The Dyson blog: Escaping the Devil's Snare: Pioneering sustainable and innovative approaches in construction

For many, Christmas is a time for family films. Over the break, I watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Towards the end of the film, the three protagonists find themselves caught in a plant called the Devil’s Snare. This plant binds you tight and the more you struggle the tighter it binds. You escape by stopping fighting, doing something different to what feels like the right and obvious thing; and by exposing the plant to light.

In my inaugural lecture in the autumn, I suggested that one of our biggest challenges to solve going forward is trying to get free of the tendrils that bind us. Another metaphor is to reduce the viscosity of business. I don’t know whether you have ever made a non-Newtonian fluid by mixing cornflour with water? As soon as you try to move the fluid its viscosity rises exponentially; in fact, people have walked across swimming pools of the stuff.

For me, both the Devil’s Snare and the cornflour explain one of the key reasons why we fail in doing the great things we are all capable of. We become wedded to one way of doing them and when we don’t get the results we want, we think we just need to try harder, to struggle more or to do more work. The results are the opposite to what we expect.

You can see this all around us in the season of festivities. We all have our own playbook, a list of traditions, menu, set of rituals. If doing these things doesn’t make everybody happy we just need to do more of them, try harder, and put more effort in.

We get caught in the Devil’s Snare.

As Hermione Granger knew, the alternative is to stop struggling and bring light to where we are. One of the play-on-words used by counsellors is not to say “Don’t sit there, do something” but to say “Don’t do something, sit there”. This is a time of year, but also a time in our history when the things we have been doing and are doing are not giving us what we want and need. There is little use in just trying much harder at doing the same things. We need to pause, reflect on our purpose, try to see different perspectives, different routes forward; bring light to our present.

We need to try different things, do things in different ways, make new connections.

A few weeks ago I was involved in a conversation about pharmaceuticals. Many of the drugs we take are synthesised ultimately from oil or use significant amounts of fossil fuels to produce. Agricultural, paper and wastewater industries dispose of significant amounts of carbon-based compounds which could be the feedstocks for these drug substances. Creating new connections between industries that work largely independently could have a significant impact on the sustainability of the pharmaceutical industry. This different perspective is exciting. Bryden Wood is supporting this idea, and many others, that will be part of the change in approach we need.

Doing things differently, letting go of what we have known either in Christmas traditions or any other traditions, or processes and procedures we follow, or the pre-judgements we hold onto can feel hard. Humankind became dominant through its adaptability, our neo-cortex in our brains is incredibly plastic and moulds to allow us to adapt our whole life. To enact the change both individually and collectively we just need to recognise that we are stuck in the Devil’s Snare and decide to stop struggling.