Butterflies, not moon shots
A “butterfly” is a flexible idea that can easily move around and adapt to different situations, spreading awareness and inspiring new actions. Just like real pollinators, butterflies are ideas and concepts that are designed to fertilize and generate a new wave of growth. Moving around all areas of a system, they regenerate themselves by leaving traces of an idea that can be adopted by the receiver. It’s hard to know an idea came from the pollinator; they are eventually lost in a sea of similar ideas.
A couple of examples of butterflies:
- open-source knowledge,
- flexible solutions like checklists where the idea is naturally customized and becomes your own. I might suggest you start using a checklist for your work, but you’re the person who writes it.
Butterflies are a major departure from the capitalist “moon shot” concept. A moon shot is a single idea with the goal of disrupting a market, dominating and winning over space. You want to build the best product, that will ‘wipe out’ your competition. But if you really think about it, the behaviour of a moon shot sounds a lot like an invasive weed.
On the contrary, regenerative design hopes to create concepts and interventions that regenerate and become ‘invisible’ through broad uptake and evolution. They are flexible and adapt to their environment to avoid disruption. When we look at a field of flowers blooming, we do not know which pollinators are responsible for each individual flower. Unacknowledged for their individual contribution by outsiders looking in, the celebration of the pollinator is the shared joy of the flowered field.
“It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit.” — Harry S. Truman
Biomimicry and regenerative design move from the position that our creativity, our processes, and technologies can and should be inspired by nature. In line with the idea that “there are no new ideas,” nature has infinite patterns, formulas, and answers for us. And so much space for creativity and flexibility in how we apply them.
From: winning to extract value for an “owner” of an idea
To: diverse growth with shared value among many
So, rather than control nature with industrial laws as our forefathers have, the work of our generation is to bring natural dynamics back into the core of all our operating systems. Instead of a view on technology that seeks to control and extract, we need to allow nature to reverse-mentor us toward systems focused on regeneration, infinite diversity, life/death/life cycles.
“We’re awake now, and the question is how do we stay awake to the living world? How do we make the act of asking nature’s advice a normal part of everyday inventing?” — Janine Benyus, Co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute
Let’s take a deeper look at just a couple of ideas, some of nature’s butterflies:
- The Golden Ratio: 1.618, from the Fibonacci sequence is everywhere in nature. From shells, flowers, fingerprints, cacti. Nature is so elegant and consistent that she designed a single pattern that inspires infinite diversity and creativity.
- Symbiosis: the idea of creating symbiotic systems where every element has a role that helps the other elements. ❤️🍃 Like the Three Sisters traditional planting system, where corn, beans, and squash are planted together. The corn provides structure for her sisters, beans infuse the soil with nitrogen, and the squash provides shade that limits weeds.
So how do we take a focus on ‘butterflies, not moonshots’ forward? I think there’s a few mindsets:
- Intention: we move forward with a conscious intention to share more openly in creative commons, away from protective modes.
- Humility: an ongoing mindfulness activity reminding ourselves that our new ideas are likely new revelations within our own knowledge of field, but likely already have root and substance.
- Relationships, Not Objects: as designers, we can shift our attention to designing for better relationships, rather than perfecting objects.
As we imagine releasing butterflies into our worlds, we still strive to create large waves of impact. The ambition of bringing our hopes for the future directly into the present is needed to tackle the big challenges of our time— climate crisis, social inequity, economic transition. The butterfly mindset shift is simply a way of tempering our ambition with a lens of shared value and regeneration. A humbled, pollinator mindset.
