What’s your big vision?
Teeming and Living Design helps you bring it to life, the way living systems always have.
Bring your big vision to life.
Through life’s proven patterns.
Living Design helps you understand the system your vision inhabits, what’s in the way, what resources, relationships, and capacities have been overlooked—and where small actions might trigger surprisingly big effects.
A project. An organization. A community.
A place. A practice.
A different future.
Explore Living Design
Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker
Evolutionary Biologist, Biomimic, and Author
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.
From Teeming to Living Design
I started as an evolutionary biologist and field primatologist, studying how social systems evolve.
The question that has followed me ever since is deceptively simple:
How do they do it?
How do living systems adapt, organize, create new possibilities, and accomplish things no individual could accomplish alone?
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.
But over time I realized the solutions were piecemeal from a larger body of work.
What would be required?
A systematic way to apply life’s patterns to the things we’re actually trying to bring into the world.
That became Living Design.
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, in our lives and the lives of other living things.
I also knew I wanted to write, create in wild places, and have my own creative institute, like Black Mountain College or Bauhaus, where we’d honor the creations of every living thing – the art of their lives – and create as equals among them.
It was just a matter of good design.
I’d need to start by studying living things. So I did that.
Botany. Social Evolution. Primatology. Evolutionary Biology.
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.
Teeming
How Nature’s Teams Adapt and Thrive
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.
It asks what would happen if we stopped designing organizational machines—
and started creating living things that eat change for breakfast.
Explore Teeming →
TEEMING
How Nature’s Teams Adapt and Thrive
about living design
In the years since Teeming, I’ve been trying to catch up with myself.
What is it I’m 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.
its a structured thinking process etc
regenesis institute for regenerative practicee and the British mathematician JG Bennett.
Living Design uses life's proven patterns to help bring the things we care about to life.
Project. Organization. Community. Place. Practice. A different future.
short explanation of what Living Design actually does.
WHAT'S YOUR BIG VISION?
What’s your big vision?
You see what is happening—and what could be.
Something you really want to bring to life.
A venture taking form.
A community organizing around something that matters.
An organization working the way you always knew it could.
A project that has lived in notebooks and conversations becoming real.
You’ve thought about it. Talked about it. Even made plans.
But somehow it doesn’t happen.
Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough help.
Something you don’t control has to change first.
Life finds a way.
Life finds a way.
For nearly four billion years, living systems have been adapting to constraints, developing new capacities, forming relationships, exchanging resources, experimenting—and becoming capable of things that weren’t possible before.
Living Design puts those patterns to work with intention.
What’s possible?
What’s necessary?
What’s in the way?
Rather than starting with everything you don’t have, Living Design helps you see the larger system: what is already present, what is limiting possibility, what capacities are missing or underused, and where a small change might change everything that comes after.
Life doesn’t find its way by having the whole answer first.
Life finds a way by doing.
Bring Living Design to your big vision.
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 →
Living Design for Organizations
Grow the capacity to accomplish what your mission requires.
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 →
Now accepting applications for the next Living Design Lab
Is this you?
You see what is happening—and what could be.
Something you really want to bring to life.
A venture taking form.
A community organizing around something that matters.
An organization working the way you always knew it could.
A project that has lived in notebooks and conversations becoming real.
You’ve thought about it. Talked about it. Even made plans.
But somehow it doesn’t happen.
Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough help.
Something you don’t control has to change first.
It’s like pushing a boulder uphill.
Yet each of us is here today. The odds of that are infinitesimally unlikely.
Life finds a way.
New relationships, new capacities.
A small change that changes everything that comes after.
That’s the premise of Living Design.
Small acts can make big ripples.
Everything is connected.
Imagine…
Five years from now, doing the work you want to be doing.
The things you spend your days on matter deeply. Your work is connected to the changes you want to see in the world—not something you squeeze in around the edges of your life.
And twenty years from now?
Something is genuinely different because of you.
Your small acts have created ripples that have grown into something you could never have predicted. People doing things they couldn’t before. Relationships that didn’t exist. Resources that flow.
Your work. Your values. Relationships and creativity. The place you live. The way you spend your time.
All of it one thing.
Aligned.
The archer, the arrow, the target.
The surfer and the wave.
Aligned and in motion.
What was the first step?
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 →
Imagine work that works with our nature
unleashes collective intelligence
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 →
Then speaking / contact / footer.
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.
