Linknotes, July 16, 2010
Image source: Unknown
Some of the things that we found of interest this week –
Nice concept – “Take a Closer Listen – 72 pages of sound” – verbal descriptions of favorite sounds in a self-published book, as reviewed at BLDGBLOG
David Brooks on the personalities of business – “princes” and “grinds” – and the importance of supporting “the country’s loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders” to spark and sustain the economy
Four points of view about which problems to solve that may influence strategies and actions in innovation – strategic problems, design problems, marketing or launch problems, and consistent business processes
Serendipity and discovery – A new theory of “gravity” generated after a theft of a laptop caused a change in plans. “It’s interesting,” Herman said, “how having to change plans can lead to different thoughts.”
Some considerations on skewed values between thinking about design and actually doing stuff
And the continuing debate (and here, and here) on “do-gooder design and imperialism”
Detroit seems to have become a focus for Design Observer. As we noted earlier, two posts there this week explored the issues and opportunities in the city. I especially liked Dan Pitera’s slideshow and essay, Detroit: Syncopating an Urban Landscape. Dan’s essay made reference to the Steel Winds project in Lakawanna. Somewhat connected, there is also this article in the New York Times this week on the aspiring imitators of the enormously successful High Line development in Manhattan.
Separately, but related, the Harvard Business blogs reflected on the importance of cause marketing and used as an example the surprising success with the “I’m in” campaign for the Detroit Public Schools
(For some amusement, things are a bit strange further north)
And, some self-reflective links –
A thought about how “master planning” seems so out of date
Considerations about design RFP’s and their inadequacy as expressions of the real problem to solve
My own thoughts on the self-destructive threat in closed environments, or, more appropriately the delights and benefits of openness that yield differential success (below), and we appreciated this extension of the conversation
A decision-making rubric | http://jimmeredith.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/true-ups-let-gos-big-leaps/
Once again, into the brief
Perhaps it’s because of work we’ve recently done for advertising and media companies, or maybe just in a sense of some process alignments, I’ve been caught by discussions about the “creative brief.” In both advertising and product design (yet mostly absent in architecture and environmental design) there seems to be a lot of continuing discussion (for example, here, here and here) around how to shape the statement of the client’s “problem.”
In a number of cases, you can almost read between the lines that the outline for the brief is an attempt to address a lagging of internal creativity. In other cases, it seems as if the formula for the brief is an assertion of the firm’s differentiation, effectively using the form for stating the client’s problem as part of the attraction of the client.
This is a link to an appreciation for another firm’s approach, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, from which Dan Pankracz quotes –
From Crispin Porter + Bogusky via samadblog.blogspot.com
He appreciates this approach for what they call “tensions in the culture,” signaling apparently broader considerations of the context in which the creative work will reside.
The classic briefing statement for architectural design projects, typically called the “program,” seems rarely practiced well but a great example is delightfully presented in William Pena’s Problem Seeking: An Architectural Programming Primer. I’ve used it as a template for most of my work. I’ve greatly appreciated it for its key principles, and for its “information index” and “programming procedures” which, if reflected on and practiced rigorously, can open you to a deep conversation with your client to uncover what their “tensions” may be, what the key opportunity is that they are trying to capture.
In a more simple form, I like Clayton Christensen’s approach of understanding what “job” the client is trying to do. I’ve taken this as a device to go way back in the client’s thinking, well before the project at hand, to understand how the work that we will do fulfills the purposes and goals of the enterprise.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Image: DCDC + Designers
Just a short note and links to some very good posts.
The Design Observer, if you are not already regularly reading it, is a great site with a diversity of thinking about design and society. Detroit seems to have come into attention there.
First, there was a 3-part series by Jerry Herron reflecting “on the rise and fall — and persistence — of Detroit.” (links to one, two and three)
Then, with real pleasure, there was Dan Pitera’s essay, Detroit: Syncopating an Urban Landscape and slideshow of some recent interventions in the city and ideas for “productive landscapes,” “urban ephemera,” and “architectural interventions.”
While we are on Detroit, if you missed it, here’s last Sunday’s New York Times magazine on Art as a Security System.
Going with the flow
Image from Self Defense by Stephane Malka via BLDGBLOG
In a couple of recent discussions on LinkedIn about the evolution of the workplace, I could sense the signals of a reluctance, or fear, in the justifications for resistance to a more open, agile workplace. Much of it comes from paradigms around the term “mobile” implying a necessity to give up the company workplace. Other resistance is more superficial, having to do with the old conventions of why someone just has to have an “office.”
I always find in these discussions a tendency to go to form rather than activity, avoiding the opportunities to explore the personal benefits of the emerging workplace concepts.
A day later these citations showed up in a couple of posts by Diego Rodriguez of IDEO on his excellent Metacool blog. He wrote about the considerations of both Joichi Ito (CEO of Creative Commons) and John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla). Each, in their own posts reflected on the power and opportunity in chance encounters.
A couple of direct quotes from each –
Joi Ito – Focusing on everything
Referring to some of the things he’s learning from Hagel and Brown’s book, The Power of Pull, he says
“…you should set a general trajectory of where you want to go, but that you must embrace serendipity and allow your network to provide the resources necessary to turn any random events into a highly valuable one and that developing that network comes from sharing and connecting by helping others solve their problems and build things.”
He then is reminded of Edward Hall’s definition of polychronic time vs monochronic time (p-time vs m-time), and says –
“In m-time, we delineate time and space into meetings and cubicles allowing organizations and institutions to scale massively. p-time is like a Arab majlis where everyone is invited at the same time and they all mill around in the waiting room of the sheikh while the sheikh has a series of meetings in the open inviting people into the meeting like a long flow of consciousness. P-time lacks scalability and order, but it is rich in context and serendipity. At some level, if you plan everything, you are very unlikely to be able to embrace serendipity or be as ‘lucky’.”
And he concludes –
“I feel like I am floating in a rich network of highly charged people and serendipitous events, not a single day going by where I don’t feel like ‘Yay! I just did something really good!’”
He does, however, also reflect on a matter of context –
“I find that this P-time method allows me to have a much richer high context thought process involving more people. The problem is, it’s hard to then get anything structured done.”
John Lilly – Adventures of the mind
John first reflects on his youth when, falling asleep in a lecture, he misses what was perhaps the very first demonstration of the World Wide Web. Talking about turning points in life and the things that influence them, he says –
“A bunch of decisions that I thought were really important turned out to be not important at all, and some things I decided to do just for fun changed everything.”
He reflects on this and offers that –
“you never know when a decision you make is going to have a profound effect in your life. At least, I’ve never been able to tell. So my coping strategy — what I do to make everything work for me — is try to put myself into situations where there are tons of great choices, tons of great people, tons of great outcomes possible — so that it makes the odds that I make some really important & good choices that much better.”
Why this matters
These are the illustrations (even more illustrations!) of the benefits and achievements that come from more open approaches to the contexts in which work is done. Yes, Ito will need to find a way to shut out some stuff when he wants to concentrate and focus, but I assume that neither he nor Lilly would be proponents of conventional office space.
As Hagle and Brown point out in their book, this time that we are in is no longer about stacks of information but about flows, and to be successful you have to get into the stream.
––––––––––––
http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2003/08/06/going-ptime.html
http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2010/05/13/focusing-on-eve.html
http://john.jubjubs.net/2009/08/21/adventures-of-the-mind/
http://metacool.typepad.com/
True ups, let gos, and big leaps
I’ve lost the original source, but I am still motivated by the phrase I had captured from the original article. Commenting on an otherwise passive role, the president of the company referred to his CEO’s interventions as “true-ups, let gos, and big leaps.” I think this is a great agenda for the new decade for all of us.
True-ups, to me, are the recalibrations we should make. What do we think about the purpose and mission of our enterprise, and how “true” are our current actions to that purpose? Alternatively, if we’ve found that we’ve lost value in the recession and cannot find a way to recapture it, how do we realign what we do to have greater value in the very new and different world we now are experiencing?
Let gos are certainly the things we’ve done in the past that no longer have value. The world has shifted radically, and to long nostalgically for a “recovery” that allows us to do the same old things again is a suicide strategy.
Big leaps are the moves I think we should have been making over the past year or more, and now must urgently make, to catch up with the big shift that has taken place in the economy and in society that is redefining everything about value in the next generation.
Powered by ScribeFire.
5 tactics for more valuable workplace design outcomes
I was inspired by a sentence in a rather good article in the Wall Street Journal this week about Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America. The article references a manual the TFA members use that provides the tools and techniques that make them so successful in raising the educational achievement of the students in the schools where the teach. This is the sentence that caught me –
One chart explains why teachers should choose an objective like “The student will be able to order fractions with different denominators,” rather than “The teacher will present a lesson on ordering fractions with different denominations.”
It caused me to reflect on the power of language in the design and allied professions. As in this example, the subject of our work is frequently not the objective of those we serve.
The dominant lexicon of achievement in architecture and design projects includes objectives like “on time/on budget.” Yet, I do not think that any of our clients has ever built something for the purpose of being on time and on budget. They build for the purpose of advancing the goals and purposes of their enterprise. However, there is rarely a reference to this purpose and its success metrics in the guiding principles of the project or in the review of its completion. The conventional professional lexicon and its associated quantitative and qualitative measures express self-reflective and self-congratulatory objectives that tend to divert our attention and could take our services and solutions well off target.
That sentence from the TFA manual, Teaching As Leadership, made me speculate on the value of renaming one of the core disciplines of our practice. Would developing best practices in “outcomes management” instead of “project management” reverse the continuing erosion of the scope of our profession and its slide into commodity service? Could assuring that the guiding principles – the program requirements – of any project have a well defined and understood linkage to the purposes of the enterprise increase the value of our relationship with our clients? Could the project “post-mortem” (egad! what a term!) include a post-occupancy review that specifically tracked the performance outcomes of our client’s enterprise? Would “outcomes management” yield an entirely different approach to design (“pilot projects” to test and prove assumptions, for example) and an entirely different relationship with our clients (a significantly broader “surface area” of contact and a longer “dwell time” of relationship that experienced with “project” management)? How do we develop space and place concepts to more effectively enable people’s participation and provide the utility to unlock their contribution of value to the enterprise?
Here are five tactics that I’d suggest to begin to change the lexicon of professional practice and move in this direction –
- Uncover and understand the business issue, the job the client is trying to get done – Move the expression of the client’s project mission from “we need (or don’t need) more desks,” to “here is the problem we are trying to solve,” or “here is the opportunity we are trying to capture,” or “here is the contribution we are trying to make.”
- Define the role that people play in this mission and purpose – what do people who work for the organization do or need to do to get its work done? Move from depictors of spatial function to descriptors of workmodes.
- Listen and observe – develop insight from the ways that people work both in the larger world as well as in the project context. Whatever the context, seek and identify the spatial motivators of human engagement.
- Identify the unmet needs – uncover what has not yet been invented that would help shape better environments for people to do this work, creating places and spaces where new opportunities can be found and developed to do the job the client wants to do
- Invent, test, develop – generate and test new ideas, learn from them, make the solutions better
I’ll develop these ideas further for a future post. In the meantime, and as always, I’d greatly appreciate your own thoughts on this subject in the comments.
Whether in our professional work, in online discussion groups, or in our readings, it seems that the subject of workplace transformation is itself in a transformational state. People still cite statistics justifying one side or the other of the ongoing open versus closed debate, and others are counting the amounts of corporate real estate savings delivered through alternative work and mobility programs as supportive data to expand them.
Certainly there is an evolution, a progression taking place, and perhaps all of this data buzz is the signal that the subject is finding traction, but the metrics are still about consumption, and not yet about production. That is, “performance” seems defined in terms of a space/cost metric and not sufficiently in terms of organizational achievement.
In the meantime, as the design of the workplace lags, the design of technology that initially enabled alternative workplace programs never sleeps. Today, the 2 millionth iPad has been sold as more and more people discover the delights of the latest technology that lightens the load and allows almost access to almost any type of information in progressively more satisfying form, anywhere and at any time, and sharable.
In relatively rapid development we’ve gone from bulky laptop to lighter notebook to Blackberry to iPhone to iPad. We’ve fretted about work/life balance yet now go mostly with the flow. We’ve gone from traveling salesman to knowledge worker to worrying about how to accommodate the socially-connected gaming generation in the workplace.
We are learning that the old institutions are dying, as well. Leadership in commerce is increasingly being achieved through collaborative insight and breakthrough development, much of it achieved from relationships established after serendipitous contact at the peripheries of our core pursuits. These connections are, in a large part, the products of technologies that have made us lighter, more agile, more networked, more aware.
So this is what I am wondering: As the pleasures of these technologies have enabled the increasing satisfaction of connecting, developing ideas and achieving the good things that come from interaction in or from places other than the office, but since only a portion of those experiences are shared by people working in assigned space in offices – is it getting lonely in a conventional office?
What is the impact, in other words, of the experiential gap between the design of virtual and physical work space? Are there barriers to achievement, organizationally or personally, presented by working in assigned office space when the activities of others are being augmented and amplified by the ability to get out and move around?
Has the quality of the experience brought by mobile technology become so satisfying that it is no longer satisfying to work in a fixed place?
The latest workplace design trends
Among the most common expressions of advice as anxiety turns to optimism in the economy relates to the preparedness and actions of leaders. “You must rapidly move from the status quo,” so many advisers say, “and establish and consistently articulate a vision for moving forward.” It may be this vision quest that so many organizations are going through that makes the request for a review of trends such a frequent agenda item in our conversations with current and potential clients.
As I noted in our last post, a review of what others are doing now provides information, a measure of pace, a confidence in direction, and other assurances that you are on the right path. I cautioned, however, that trends, in this sense of “solutions,” are more the evidence of what others may have found to be the right move to make, yet may neither connect authentically to your own purposes nor deliver similar or related results.
Redefining trends
I thought I’d return to this subject, with a slightly different skew. Reviewing trends as “solutions” to help shape your path forward begins at the wrong point and may lead to bad results. Understanding and analyzing trends that shape what you do and how you do it is an essential discipline in shaping and communicating vision and purpose, and in shaping and delivering services and products that have value to those you serve.
More specifically, shaping a workplace transformation program based on the trends you see in the actions of others may be more harmful than doing nothing. Shaping a new workspace around the trends and directions driving the value in what you do can be a powerful agent in sustainable leadership.
Transform, and activate
A major social services organization was facing challenges brought by the reduction of resources as a result of the economic collapse, and a corresponding rise in demand for their services. The leader of the organization recognized that they would have to begin to do more with less. He quickly realized that he could never accomplish that mission-rich but resource-spare agenda in the type of workplace where they had been working. Although a generous gift from a financial services company, it was generations out of date, compartmentalized, and walnut-paneled. And it dragged on their energy and purpose.
This leader researched trends in workplace design and spoke with architects, designers and furniture manufacturers. He began to form a vision of the workspace concepts that he believed would characterize the type of organization they would need to become – open, collaborative, agile, responsive. He then embarked on a major program to find and design the right type of space. He included in it all of the elements that he had been advised were the components of a more open and collaborative culture. He then moved his organization in and waited for the culture to take shape.
After several months, this same leader began to shape another program – this time to “activate” the workplace. Even though his organization’s workspace was at the leading edge of a typology for action-oriented organizations, the results he expected were not materializing. Returning to the recent reformulation of the organization’s mission, he put together a proposal to augment the earlier project with artifacts of the unique work his organization did, and more representative of how work is actually done in the organization. They are now implementing a tuning and amplification of the concept in place.
Touch down, and touch base
A leading consulting organization had an innovation culture and a staff who worked closely with their clients in modes that were highly mobile. They were able to design and implement mobile workstyles that progressively reduced demand for their own corporate real estate. Each iteration of the program brought the ratio of people to seats higher and higher, and the ratio of real estate to people lower and lower.
The people who worked for them had no problem with the evolution of these programs. They did their best work in close contact with their clients, and traveled around the world to deliver their advice. The company became a model and their workplace transformations became benchmarks for others, the influential origin of a trend toward aggressive mobile workforce solutions.
This company however, began to have problems with the results of these programs. They had so successfully supported mobile workstyles that their people rarely had contact anymore with the company or their peers. The knowledge they had when they entered the company was not expanding, and the experience they gained in their work was not being transferred. Their brand power, formed from collective intelligence, experience and expertise, was eroding.
One component of their solution was, oddly, a workplace transformation program. They developed a workplace that was so authentically responsive to the experiences and behaviors of their “road warriors” that it became their preferred place to touch down. These “offices” became the places where they found colleagues and traded stories, where they updated and sustained their sense of the brand, and nourished their intellectual energies before heading off on the next engagement. The company is now making headlines again, and the next wave in its business innovations currently under way.
Envision, and transform
A large creative services organization composed of several advertising and media companies recently began a lease consolidation program to bring all of the companies together in one place. These companies were fiercely independent, proud of their brand legacy and, in some cases, competitive with each other for clients and accounts. And they were very resistive to the program.
They participated, however, in a series of exercises that looked at the changing nature of the business they were in, the drivers of change for themselves and for their clients and customers, and the products and services they would need to develop to survive the change and to achieve and sustain leadership. This analysis led to insights that allowed them to envision the behaviors and experiences that would be essential to how they would frame and deliver those services. They then shaped a workplace and workspace transformation program around those experiences and behaviors.
Within a few months of moving into their new workspace, their principal customer, a global manufacturer, complemented them on the impact he felt to his business from the change that had taken place in theirs. Both the companies and their customers had survived a very challenging business context and today are leaders in their markets.
M-Shaped Strategies – A process inversion
These are the successful stories. In each case, these organizations shifted direction from initial intentions and achieved results from solutions that were original to their purposes. So many other organizations in these times, however, are starting with goals of “cost savings” and embracing workplace transformation trends and implementing programs that shed and minimize real estate but threaten the effectiveness of their mission.
The identification and analysis of trends is very important in the formation of a vision or development of a strategy for a robust and sustainable future. The trends to study in this context are not solutions, however, but problems. These trends are the weaker and stronger signals of emerging change, or of dissatisfaction with the now, or of a shift in value or values that provide the insight shaping the moves you want to make to be effective, or to lead, or to fulfill a purpose and meet a need in the future. They are what Roger Martin calls the “mystery.”
These trends define the context for what you will do as an organization. Clayton Christensen calls this the “job” you are asked to do, the root problem your customer wants you to solve, or the result they want to achieve through your products or services. In the examples I cited above, the social services organization’s customers wanted advocacy, the consulting organization’s customers wanted to trust in and receive the value of the brand, and the media company’s customers wanted integrated creative communications.
The role of the workplace in each of these “jobs-to-be-done” was influenced by considerations of functional, emotional and social experiences of both staff and customers in these organizations. People who worked for the social services organization or who had an interest to contribute to its programs could be moved beyond volunteering and donating to active advocacy by becoming immersed in the story of the community they would affect. People who worked for the consulting organization and their clients would progress throughout the exchange of experiences and knowledge gained in a global practice by its members. Customers of the organization composed of the media and advertising organizations would benefit from the creative and coordinated programs developed by in the collaborative and open culture of its agencies.
The jobs-to-be-done and the understanding of the experiences of staff and customers of these organizations were the underlying and salient considerations that then shaped their workplace strategies, programs, and designs. Each of these organizations, achieving and sustaining leadership through what they do are now effectively, trend setters, and have the potential to influence the moves that others make. But the strategies and concepts used by the agencies, for example, which could be seen as representative of a trend in design for “agile” and “collaborative” and “team-based” workplaces, would be inappropriate or insufficient for the jobs that the other organizations were trying to do even though they, too, wanted to support agile, collaborative teams.
A recommendation
I would recommend an inversion in the process and origins of the conversations we’ve seen as a trend in the quest for trends.
If you are an organization who also believes that the nature of your workspace influences the impact of your work, try inverting the conventional process. Try starting the conversation with your architect or designer by telling him or her about the trends deeply affecting your clients or customers – the “mysteries” in your scan and the “jobs” your clients want done – and how they might affect the direction you feel you need to take as an organization. I assume he or she will then engage with you in a conversation about the experiences that are at the core of your offering, and shelve the conventional presentation of the portfolio and the latest styles of workplace design.
I think you’ll be happier.
…..
© MEREDITH Strategy & Design | M-Shaped Strategies ®
Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Prescription
Emerging opportunities in organizational real estate and workplace programs – and how to capture their value
I have become considerably optimistic about the future of our practice from the evidence of disruption that had been latently present and now is increasing activating our economy. What had been a slowly emerging awareness of the need for doing things in new ways is now attaining greater momentum through the recognition that a fundamental shift has taken place, and that new strategies and designs are essential to successfully get in the flow of new achievement.
I sketched a diagram, an emergent equation of sorts, that begins to express some of the shift and its potential in a couple of domains of interest for me.
It tries to express that the content of the institutions and organizations of the recent past, which had still been bound up in closed and constrained systems, is breaking out and finding new value through more open and innovative systems. The impacts of this change of state include the collapsing value of the services and infrastructures that sustained the older systems in the first decade of the millennium, and the emergent power and potential residing in the transitional white space between the recent now and the yet-unformed next.
Some familiar recitations
Corporations, as individually competitive entities, were essentially closed systems where not being number one or two meant death. They were administrated by hierarchies enclosed in towers expressive of stature, status, and power. The value in these towers was attained through internal controls like efficiency of utilization, and external influences like financial instruments.
These real estate values were achieved through a set of services, equipment and standards managed separately from the core purposes of the organization, and yet influenced the shape of buildings and cities. People sat in policy-defined cubes. Furniture manufacturers fabricated responsive and dimensionally-confined systems. And architects and designers influenced site selection and lease negotiations based on “test fits” measuring the efficiency of the ratio of space enclosed in cubes versus the amount of space left over. Developers achieved “investment grade” ratings on their buildings by, among other things, reducing the inches of building constructed between the module of the furniture systems proscribed by the corporate standards and the minimum dimensions of aisles defined by code. Geometric precision defined economic value.
Then, a confluence of global comic development, financial meltdown, technology acceleration and the innovation imperative scrambled the value set. Rising real (and artificial) estate costs initiated a quest to squeeze, and “footprint hierarchy” disappeared. Technology enabled a work-anywhere potential, and realistic real estate utilization metrics proved the case for dramatic reduction in real estate demand. Innovation, the key to competitive differentiation and precious growth, was now believed to arise from a culture of creative and cross-disciplinary collaboration for which the cube was an enemy. Even after economic collapse and the disappearance of price pressure on real estate decisions, the demand for space may now be felt more by the coffee shop than the corporation.
Leading organizations are now trying to find ways to operate as networked clusters of competencies rather than closed corporations. The concept of work “stations” now only has value if you believe that if you have one you will not get laid off; instead, quality of place and attraction of space get attention. Work, in any case, is no longer contained in a company’s buildings, nor by the clock, and is progressively becoming part of a seamlessly networked, diversely urban lifestyle. People now much more agile in place and time, choose places and spaces that are the most effective, or can be made more effective, for whatever activity is part of their workstream.
So, what might this mean?
Our clients regularly ask us about trends. Understanding what is happening in workplace planning and design, for example, allows them to become current, test their status against industry and competitors, and make more informed choices about their own programs. Trends, a term borrowed from the world of style, may however be evidence more of group-think and less a valid tool for decision-making. The trend-setter may actually have been the only one in the chain who made an authentic move, creatively adapting and innovating their workspace to meet the unique and differential needs of their organization’s purpose. His followers may now be experiencing the frustration of trying to fit function to form.
In a recently posted video of his presentation at a TED conference, Simon Sinek offers a diagram – “the Golden Circle” – of the path to influential leadership, and a simple formulation that people want what you believe, not what you are.
Individuals and organizations with a well-formulated and articulated belief system (“why” – their purpose for being) develop aligned and authentic means to deliver on their promise (“how”). In order for the “how” of their organization to be effective, they shape their presence in place and space in the character of their culture (“what” – the tangible and physical expression of their unique DNA).
Trends in organizational real estate and workplace design
In their real estate and workplace design programs, aspirational organizations may see the impact and influence of others’ space moves and, sensing “trend,” may choose a similar approach for themselves, believing they, too, may benefit from the concepts.
The trend-setting organization may say – we are relentless in our quest to understand the needs of our clients and their customers. To get this understanding we do our work standing next to them, enabled by technology and support policies that allow our people to work in our client’s places. We’ve developed an agile workplace with all of the tools to support and nurture our highly committed and recognized staff.
The trend-following organization sees a “trend” to shed real estate costs through a reduced space inventory and minimized allocations. They initiate a mobile work “policy” and measure their success with a 40% reduction in occupancy costs, which, they believe, enhances their competitive position in the market. Their people begin to experience a high level of stress, make harmful decisions based on the celebrated internal metrics, and cling to a cubicle as an entitlement and an assumed job insurance.
If I could apply Simon Sinek’s principles to our advice to our clients, I would always propose that we design from the inside out. Developing a deep understanding of the purpose and goals of the organization (the why), we would then begin to shape with them a strategy design (the how) to meet their goals and then begin to uncover, test and develop concepts to shape a design strategy for place and space (the what) to enhance the performance of people and to achieve and sustain leadership in their mission.
In other words, I’d try this new formula with them–
- Articulate why you are in business and let that purpose be the principle drive of real estate programs and decisions
- Define how you uniquely do what you do, first without reference to space
- Shape space and place around the how
This is a great time for corporations and other forms of organizations to reassess the purposes and power of place for their own goals and objectives, whether considering new initiatives or reviewing the impacts of past or recent programs.
What do you think?
© Jim Meredith
Dangerous and seductive curves
Aircraft carrier in landscape, Hans Hollein
I may have referred to this before, but recent readings bring the idea back to mind.
In one of those influential lectures very early in college, Hans Hollein, an Austrian architect, offered an insightful illustration of the relationship between technology and society. I can not remember why he was speculating on this in his talk, in that long ago time when computers were kept in special locked rooms and run by punch cards, and chalk was used on chalkboards, and his own reputation at that time was shaped by a couple of small shop designs.
He drew a graph that looked like this –
His point, reinforced over and over since then by developments none of us could have foreseen at that time, was that technological development moves inexorably on, but social development lags. When the gap between the states of society and technology becomes too great, a social revolution takes place. Society adapts to technology.
That broad contextual reference reappeared when reviewing these two graphs in a recent post by David Sherwin in his very nice Change Order blog –
He called his S-curve the “Design Investment Curve,” and offered it to designers as a way to set client expectations about an appropriate pace of development of a concept and project. I think the offering is appropriate, yet I think his perspective, and the scale of the curve, may be shifting.
I many cases, the commissions that come to us as architects and designers are already on the acceleration portion of the curve in our clients’ minds. A corporate or organizational strategy has been formed internally, budgets have been developed and schedules set, the project has been formulated and moved into the workstream of an implementation team, RFP’s have been developed and a selection process executed, and then we get the commission. Client interest, anticipation and anxiety must be high at that point, and so, as Sherwin points out, are expectations. We are by this time, as in Hollein’s graph, “society” to our client’s “technology.”
It may be very appropriate for us to adjust our client’s expectations about the probable or possible pace of a project or program. But another graph appeared in my reading recently, and I wonder if it does not set a different tone.
I was watching a video of John Seely Brown presenting to a class at Stanford recently. His new book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion was about to come out making the argument for the need of new approaches and the rise of new institutions to meet emerging needs and be successful in emerging contexts.
His point, like Hollein’s, was that the advance of technology was inexorable. Brown’s graph illustrated technology with a very steep and very tall acceleration line and also served as a representation of the “flow” of ideas in our time. His argument was that survival/success/prosperity would mean that we get into that state of flow and adjust our strategies and programs to fit, like this –
So what does this mean for architects and designers, and their clients? Maybe this –
- We are in the state of social revolution that Hollein represented by the vertical breaks in his graph
- We need to adjust our own expectations, and get into the flow that our clients are in or trying to get themselves into
- We may want to explore the power of small, smart moves, developed in collaboration with others, to uncover what matters and to sustain position in the flow
- We need to understand how to quickly develop effective and powerful “creation spaces” for ourselves as well as for our clients
What are your thoughts?
