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ENGIN IS A TRANSDISCIPLINARY DESIGNER and strategist with a background in architecture, systems thinking, and interaction design. As a co-founder of ATÖLYE, a strategic design and innovation consultancy, Engin focuses on leading a diverse team around interscalar strategy and design projects while honing the organization’s shared culture.
As part of our series of profiles of social change-makers for the Cohere+ Project, we spoke with Engin recently. He brought a new lens to the topic of coherence, considering both the structural components and gestalt nature of what makes for coherent design. He also spoke candidly on why he believes an excessive focus on ‘paradigm shifts' is not only presumptuous, but can obscure the degree of mystery involved with generating long term impact. And if you're wondering how sailing, gardening, and building campfires all can be described in the language of coherence, read on.
Some more background on Engin before diving into the interview: he received his master’s degree in Interactive Design and Media Arts from Tisch School of Arts, ITP of New York University in 2013. Following his ITP thesis on collaborative creative spaces, he co-founded ATÖLYE. Engin also received a dual degree in Architectural Design and Engineering from Stanford University. Afterwards, he worked in the European and US offices of ARUP as a Sustainable Design Consultant. Alongside ATÖLYE, Engin is focusing on building community-powered systems within the kyu Collective as a Director and serves on the Board of IDEO.org.
Leigh Biddlecome: I’ve heard you describe yourself as a ‘curious generalist’. What’s piqued your curiosity the most in the last week?
Engin Ayaz: This morning I was at a conference organized by a foundation in Dubai featuring a digital platform called Sky Hive. It is building a common language of skills and capabilities, and then helps people assess themselves. There are learning modules to help address skill gaps and they also match skills with job providers — so it's basically a skill building platform for youth.
I thought that modular and rigorous approach was quite interesting, and the way they designed it towards questions such as, if you are a kid in a public school, how do you find your path? How do you assess where you are, the jobs you would want, your skills gaps, and how to close those gaps?
LB: To go deeper on the subject of generalists, what do you believe generalists bring to systems thinking?
EA: Systems thinking can help legitimize being a generalist. Because it's all about, ‘what is the boundary condition of a problem?’ For example, you might look at a problem and think it's a healthcare issue. But then you realize, actually, it's not a healthcare problem, it’s an economic problem, or digging further, that it’s actually a cultural problem.
So I think being able to navigate through these different terrains, to build the shared language to assemble different stakeholders, and to facilitate— you can’t do those things if you're locked into a single discipline.
But I think the compelling bit about generalists is that if most problems could have been solved with specialists they would have already been solved in the past. Over the last couple centuries, we’ve seen that the method of breaking a problem into parts, analyzing each part, and then reassembling them doesn’t really work, because you're focusing too much on the parts and not on the relationships between the parts.
When you focus on relationships, then you have to be a bridge between two different things by default. And if you want to be a bridge, you have to be able to speak both ‘languages’, and if you compound that over three or five or ten parts that are in action, then all of a sudden you find that you’re a generalist.
I'm a generalist from the lens of being open and versatile about these conversations. And incidentally, I think AI is helping many people become generalists. Even the conversation of AGI is around Artificial General Intelligence, right? That's what we're afraid of, but it also implies that humans are holding that corner already. Many humans have some sort of a generalist inclination — we can already process information of different types, different sources, different languages and move across these territories.
I don't think this will reduce the relevance of specialists, because what I'm seeing with AI is that you have to actually discern what ‘good’ looks like, and if you're a specialist you can pick up on the feeling of something being ‘off’.
LB: This ties into what you shared just now about the foundation working on skills building and employability. For me, it also raises the question of how we should be educating young adults, and what education systems in different parts of the world are doing to grapple with this quandary of promoting more generalist vs specialist approaches, and at which points of a young person’s education.
EA: Yes, and I think that you really have to equip your toolkit with as many tools as possible and ask yourself, am I versatile in storytelling, in facilitation? Visual design data? Analytical writing? Interviews? Desktop research?
And then you have to also be quite fluent in knowing which one is the most relevant and needed at the time, and how you carry a piece of work to another context. Then I think you're really a generalist. Sometimes you might call yourself a generalist but at the end of the day if you're not deploying the right tool for the right problem, it's not going to be effective.
LB: To shift the question of relating into a human and organizational realm, I’m wondering if you can speak more to the act of facilitating, especially because I heard you speak recently about how a ‘facilitative act is also a strategic act’. Can you expand upon that?
EA: I think there's still a discourse that says someone can just come into an organization, look around, articulate a vision, and then bring the whole organization into realizing it. But the world is so nuanced and complex that I don't think anyone can do it alone.
If you allow the intelligence in a room to be surfaced, and if you allow something new to emerge that no one had thought about in that exact way before, then it does a few things. First, I think it genuinely creates alignment. Strategy is irrelevant if it's just a narrative held by a single person. It has to infiltrate, and everyone should be able to describe that strategy. If you're facilitating a conversation, getting that alignment where everyone can say, ‘I get this,’ and then put their own words to it, is much easier than pushing out the usual statements of values, vision and mission.
Facilitation increases coherence in the system, because you can hear different voices and see who is standing to the side — and that usually makes the outcome richer because someone is provoking, or finds holes in a given argument, or someone else is saying, ‘I don't believe in this.’
So you have to weave it together one piece at a time, take in different perspectives, and ask yourself as a facilitator, ‘Who are the silent ones? Where is the wisdom in that?’ Are they silent because they don’t care? Are they dissociated? Do they fully disagree, but they don't find the space safe enough to say so? Those are very different types of silences.
If you don't understand the silence in the room, you might think you have coherence, but that's not the case.
And then ultimately, I think ownership is key in most organizations. If you have people that are owning their corners, owning the organization's mission, then you go farther. Ultimately, it's co-ownership — as in, ‘we have stakes in this together.’ And to get there you also have to do storytelling, probably also some politics. So you have to deploy different methods, but I don't think you can do this without facilitation.
LB: You mentioned facilitation as a means of increasing the coherence in the system. What are challenges or blocks to developing coherence that you’ve seen in some of the communities that you've helped build, or in individual projects?
EA: In general, it's hard to get there, it's hard to sustain, and it's also hard to scale. Otto Scharmer described ‘small islands of coherence’ in one of his posts at the end of 2023 and that’s a nice description because it relates to different fractals.
You can build a beautiful park in a city, right? And it can be in a relatively small neighborhood, maybe a bit overlooked, but you can put so much attention and care to it that everyone that comes says, ‘Wow, someone cared to do this!’ I think that's a little island of coherence. Then maybe someone in the municipality sees it and says, ‘why don't we do this elsewhere?’ So then they try to build another one, and maybe it's to the same level, or maybe it's better. And then over time you can build design guidelines to make a lot of parks that way.
But design logic doesn't mean it's going to be used by everyone the same way. There are just so many layers of experiences that can unfold on top of this scaffolding. So I don't think it’s realistic to look from the Cartesian lens of ‘this is what we did and this is how people are going to move and behave.’
That's a bit like coherence — you create some order in the system, you can say ‘this is how this can be used’, these are the colors we picked, etc, but then you will never know how people will use the place individually and collectively.
I think you have to create enough structure and order and consistency as well as have an underlying logic and also underlying sense of care that others feel. Because when you enter a certain space or use an object, you know that someone cared during its creation. So coherence is structure and logic, but I would also say there's an intangible element to it.
In communities it's just so shifty and dynamic. You enter one day and things click and people are connecting and talking, and there's a very open, vulnerable conversation, just by the virtue of the first person saying something that was pretty open and candid. In others it doesn't click. Something is off, and most people feel it. There is a holistic quality to it, it can’t be taken apart and analyzed or articulated ‘why’ — something is coherent or not, in the gestalt sense. I think that's what makes it also special.
Another metaphor that comes to mind is from wind sports like sailing or windsurfing. At a certain speed and direction, sometimes you hear this hum, a very high vibration. And that doesn't mean you're going the fastest, but everything is resonant, in alignment. You’re in a steady state, but only because of many forces balancing each other out. Whereas sometimes you keep tinkering with everything — you change the sails, you keep moving your tiller — and actually, that doesn’t make you faster, despite the fact that you’re spending so much effort on it. Sometimes you have to just tune into it, do ‘nothing’.
And that's also what I find sometimes with organizations or communities. If you tinker too much and put more energy into the system, sometimes it's actually worse. Or, for example, if you just keep watering your garden once an hour, it’s worse, right? That's not what is needed.
So I’d say, do something, wait for its repercussions, allow things to emerge, step back, maybe do something else. But I think what's very unlikely is that you do ten things at once and then hope for the best — that doesn’t usually work so well [laughs].
Engin and members of the ATÖLYE community in Istanbul
LB: One of my favorite things about doing these interviews has been the metaphors for coherence that people come up with from their personal interests. And I think both the sailing and gardening ones are really resonant.
This is related to another question that I had around how you chose to cap the community at ATÖLYE for five years at 150 members. That links with what you just said around not doing too much too quickly, and instead stepping back and allowing things to emerge more organically. In the longer term, I'm wondering what you learned from that experience, and maybe any advice that you might give to others that are building communities of practice?
EA: Honestly I’m not sure whether that number still holds. I think it worked for us in an era where we were in a single place, with a relatively focused set of efforts, and where the space was designed precisely around the community. So it got to a very coherent place, but a lot of things converged, including some of the design decisions we made. We’ll never really know what would have happened if we had built for 250 or if we actually shrank it and doubled down on a stronger core. It was a convenient theory and there's science behind it which was nice to lean into (Dunbar’s number from anthropology).
So many organizations obsess about big numbers, like how many people they reach, how many people have been engaged. But if you dilute something, you cannot get back to purity very easily — dilution is a single lane road. So you want to make sure that the system is ready for dilution and that the core has enough flavor to it so that even when you dilute it, you have enough to work with.
Maybe another metaphor — although I don't want this to be a conversation of ten metaphors! — when you go camping and you want to start a fire, if you go for the big logs, they will not burn, right? You have to start small with kindling. But kindling also burns out fast. Similarly, in communities you have to have some of these small, early, frequent bursts – this can look like a few people coming in and feeling good about the place.
Then you can bring in the bigger ‘logs’, and then they can start burning, and at some point, if you have enough of a campfire, you can always put some of it aside to cook. You can even go elsewhere and build another fire. But if you carry too much away you might lose the core. So it's a juggling act — does this system have enough momentum in it, so that if I take away from it, it will sustain itself?
I think organizations also work that way. If you try to do ten initiatives, you find you can’t get any of them off the ground. Do two or three initiatives, and they start taking off.
I think the most important thing is a sense of momentum — asking yourself, is this moving at a pace? Does it have enough ability to keep moving just by virtue of it?
LB: Yes, similar to what you were saying initially around facilitating and group processes, ideally you have someone around with the subtle sensing skills to know when that momentum is happening.
EA: Exactly. And it's intuition, not intelligence.
Leigh Biddlecome: Definitely. Frankly, I don't know if you can teach this skill, it seems more like an art, a subtle sensitivity.
EA: Yes, I think you have to be attuned to your own emotions and mental state. And in conversation it’s not just what's said but what the body language is. I don't think you can have that intuition about your environment if you don't have some reflection cycle. Even simple acts like journaling or thinking ahead before a conversation (so that you are processing earlier) allow you to be a bit more present.
The other thing is, if you're completely out of your comfort zone or you know nothing about a subject or you don’t trust the environment you’re in, or if you feel like everyone is holding back, or they're dropping toxic comments, then this kind of sensing is very difficult.
And I find, at least personally, that it's pretty difficult to unpack in that very moment what exactly is going on. But you can call it out by saying ‘something feels off here, maybe we should take a step back. Is something not being said, or are we carrying a burden from somewhere else?’ Because I don't think you can intuitively read all these things without making some false assumptions.
LB: To finish up, do you have any stories from projects you’re working on which are inspiring you right now in terms of bigger picture ‘paradigm shifts’?
EA: I can point readers to our website to check out some of our projects and case studies. I have to say, if you're going around saying, ‘we work on paradigm shifts,’ I feel like usually there's something off with that. We might actually be part of the problem if we imagine ourselves as so powerful and influential. There’s a lot of mystery to things in life. You might be moving things around in the grand scheme of things, but you don't know their real ramifications.
We started with the aspiration of wanting to do long term impact and drive long term value, and we still hold on to these aspirations. But I think there's a difference between saying ‘we’re doing this’ and saying ‘we're aspiring to do this, let's see what comes out’.
Some projects start with the best intentions and they don't fully land. Sometimes it's due to lack of alignment or stakeholders, sometimes it’s lack of experience, mistakes in team formation, or world affairs. There’s just so much at play. And so do they leave an impact, do they inspire you? Maybe some do, and maybe the world is slightly better that these things exist over not existing.
But there's a risk to be presumptuous about any of this.
A typical allegory is one of the eye surgeon compared to the health policymaker. The eye surgeon goes to India and operates on two kids a day to restore their sight, and over a lifetime, she has a real impact. The health policy maker tries to get at the root causes of where the chemical poisoning is coming from that's causing blindness in the kids, and tries to move a lever in the system that's far underneath the layers.
And both are noble. So I think the quick wins and the reinforcement of building connections and working with people is necessary. I don't think you can sustain that if you just work in the more abstract and systemic side. Of course you should have a thesis on systemic implications, but also accept that there's a lot of mystery behind everything.
There are also plenty of moments of disillusionment, disappointment, and overcoming many hurdles. And naturally, our brains have this negative aversion bias, and certain shields or protection mechanisms. So I think it's actually harder as you go on to remain hopeful and optimistic about things. And that's good to acknowledge. Because, then, if you do try to become aware of this bias, you can really shift something, because most people are not that optimistic.
Even the idea of legacy is changing for me personally, from projects we build or tangible work, to more emphasis on a compounded set of relationships. Through work and deliverables you can get to certain outcomes, and that’s fine, but that focus is also changing a bit for me. People remember relationships, especially if you connect to yourself and others in a relatively authentic way. In the end, I believe it all comes down to tending to relationships with care, staying curious, and leaving enough space for emergence — that’s where real transformation can take root.
Leigh Biddlecome is a writer, facilitator and interdisciplinary consultant based in Berlin.
