How do living systems adapt, organize, create new possibilities,?
That question led from evolutionary biology to biomimicry, from primates to organizations, and eventually to Teeming: How Superorganisms Work to Build Infinite Wealth in a Finite World.
I began putting these patterns to work with organizations and leaders.
Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker
Evolutionary Biologist, Biomimic, and Author
Life creates conditions conducive to life.
I could never have mapped a straight-line path to the life I have now.
Author. Innovation consultant. Dean of an international school for biocultural leadership.
Founding Director of an Institute in the desert.
But, nutty as it sounds, I’d imagined from the youngest age.
When they asked what I wanted to do when I grow up, I knew the answer.
Grow possibility on this beautiful planet.
It was a matter of good design.
I’d need to start by studying living things. So I did that.
Botany. Social Evolution. Primatology. Evolutionary Biology.
TEEMING
How Nature’s Teams Adapt and Thrive
But life has a way of happening, and after a decade running my husband’s business, I found myself suddenly single and unemployed, the mother of three wild little boys, upside down on our mortgage.
What could I do?
I used what was available, and kept developing the capacities and conditions that might open the next possibility.
Over time, impossible things came to life.
For nearly four billion years, life has been finding and creating new opportunities.
Transforming the environment—and being transformed in return.
Living things shape each other.
Nature has been organizing for change for billions of years.
Teeming explores how living systems distribute intelligence, coordinate without centralized control, cultivate diversity, build trust, respond to change, and create capabilities that no individual possesses alone.
what would happen if we stopped designing organizational machines—
and started growing living things that eat change for breakfast.
Explore Teeming →
BUT WHAT WAS I REALLY TRYING TO DO?
Piecemeal applications weren't enough.
What would be required?
A systematic way to apply life's patterns to the things we're actually trying to bring into the world.
but what was I was really trying to do?
My consulting jobs were a side effect, and the solutions were piecemeal from my larger work.
What would be required?
A system to apply the ideas, one which could not be piecemealed. It was all one thing.
A systematic way to apply life’s patterns to the things we’re actually trying to bring into the world.
a structured thinking process
regenesis institute for regenerative practicee and the British mathematician JG Bennett
What are you bringing to life?
3 ways to put life’s patterns to work, to grow possibility:
For individual leaders → Living Design Lab
Now accepting applications for the next Living Design Lab
Living Design Lab
An 8-week intensive for people working to bring a big vision to life—the way life always has.
Bring something real you want to see happen.
Over eight weeks, you’ll use Living Design to explore what you’re trying to create, what it requires, what is already present, what is limiting it, and where relationships, resources, and capabilities haven’t yet been connected.
You’ll leave with a Living Design Brief, a clearer map of the territory, and meaningful next moves you can actually make.
Explore the Living Design Lab →
The question im most often asked:
How do we convince organizations to include this kind of thinking in their scope?
The process makes the unrealized value, lost capacity, relationships, constraints and possibilities visible enough to articulate to others. As we progress through the lenses, the costs and opportunities are revealed
Many participants ask their organizations to sponsor their particpation for this reason.
For Organizations → Living Design Capacity Builder Programming
Imagine work that works with our nature
Living Design Capacity Builder
Grow the capacity to accomplish your vision.
Complex work takes more than funding and a plan. It requires relationships, coordination, knowledge flows, complementary capabilities, participation, experimentation, learning, and adaptive capacity.
Living Design helps organizations, initiatives, and wider networks see what the system needs to become capable of—and develop the conditions for that capacity to grow.
Explore Living Design for Organizations →
unleashes collective intelligence
Developing grant-funded work?
Funding provides the resources. But resources alone don’t create the relationships, coordination, knowledge flows, distributed capabilities, learning systems, and adaptive capacity the work requires.
For aligned grant-funded and mission-driven work, the Living Design Capacity Builder can be delivered through the Borrego Institute for Living Design, a 501(c)(3).
BILD joins the initiative as an aligned capacity-building partner, helping the people and organizations carrying the work become increasingly capable of accomplishing its intended outcomes.
Explore the Living Design Capacity Builder at BILD →
and transforms organizational machines into living things that
eat change for breakfast.
Living Design has a home.
The Borrego Institute for Living Design
The BILD is a nonprofit field school, creative institute, and living laboratory for exploring how life grows possibility—and putting that knowledge to work on the things we care about.
Its home is 86 acres adjoining Anza-Borrego Desert State Park: a place to think, learn, make, experiment, gather, and encounter people and possibilities we might never otherwise have found.
Visit the BILD →
Borrego Institute for Living Design 501(c)(3)
a unique field school for developing the capacity to apply nature’s proven patterns.
Your donation helps the BILD offer scholarships for TeemLab programming and more.
