into neat, single-purpose blocks, because messy, overlapping, mixed-use streets are what actually make a neighbourhood come alive. Wikipedia works the same way. You go in for one fact about Wimbledon and surface an hour later having read about Ottoman naval history.

And, it’s this sense of discovery we often want to design in: Montessori rather than IKEA. Self-paced learning, rather than a lecture series. In a similar vein, I often caution my clients about building perfection: the “perfect” customer journey, or IT roadmap, or growth strategy. We don’t need every step signposted, every surprise engineered out.

Question: What in your world are you better off letting people discover, rather than telling them?

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Grumbling is Futile

“Gosh, London is expensive.”

You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, and it’s true.

A pound is worth two of our dollars (yet a pound buys what a dollar buys in Australia). Londoners have simply absorbed this: “Fifteen quid for a wedge of Stilton, sir”. (That’s why we price it by the 100g, not the kilo).

What struck me more, walking central London this week, was what’s missing.

Barely a private car in sight. Transport for London's congestion charge has been running over twenty years and just rose again, to eighteen pounds a day. The justification is always the same: you have “sustainable alternatives,” so pay up or get on the bus. People grumble, some campaigned against it, and everyone pays anyway.

I’ve seen clients do something more useful than grumbling.

The sharper ones don't just pay unquestioningly. They ask a different question upfront: is this cost fixed, or is it a design choice dressed up as inevitable? One client renegotiated a funder's reporting cycle before it became the norm, not after. Another devolved its head office entirely, partly to dodge costs that they, and their employees, faced with commuting to blue chip city real estate.

Question: What recurring cost have you just accepted, that you could actually design your way out of?

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Another week in sunny London, including a day at Wimbledon, so I’ll be back with you next Friday.

As always, please let me know you’re out there with a quick heart, and even a comment.

Andrew