Patterns are a central feature of the systemic nature of life on Earth

There is something magical about patterns: you can’t see them, yet they orchestrate everything that you see happening around you.

From bare ground, a primary forest starts with pioneering plants, then shrubs, then pioneering trees, then longer-living trees, then really big trees prepared to live for centuries.

In the great plains, huge herds will roam from north to south, then south to north, in high density, trampling the soil, half-eating the grass and leaving their excrements as they keep moving on – building the soil, increasing its biodiversity and its fertility.

When a storm breaks out in the mountain, the water from the rain will trickle down to form streams, and later on rivers, that will snake their way to the ocean, before it evaporates to form clouds and end up again as rainwater.

All 3 examples above will unfold that way, regardless of the specifics. In Africa the plants, shrubs and trees will be different to those in the Amazon, but they will all follow the same patterns. Same with the herds: buffalos in the Great Plains of North America, elephants in Africa – but they will all follow the same patterns of behaviour. And whilst the clouds, mountains, rivers and ocean might be different, they’ll all connect to one another following the same general patterns – only the details vary, according to the location, the surroundings, the particular events in that particular place at that particular moment.

Permaculture is a design system based on establishing life-giving, self-sustaining patterns

One classic design example in permaculture is that of the chicken-house/greenhouse: when you build a chicken house, design into it a greenhouse on its southern side (in the northern hemisphere that is), with a wall that lets air circulate from one part of the building to the other. In that way, the chicken will keep the greenhouse warm at night, will provide manure and CO² for the plants, who in turn will provide oxygen to the chicken. Add to this design a chicken-run with a few shrubs and trees that can produce plenty of edible fruits and seeds for the chicken, and you will then have an almost self-sustaining system, designed according to patterns that ensure that the output of one element becomes the input for another.

As a permaculture designer, once you have designed those patterns, then you might start asking more specific questions: where do we place this chicken/green-house on the land? What type of chicken do we select? What species of shrubs/tree? These are details, that you only address once you’ve designed the interconnecting patterns.

What could this mean for organisational life?

In many ways, this Principle #7 is in great resonance with much of what has been happening in terms of innovation in organisation functioning over the last few years. In companies studied by Frédéric Laloux for his book “Reinventing organizations”, or by Itzaak Getz for “Liberating leadership”, there has been a real shift in managerial approaches, whereby leaders have moved away from telling their staff what they have to do, and how to do it. Instead, they clarify the company’s or the team’s purpose, they clarify people’s role in connection to that purpose and to each other – and then they let them get on with it. More recently, in France, we have seen the development of a movement called “Entreprises à Mission” (“Companies with a Mission), where the emphasis too is on clarifying purpose, and letting people and team organised around it.

This is Principle #7 in practice: design the patterns, and let the details emerge from the people you’ve given the job. Treat them as intelligent, sophisticated human beings, able to use their creativity to unfold a purpose in the nitty-gritty of their operational reality.

Why is this so important?

At any given time, we might be skilled at expressing an intention, a purpose – a vision of where we feel we want to get to. But at that same given time, it is most likely that we will not be able to describe in details how the whole thing should operate, and what we should do to make it happen. And even if we were, in the time that it will take to make it happen, lots of new elements (innovation, shortage of a key element, inflation, pandemia …) could come up and disturb our very well crafted, detailed plan.

Furthermore, whilst we might be clear about purpose/vision, turning them into operational activities will involve other people, who know their operational reality better than we do, and have ideas that we would never think about. Fixing the details too early will deprive us of all their experience and creativity, and thus of solutions that might be much better (cheaper, more efficient etc.) than those we had thought of.

Finally, if you give your staff a detailed list of what they should be doing, but not why they should be doing it: 1) they may get stuck as soon as something unexpected comes up, not knowing what else to do because they won’t know the intention they were supposed to give form to – so you’ll need to come back and intervene; and 2) they are likely to drop in motivation because they will not get to tap into the level of meaning.

In a way, with his Golden Circle, Simon Sinek is very aligned with this Principle #7: design from patterns (the Why) to details (the How and the What).