Designing conditions for things to happen

“We cannot step into the same river twice. The only constant is change” (Heraclitus of Ephesus, 5th century BC).

There is a recurring pattern in organisations and projects that genuinely want to do things well. In those that understand the world is in constant flux and that thriving means navigating this complexity.

These organisations and teams may have committed people. Data on the shifts taking place in their context, and on the impact they are generating within it. They act continuously, trying to combine speed with rigour: redesigning processes, launching initiatives, constantly rethinking their communications, incorporating new criteria into their decisions. And yet… something never quite moves. Many changes remain at the surface. The dynamics that produce the problems stay immovable.

It is not a problem of intention. It is a problem of conceptual (and methodological) framing.

The tools available to accompany complex transitions — organisational, territorial, sectoral — are mostly built to incrementally improve what already exists, not to transform the conditions that produce it. Traditional Design Thinking is itself an example of this. They address the symptoms, without going deeper into the conditions that generate them.

Creative Regeneration was born from years of work on projects where that tension became impossible to ignore.

The real problem

Let us not talk about cosmetic changes. Let us talk about genuine transition challenges — those faced by organisations and territories in a volatile environment like today’s, where ecosocial crises are shaking the foundations of markets and of society itself. We try to create solutions with good intentions and creativity, but the conditions that determine what can be believed, thought, and done within a system are rarely altered.

When we speak of conditions, we mean the material infrastructures that organise everyday life — spaces, objects, distribution systems, digital platforms. We mean the norms, written and unwritten, that define what is legitimate and what is possible. The (power) relations between actors that determine who gets to participate and who is taken seriously. The worldviews — the beliefs about how the world works — that make certain solutions seem obvious and others simply unthinkable.

The urbanism example is paradigmatic. The materialisation of certain infrastructures makes individual car use the rational option for almost any kind of journey… and this, in turn, generates a vision of the world, of what is possible and desirable. No cultural campaign alone will reverse this without an intervention in the material infrastructure that produces what is possible.

Beyond urbanism, this principle operates in any system. An organisation whose incentive structure rewards the short term will not produce disruptive innovation because it runs a Design Thinking workshop. A territorial ecosystem without structured mechanisms for shared governance will fail when attempting participatory diagnostics — and participation will be nothing but cosmetic.

The central proposition of Creative Regeneration is this: designing transition requires designing the conditions that make it possible.

Anything else is simply managing the symptoms of problems, without real transformation.

Why does this matter especially now? The transitions facing organisations and territories today are not adjustments within a stable system. They are repositionings within a system that is being reconfigured — by ecological, socio-cultural, technological, economic, and political-legal pressures that feed on one another. Climate crises, resource limits, market restructuring, the erosion of institutional trust: these are not simply sustainability issues. They are the conditions of the age in which any organisation that wants to remain relevant in what is coming must learn to move. Navigating that complexity demands capabilities that go beyond incremental adaptation. It demands the capacity to redesign one’s own conditions whilst operating within them. To regenerate — to improve and drive forward, rather than erode — the capacity of our systems to produce prosperity and wellbeing.

That is what Creative Regeneration attempts to make possible.

Three movements, one cycle

The conceptual framework of Creative Regeneration follows three movements that feed back into a complete cycle. They are not necessarily sequential phases. Rather, areas of action that inform one another, iteratively.

Explore is the first movement: coming to know the system we are in. Not just the market or the sector, but the system in the broadest sense. Who participates and how (human… and non-human actants). What norms and worldviews determine what can be thought and done. What relations structure what is possible (and desirable). What material infrastructures produce the behaviours we observe. How the system has evolved to this point… and where it might evolve towards (through a Futures exercise).
We are not looking to catalogue the environment with structured, rigid conceptual boxes. We are looking to understand, dynamically, the conditions that produce the current environment.

Activate is the second movement: purpose, intention, strategy. This is not rational planning that deduces objectives from an analysis — for such methods have already proven themselves rigid and prone to obsolescence. It is a process of building shared meaning. To activate is to help an organisation or community articulate who it is, where it wants to go, and why that matters. And to translate that vision into concrete goals, into explicit hypotheses about how to produce change, into a (agile and dynamic) roadmap that is honest about the complexity of the path ahead.

Impulse is the third movement, and it is where Creative Regeneration does something that few frameworks name clearly: constitute. Not implement — constitute. Or what some academic voices call design as infrastructuring (beyond design as projecting).

This distinction is not trivial. To implement means to execute what was decided in the strategy. To constitute means to give form to the experiences, artefacts, and infrastructures that will make certain behaviours, relations, and beliefs possible — and that will thus contribute to the transition.

Impulse works simultaneously across two dimensions. The dimension we might relate to what Design Thinking tends to call “desirable”: the lived experience — what people feel, do, and experience in contact with what the organisation or the actors that produce it offer. The second dimension is what we might relate to the “feasible” — or “possible” — in Design Thinking: the protocols and infrastructures that sustain those experiences and produce them. Both dimensions represent the visible front and the invisible scaffolding. Both are designed. And both (re)produce the conditions of the environment.

Rethinking Design; Designing Transitions

The relationship between Impulse and Explore is central to our methodological framework. What is constituted in Impulse enters the system, modifies its conditions, and produces a new reality that Explore will encounter in the next turn of the cycle. The system we will study and inhabit next time is not the same as the first time — because what we have constituted has transformed it. “We cannot step into the same river twice…”

Each complete cycle of RC does not merely improve — it regenerates — what a system does (an organisation, a community, a territory…). That is the kind of learning that produces real transformation. But it is often, too, the learning most avoided — because most available tools are not designed to provoke it… and because it is the most uncomfortable.

Who is Creative Regeneration for

This community, and this methodological framework, are not simply for organisations that want to communicate what they already do more effectively. They are for organisations, communities, and territories that already know they need to change something more fundamental — and do not yet have a framework for thinking through and addressing that change.

The kind of challenge Creative Regeneration addresses is not defined by sector. It is defined by the nature of the challenges: those that cannot be resolved by optimising existing practices because those practices are part of the problem; those that require balancing the participation of multiple actors with the materialisation and consolidation of concrete solutions.

That can happen in many places at once.

In a company that has reached the limit of what it can improve within its current model — and needs to rethink its purpose, its value chain, and its relationship with the ecosystem it operates in, not just its internal processes.

In a startup or entrepreneurial project that wants to build from the outset with a different logic — and needs a framework that integrates environment, strategy, and impact without treating them as separate compartments.

In a cultural, educational, or public institution that senses its role is changing — that the communities it serves have changed, that the legitimacy of the social contract that sustained it has eroded, and that it needs to reimagine itself without losing what makes it relevant.

In a municipality, district, or territory that wants to activate transition from within — not to execute an imported plan from outside, but to build the collective capacity to generate its own strategy for the future with the actors who already belong to the territory.

In a social economy organisation — foundation, association, NGO… — that works with an explicit purpose but needs to better align its strategy, its tools, and its model with the systemic transformation it claims to want to produce.

In any context where someone — a leader, a team, a community — faces a transition with no known roadmap, where previous answers no longer work and where the challenge is not only what to do, but how to generate the collective capacity to decide and sustain it over time.

What unites all these cases is not sector or size. It is that the real problem does not lie at the surface — it lies in the conditions that produce it. And that addressing it requires working simultaneously on what the system is, where it wants to go, and what must be constituted for that transition to be possible… and desirable.

An invitation

The methodological framework of Creative Regeneration is available under Creative Commons. Precisely because we understand how many different people have contributed to the construction of its value, and because it will have more value the more people use it, question it, and help it evolve.

This space is where that process happens in public. Each podcast episode, each reflection, each conversation with practitioners from other fields… is a questioning, an iteration, an evolution of the methodological framework itself. What we publish here is not the definitive version of Creative Regeneration (and never will be). It is the continuous process of becoming something new — embracing change.

Finn Janning, inspired by Heraclitus, wrote that “embracing change is not surrender, but an act of lucidity.”

⚪ And you — how do you design transformations?

Pedro Sáez Martínez

A new world is continuously taking shape, placing inspiring horizons before us, alongside complex challenges. In this space in-between what is and what could be, Creative Regeneration is a community of practice and research that seeks to bring what is yet to come to life.