Permaculture principle 11: Use edges and value the marginal

Permaculture principle 11 is use edges and value the marginal — here’s how it can be used as a practical thinking tool to guide more ethical marketing and business decision-making.

This is Part 12 of a 13-part series: How to Use the 12 Permaculture Principles in Business and Marketing. If you’re new to the principles, start here. Or, you can view the full series here.

What ‘use edges and value the marginal’ means

While the permaculture principles were originally developed to guide the design of farms and gardens, they’re actually universally applicable. Let’s look at the traditional definition, then reimagine what ‘use edges and value the marginal’ means for ethical business and marketing.

Land-based definition

Deliberately maximise the overlapping edges where different species and elements meet, which are often the most productive and valuable parts of a landscape.

Marketing definition

Pay attention to fringes and in-between places where ideas, people and systems overlap, where the most meaningful exchange and marketing innovation often occur.

Proverb

Don’t think you are on the right track just because it’s a well-beaten path — reminding us that the conventional or status quo approach may not always be the most innovative or effective.

Translating this principle to marketing

In nature, edges or ‘ecotones’ are places where ecosystems meet.

This creates an overlapping space that’s often more productive, interesting and diverse than either place on its own. For example, consider where the sea meets land, plant roots meet soil, or even lungs meet air.

Edges can be places of competition, but also of cooperation.

‘Use edges and value the marginal’ encourages us to increase these beneficial edge effects across our business and marketing by deliberately overlapping more elements.

Cultivate your website as an ‘edge’ between worlds

A key edge in digital marketing is your website, which acts as a shopfront and therefore an interface between the public commons of the internet and your private world of offers, services and values.

People move across this edge from curiosity to trust and from interest to economic exchange, so it’s a crucial space to cultivate and bring attention to.

But marketing is full of other edges and peripheries, too — between platforms, content types, offers, teams, industries, people and locations.

These edges can be a melting pot of creativity, diversity and connection, and sometimes tension and conflict, too. It’s a place where you can actively cultivate interesting and unusual change.

Allow space for wild ideas and emergence at the edges

‘Use edges and value the marginal’ invites us to identify and appreciate the fringes as sources of inspiration and possibility, because the most common, popular or obvious things aren’t always the most influential.

Innovation often surfaces from countercultural or wild ideas that don’t yet fit neatly into dominant norms.

These overlapping edges can even create emergence: when something entirely new is created from two or more individual things coming together. (For example, a rainbow created by sunshine during a storm.)

That’s when the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, to paraphrase Aristotle.

So, this principle asks us to discard negative connotations around ‘marginal’ — permaculture itself has been marginal for years, after all. 

How to apply ‘use edges and value the marginal’ in marketing

A handy tool for visualising edges is the Venn diagram.

For example, the Japanese concept of ikigai helps you discover your purpose by identifying the intersecting edges between what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for.

So, brainstorm edges, intersections and marginalised spaces within your business and marketing, then look for ways to learn from what’s already happening at the fringes while increasing overlap to create more value.

Edges in business approach and structure

• Speaking to values and ethics that are not yet mainstream in your industry.
• Countercultural or disruptive shifts your industry needs but hasn’t fully embraced.
• Experimenting at the intersection of two disciplines (eg, the way I’m blending permaculture and marketing).
• An evolving business identity, perhaps as you change niche or business model.
• The tension between your personal capacity and business ambition.
• The negotiation between generating income and achieving your mission or purpose.
• Interactions between teams and roles (eg, finance versus customer service).
• Testing a new business idea in a rough-and-ready way (eg, a pop-up in a disused warehouse) that’s low-cost and provides room to take risks and experiment.

Edges in marketing offerings and client care

• Your website as the ‘shopfront’ edge between the public and your private offerings.
• The true needs of the community you serve versus what they think they want or need.
• Free value and advice versus paid offerings and support.
• The way your offers overlap and connect to guide people to the next step.
• The tension between algorithm-driven content and things you make just for the love and creativity of it.
• Onboarding and offboarding processes as key transition points for clients.

What permaculture thinkers say about this principle

“In permaculture, we say: ‘The edge is where the action is.’ Edges are special places that you can observe, learn from and include in your permaculture designs. By doing so, you can create abundance and diversity.” — Heather Jo Flores, Free Permaculture

“Edges are places of great dynamism, of great creativity and diversity, and sometimes of conflict and tension… They’re often also places of great diverse aspects that co-create a third system that is often richer than either of the two.” — Starhawk, Earth Activist Training

“The paradigm-changing ideas in society are often generated by those who are marginalised, at the edge of acceptable norms.” — Tim Sonder, Edible Evanston

“I believe the inspiration, examples and wisdom for the solutions come not from the centre, but from the margins, where people live at the edge between culture and nature, between modernity and the past.” — David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability

“Overcoming what’s referred to as functional fixedness can enable us to get more use out of those edges and margins. That’s a boring name for a powerful concept which essentially means seeing beyond an object’s original or common use.” — Laura Oldanie, Permaculture and Money

Other closely connected principles

The 12 permaculture principles work best as a set of interconnected design prompts.

Each offers a different lens, and the combination creates depth, balance and a tempering effect — the holistic approach at the heart of systems thinking.

For example, ‘use edges and value the marginal’ is closely related to:

• Principle 1, ‘observe and interact’, as noticing opportunities at the peripheries requires close attention and listening, ideally before taking action.
• Principle 3, ‘obtain a yield’, as we may find unexpected forms of capital (monetary and otherwise) when we turn our attention to the fringes.
• Principle 8, ‘integrate rather than segregate’, as getting the most out of the fringes requires maximising beneficial relationships.
• Principle 12, ‘creative use and respond to change’, as overlapping edges can be places of emergence, where collaboration creates unexpected or outsized change.

Ready for the next principle?  Explore permaculture principle 12, ‘creatively use and respond to change’, or browse the full series here.

And a quick side note: this series is adapted from a lesson inside my Permaculture Marketing course, in case you’d like to go deeper.