Edges are the richest, most productive spaces in the natural world
In Nature, edges tend to be places of trade, where elements of both ecosystems exchange their goods and create new, unprecedented wealth.
The edge of a forest is a place where light is more accessible, thus enabling species that could not otherwise develop to capture the sun’s energy whilst still relying on the mycelium from the forest ecosystem to regulate their nutrients and water intake.
The estuary of a river combines fresh and saline water environments, and benefits from the back and forth of the tide and of the river flowing downstream to mix elements that would not otherwise do so. In that way, it creates conditions for many algae, plants, fish, insects, birds and other animals to meet and eat each other, thus growing the diversity, productivity, and resilience of the overall ecosystem.
In many ways, topsoil is an edge, perhaps the most valuable of all. It enables plants to bring into it energy from the sun (converted into carbohydrate through photosynthesis) and gases from the air (nitrogen), to trade with bacteria and small insects in exchange for minerals that they’ve broken down from the rocks further below. The result can be as spectacular as the Amazon forest …
But there’s no need to go that far to see the wonders of edges: our microbiome, i.e. the billions of bacteria that have colonised the lining of our gut, spend their lives breaking down the food we eat so that the nutrients can move across the gut’s lining, into our bloodstream – leaving out viruses, harmful bacteria and other toxins. Who would have thought that our lives could depend on such tiny, marginal beings? Yet without them, no food could reach our cells.
As hinted in Principle #10, edges are rich because they are diverse – or diverse because they are rich. Or actually, diverse and rich just go hand in hand!
How permaculture designers use edges and value the marginal
Compost bins are great for composting your garden plants and kitchen waste. We usually place them on a spot where we’ve decided we wouldn’t plant anything, and so they go about their composting quietly, building dark, rich compost over time. But with the rain, some of the rich nutrients they produce leak away into the surrounding areas.
So what permaculture designers might do is plant comfrey all around the compost, so that it can draw all those nutrients into its leaves. The idea is then to cut it back every so often, and to use those leaves as mulch on your vegetable beds.
Or, another design option: place your compost right in the middle of an area used for growing, so that the ‘leaking’ is directly taken up by the plants around.
Hedges are another great way of building on the power of edges, by creating a mini-zone 5 and bringing wildlife (and all its benefits) directly to zone 2 or 3. You can do that on a big scale, through agroforestry, i.e. planting rows of trees in between you fields: the trees will stabilise the soil, regulate the water cycle with their roots, grow mycelium that will connect across the rows, and therefore travel through the fields and bring it fertility; hosts animals, birds and insects that will gradually fertilise the whole ecosystem, etc. – plus they can also be a food crop of some kind (apples, walnuts, etc.) that increases the overall profitability of your system. Or you can plant hedges on a small scale, with rosemary, or even thyme, planted between vegetable beds, stabilising the soil and keeping moisture, whilst sheltering lizards, slowworms or even hedgehogs if you’re lucky – your natural slug-killers. Working on design forms – eg. moving from rectangle beds to curved ones is one way to actually increase the edge effect and maximising its potential, including harnessing light or/and creating shade.
Permaculture designers also tend to create wet-zones, typically with a pond, and leverage on the edge between the pond and the rest of the garden, in order to attract all the biodiversity that thrives best there, but contributes to the fertility of both (frogs, ducks, dragonflies, reeds, etc.).
In all these examples, designers see the edges, the margins as opportunities, and the marginal – that which lives at the margins, and, by extent, that which we tend to lose sight of – as a crucial, untapped leverage for system growth and fertility.
So, how might we use edges and value the marginal in our organisations?
For a long time, the boundary between customers and product designers had always been considered as sacrosanct; only sales functions might have access to customers, and vice versa. Recently, new approaches have pushed forward the idea of customer-designed products, i.e. involving the customer from the very beginning in creating the products they want to buy. Lego has developed a platform where people can custom-design their own Lego products – which then become available for sale to mainstream customers. Favi, a gear-box manufacturer, has redesigned its organisational model into mini-factories (see Principle #8), so that the workers who build the gearboxes are also the ones who interact with the customer to understand their needs from the start.
Another classic example is how some of the most creative conversations happen in informal settings rather than in formal meetings: in the corridors, around the coffee machine, etc. We’re less guarded, more relax, more direct. That’s how the “World Café” methodology was created, to reproduce those “conversations at the edges”, and harness, and even generate, collective intelligence that would otherwise not have been tapped into.
“Edge thinking” can help organisations challenge their own mental models and escape “silo mentalities”. In the French company Decathlon, for example, there is no longer an R&D department; rather, R&D and innovation more generally permeates most business units: by placing R&D, product designers, marketing people in the same team, and linking them with production factories, Decathlon provides the conditions for “multiple edges”, and is able to respond very innovatively to key issues in their business.
In health, education, and social care, this is highly necessary. For example, an interesting innovation was launched in Geneva to transform their current Child and Adolescent psychiatric services into a “House for Children and Adolescents”, and to locate it in the heart of the city, blended with an art and cultural centre. The “house” hosts a wide-range of multi-disciplinary teams, accessible to children and families according to needs. By locating it in the city-centre, and blending it with a cultural centre, it enables families to access help that they would otherwise not feel they could access; and makes “returning to normal life” a much easier process, because the “house” already feels “normal”.
Finally, in another context altogether, the synodal process launched by Pope Francis can also be seen as creating generative edges between the clergy and the rest of the faithful, to help imagine new ways of “being Church” that has the potential to truly regenerate this very old institution.