Regenerative Beauty with Alan Moore - Part 2 of 2

Alan Moore is a craftsman of beautiful business. He is a business innovator, author, and global speaker whose life’s work centers on one simple but radical idea: beauty is not a luxury in business, but a necessity.

He has designed everything from books to organizations, working across six continents with artists, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams. He has advised companies including PayPal, Microsoft, and Interface, taught at institutions such as MIT, INSEAD, and the Sloan School of Management, and helped guide some of the world’s most innovative enterprises.

He is the author of four books, including Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything and Do Build. How to make and lead a business the world needs. His work has been featured in outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Huffington Post.

In this second part of our conversation, we talk about:

1. Beauty as a quest for truth rather than surface aesthetics

2. What it means to create something like a jewel

3. Inevitability in design

4. Beauty as a metric for innovation

5. The distinction between extractive and regenerative approaches

6. Beauty as a verb and everyday practices for “doing beauty.” 

To learn more about Alan’s work, you can find him at:

https://thebeautifuldesignproject.com/ 

Books and resources mentioned:

• No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Nonlinear World (by Alan Moore)
• Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything (by Alan Moore)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Transcript

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Welcome, everyone. This is the second half of my conversation with Alan Moore. If you missed part one, please check it out. Here in part two, we dive into Alan's books on beauty and their applications. We look at beauty as a decision metric, inevitability in design, daily practices for doing beauty—as Alan calls it—and the shift from extractive growth to regenerative business that is sorely needed so that innovation actually serves life. Let's get started.

(interview)

Brandon: One of the things you say in the book is that beautiful things endure. You've given examples of Shaker chairs—which I was not aware of them until I read your book, actually—and then the insistence of William Morris, that you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Can you talk a bit about those principles? I mean, what makes something endure? What are the qualities of timeless design, perhaps?

Alan: Well, there is, in a sense, no easy answer to that. I mean, the Shakers are interesting because they never wrote about beauty. What they wrote about was truth. Because they were a religious cult, for want of the better word, you know. You might say that their closest relationship will be something like the Amish.

Brandon: Yes.

Alan: The Shakers made everything—from hairpins to chairs, to desks, to houses, to barns, whatever. I mean, they literally made everything. They had a particular style which is very simple, but it was incredibly elegant and very beautiful. Their obsession about truth was, is through their act of their craft and their making. They would reveal the truth and the spirit in whatever it is that they were creating. Because they had the view that if an angel was ever to come and sit on one of their pieces of furniture or craft making, they would understand the purity of the religious truth in their work.

I've always been fascinated by the Shakers. I mean, I came across them as a young man, as a designer. We've got some Shaker stuff in the house actually, and it just endures. It's that quest for truth, I think, is is very important. There's a story that I can tell you, which was, when I was a young designer, in those days, I was working for some very big contemporary art galleries in London. So I got to work with the likes of Ansel Kiefer, Richard Long, the estate of Andy Warhol, and Helen Chadwick, who's sadly no longer with us. I got to work with these amazing artists. One of them was a guy called Cecil Collins, who did die many, many years ago. He was a very famous painter, an English painter, born, I think, in about 1908. So when I met him in the '80s, he was a very old man. He painted these incredibly spiritual paintings. I can remember Anthony, who was the gallery director, was going away on a holiday—which I was rather pleased about because he was a bit of a tyrant. We sat there, and he said, "You know, Alan, Cecil's work..." I said, "Yes?" He said, "Well, Cecil's work..." He said, "They're quite like jewels. Do you think you could design a catalogue like a jewel for me.?" I was very early on in my design career at this point, my graphic design career at this point. And I said, "Of course, Anthony. I can do that."

But it was a really interesting brief. Because I went back on the train from London to where I was living in Letchworth, and I thought, "What is a jewel?" Well, a jewel is a gift. It's priceless. It's unexpected. A jewel is something that is enduring. It could live forever, like a diamond. A great deal of work goes into creating these very precious objects. They give joy to people. They bring beauty. So I kind of had this kind of conversation with myself about designing a catalogue like a jewel. And so I made all the decisions about this catalogue that I was going to design for Cecil around the idea of making a jewel for him—choice of typeface, format, paper, how it was going to be printed, what the cover was going to look like. Everything, right? At the private view—I got the privilege of going to private views, which sometimes were a little bit overawing, I have to say, actually, because I was so young. But this elderly gentleman comes up to me, and he says: "Are you Alan Moore?" I said I am. He said, "Well, I'm Cecil Collins." I said, "I know who you are."

Brandon: Oh, wow.

Alan: He said, "You designed the catalogue." I said I did. He said, "Well, I have to tell you it's the most beautiful catalogue anyone has ever designed for me." And I went, "Well, Cecil, you know, I'm really grateful for what you've said." And so, in a sense, when you quest for the truth — so I teach people, and I talk about the poetic brief. So there's a brief. It's like it needs to be this size, this weight, this volume. There's all sorts of metrics or specifications. There's money that's associated to those things. But I say to people that I mentor or teach or work with, I say but there's another brief. It's called the poetic brief, and you cannot put a quantitative measure on it. But it's something that you are questing for. That's, to me, the heart of beauty also. There is something magical within it. But if you quest for it, it will reward you in extraordinarily wonderful ways.

Brandon: Yeah. Wow. That's very helpful. I want to ask you about another quote that you have from a mentor of yours, Derek Birdsall: "I design something to be inevitable." What does inevitability mean? What does that look like in practice? Could you give us an example?

Alan: I mean, again, well, you could look at the Shaker stuff and say there's an inevitability about their design. You know, I can remember touching the first iPhone. I worked a lot in technology, bizarrely enough, right up until that point. I can remember touching that iPhone, and it just blew my mind. They did something extraordinary in terms of the user experience. But you could say, what is the experience of walking into a hotel that feels inevitable? What is the user experience that you would create for someone that feels inevitable? To me, it's frictionless. I remember asking Derek. Because he was an incredible man. I remember saying to him, "Well, Derek, you know, what does it look like if a piece of design is inevitable?" He said, "Well, it means that your client cannot imagine it looking any other way." I suppose the poetic brief, the idea of inevitability were things that I carried through all of my commercial practice and working career—not maybe something that in those days I would brief or talk to people that were working with me or reporting into me or whatever. But I always had this complete vision. The experience should be frictionless. It should be aesthetically beautiful.

I suppose there's another quote in the book, which is: "Beautiful things are made with love." And with that becomes this idea that you are achieving the ultimate potential of what it ever is that you're creating and you're making. It goes back to, you know, ceramics for me is something that's very important in my life. There is so much that I look at which is not made by love. It's got a lot of technical skill, but there's no truth and there's no beauty in it. When you pick that thing up, when you pick that object up, it should be giving you joy. And actually, it should give you a direct communication to the maker that made that piece of work. And so, for me, inevitability can manifest itself in all of those kinds of different ways.

You know, I talk about utility. There's beauty in utility. I've lived in enough hotels in my life to see enough knives and forks and spoons which weren't made by love and certainly didn't feel inevitable, and all the meal, and all the experience. In a sense, it's like these things shouldn't cost you any money. They're just common sense in terms of what you're doing. So when you go into a place and, I don't know, you're not being served well—the food comes out cold, or the hotel room is kind of not what you expected—the promise of what you've offered and what you've delivered are two completely different things. Inevitability could actually be surpassing all of that. It should be superlative. It's the way that I look at it. Because I think it's possible.

Brandon: Yeah, that seems like a really valuable criterion for thinking about innovation too, right? I mean, I think, often, innovation promises some kind of beauty but underdelivers or brings with it some unintended consequences or maybe shallow novelty, which doesn't really get to the heart of things.

Alan: Yeah, I mean, I've been in enough rooms where—I won't say the name of the company—there would be a number of occasions when I'd walk into the room and the person would say, "Well, Alan, if we're not going to talk about a really big number, then there's no point having this conversation." It kind of really frustrated me. Because I felt that the question should we be asking is: what is the most amazing experience that we could create for people that would actually give you the big number that you really want? And so people are kind of in a very short term. I mean, that said, just jumping along from that, I got a very good friend who runs a big VC firm here in Cambridge. We were talking a while back. He said, "Your problem, Alan, is your horizon line is completely different to most VCs. You see things in a completely different capacity." For us, medium term is 5 years. Long term is 10 years, where we need to exit the company and get our money back times 10 what we're getting. He said, whereas you're looking at something different. To me, that's a huge problem. Because when you look back at, say, indigenous culture, indigenous innovation, all of those things that did amazing stuff, that took them a long time to work that stuff out—by looking and observing.

Brandon: Yeah, hundreds of years, right? I mean, really long, long term horizons. I had an interesting conversation a few days ago at Climate Week in New York City. I was part of this conversation around valuing the intangible beauty of nature. We were trying to get impact investors to think about how we can better take beauty into account, in investment decisions and so on. I got a question I sort of pushback from somebody who is running a pension fund and saying, "Look, I mean, this all sounds very nice. But ultimately, I have to still maximize returns for the people I'm serving. I really can't take something like beauty into account. I mean, it really has to be hard returns in the short term. These are people whose livelihoods depend on me." Right? And so do you have anything that you might say in response? How would you encourage folks who are trying to think this way?

Alan: I can remember I spoke to a very old friend of mine, a Dutch guy called Jurgen. We would work with a guy that would do a lot of workshopping with pension fund holders, institutional pension funds. Pip would like me to come along. He would call me the wild card, which I always found a bit insulting personally. But there you go. Jurgen and I had not spoken for a long time. I had completely forgotten this conversation. We were in Lisbon, I think it was, and doing this workshop. Pip asked me to give a point of view on something that he had been working on. Jurgen reminded me of this. He said, you stood up. You said to these people that, basically, in this room, we're managing trillions of dollars, right? And I said, so you have the capacity to actually make change in this world. You have the capacity to get people to make better choices and better decisions about the type of legacy that you want to create. And so you need to think very differently about how you are investing and who you're investing in. Jurgen said, "I really remember that."

And so, in Do Build, the second book, we've got the 30 designed questions that I formulated after kind of looking at loads and loads of businesses and thinking about their ability to really make meaningful change in this world. I mean, I struggle with the word "impact" because it just feels so masculine, whereas I think that we need a better word. The first question I ask is: does it matter? People talk about a lot of purpose. But I'd say there are various people in various administrations in this world at the moment who have a lot of purpose, but I don't really think they're involved in the concepts of beauty and regeneration. And so my question is: does it matter? Does it matter to me? Does it matter to the world? Does it matter to us as a community? So the mattering, as I call it — beauty is a verb. The mattering in a sense is part of that. Does it matter?

There's another one which is, is it transformative? So are we bringing in technologies, new innovations, solutions that are transformative to the world that we live in? So you could be looking at, say, green jobs, green energy, a different way of doing things in that sense. Is it regenerative? So to the core for me in terms of business is, is what you're creating regenerative? You could look at that from a technological perspective, an economic perspective. It could be an ecological perspective. So rather than your principal model of it being extractive, it's regenerative.

The last one is: how will you create legacy? You know, I've got a friend of mine who he lives in his five-million-pound house. He's done very well. I celebrate him for that. I went to see him a couple of years ago. We were sitting there having a catch up. He said, "I don't know. I love your books. I think they're great." He said, "But why should I care?" That made me really sad because he's got a daughter. She's five. If he thinks his five-million-pound house is going to protect him from climate change and all the other things that we're witnessing at the moment, then he's got another thing coming. He may be lucky. He may have his fortress. But to me, well, as the French will say when they were writing in 1968, "La beauté est dans la rue." The beauty is in the streets. It's every person that is contributing to kind of making that change. So I think those questions that I felt needed to be asked. Because the concept of beauty in that sense is multidimensional. It is complex. It doesn't need to be complicated, but it requires us to think in a systemic way. It's not a word I like to use because that makes it hard for other people sometimes too. Well, how do I think in a system? But to me, those questions are really important then in terms of your friend or colleague or participant in your panel asking you that question, which is whether a number of very important questions we need to ask, if actually you're going to make a significant contribution to what the future looks like. We choose to use the word beauty. Actually, it's a much richer — when I fight back, it's like we don't need to sustain what we've got. What we've got is rubbish. We're in a worse place now than we were 20, 30 years ago.

So sustainability is not what we need. What we need is a world where we can describe a better future for all than the one we currently have. That, to me, is the power of potential of beauty. It may not fit into your nice Excel sheets that you can kind of do all this kind of calculations. So it doesn't really work like that. But what you can see is that if people are happier, if you start to look at loads of studies, if people are happier, then they go to hospital less. People eat healthier. They go to hospital less. The reality is that nature supports all diversity. So trying to turn things into narratives where you're trying to exclude certain types of human beings from what is acceptable. You're an immigrant. You're undocumented, whatever. To me, it seems a completely forced narrative. It's reductive, as opposed to expansive. That freaks some people out. But actually, I think that's just how the way the world works. That's what I would have said to your—

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. The distinction you're making between — this is, again, your other book there on how to really build essentially a business that is beautiful, does pose, I think, a lot of important questions but also this important distinction between the extractive and regenerative approaches. I think that we really have to make the shift. One of the questions that you raised in the book or that you say that you challenge business leaders to ask—which struck me—is: is this the most beautiful decision we can make? I'm curious to know what responses do you get to that. How do people process that?

Alan: It's quite a disarming question. I was being interviewed once by someone, and they asked me that question. I said, well, let's just say there's a car company that's in a lot of financial distress. The board is meeting together to discuss how they're going to deal with what it is they're going to do. The leading tool is the idea that they're going to sell the idea to their global marketplace, that diesel cars are much more efficient and a lot less polluting than petrol cars. Then someone on the board sits there and says, "Do you think this is the most beautiful decision that we could make?" The interviewer looked to me, and I said, "So this is all unpacking for you now, isn't it?" Because the reality is you're being asked a question about your own honesty, your own ethics, the ethics of this board, the longevity of the impacts that, were you to be found out, would have huge and significant ramifications. Of course, that company is Volkswagen. Ten years after all that happened, I remember meeting a lawyer and he said, "We are still making hay out of the classed actions. I mean, in Germany, they passed the law in Parliament for the first time where a class action could be taken against a company because of what it is they did.

And so, for me, again, it's a way of really challenging people to think very deeply. So it's not then about a cerebral exercise. Because actually, your ethics sit in a much deeper heart of the body, is how I believe it. And so I use that as a challenge in terms of the quality of decisions that people might want to take. Yeah, you're rushing for the short term. That's still a kind of reality. But the fact is, the time it takes to clear up the consequences of all those awful decisions that people make are incalculable. The money is spent mopping up all of the spilled milk, all of the damage, whatever. To me, it's a tragedy. Because you kind of look at it and you think, "Well, it didn't need to be like that in the first place. You just needed to be a little bit more patient." I don't know. But people run on the quarterly numbers. They run on their 5-year and 10-year cycles. I would always point them back to, well, nature's run this incredible design project.

In fact, I was watching this film called Megalith the other day, which is all about the standing stones that have been built all through Europe at incredible scale. Before really there was any form of society that you would call it, there weren't any big towns or cities. These were just people that were prepared to somehow wherever come together to collectively bring stones that weighed two tons, four tons, five tons, ten tons, to erect places in Brittany, in France, that were just extraordinary, or Stonehenge—which is the most famous one in England, where they obviously understood that there was something about collective transcendence. There was something about our relationship to the stars, to the universe, to the land that was important. That somehow, their collective efforts would be transcendent against anything else that they kind of held in as a belief.

There's this wonderful book called The Dawn of Everything, written by a guy called David Graeber and David Wengrow. Unfortunately, David Graeber died just before it was published. It really challenges the concept and idea of what an organized society could look like. So the story that we're being told at the moment, I think, is just but one story of immense possibilities of how we could live our lives. Those things still stand as an incredible monument to human capacity to organize, come together, be together, and transcend together. In a sense, albeit the beauty thing for me is immensely spiritual—that was something that I discovered on my journey—it's not an organized religion in the sense of whether it's, well, all the religions that you could throw your hat in the ring at the moment. But we understood that we could transcend and be together. I think beauty plays that role. I think it's why it's so important to people, and then it's why we need to reclaim it for what it needs to be. So I'm really thrilled about the work you're about to embark on and to go on because I think that story really needs to be brought to people.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. That's wonderful. Well, let me ask you perhaps one final piece of advice you could leave our viewers and listeners with. You talk about beauty as a verb, doing beauty. You offer a manifesto of regeneration and the concept of Re. Could you leave us with perhaps some practices? You do offer a number in Do Design, but maybe one or two that could help our viewers and listeners to concretely in daily life do beauty.

Alan: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that maybe in a simple way, find something every day that you believe to be beautiful. It could be a small thing. It doesn't need to be a big thing. Do you walk every day? Do a 20-minute walk. Just take a walk and say: "This walk is going to be for beauty. It's going to be for me." How do I bring beauty into somebody else's life? So your act of generosity, I think, is very important. Do you write a letter to yourself in terms of, to make my life more beautiful, what would that look like? And to sit with that question, which is, I mean, when I wrote the Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything book, I mean, I sat with that for a long time. I mean, it was four years, I think, where I just thought there's something in this that's really important. I didn't even know the word was beauty then. I mean, we started off with the question of my experience around beauty.

Your best guide to your best future is within yourself. It's not within other people. It talks to you if you're prepared to be patient. Just ask that question. Were I to go home, what would that beautiful home look like to me? Spiritually, work-wise, whatever, rather than feeling that there are opinions and ideas of lots of other people, that I actually know you better than you know yourself. Because no one knows you better than you know yourself. It's the truth of it.

Brandon: Right. Well, thank you, Alan. This has been really enlightening. Where can we point our viewers and listeners to your work? Where can we learn more about what you're doing?

Alan: Well, there's the website www.beautiful.business. Then there's a new website coming also which is thebeautifuldesignproject.com. That's about to go live. You can find my books at The Do Book Co. So if you just Google Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything or Do Build: How to make and Lead a Business the World Needs. Actually, at the Do Book Company, it's great because you can get a physical paperback, and you can get an e-book at the same time. There's lots of information on there about me too. So there you go.

Brandon: Fantastic. Wonderful. Thanks again, Alan. This has been such a delight.

Alan: You're welcome. Okay. Thank you.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.