I do not think that anybody can question or doubt the realities that most creative businesses face. The business environment for creative organizations is changing rapidly and presenting unique challenges to those charged with leading successfully. Specifically, our firms face issues of technology use and integration, team organization, process development, leadership and leadership transition, intense competitive realities (and increasingly global), and the commoditization and devaluing of our work. Many of these specific challenges have been discussed on Schneiderism already. I speak the obvious when I say that determination of success in the future is dependent not on navigating one or two of these challenges successfully, but all of them.

I had the opportunity to recently attend a presentation by Adrian Slywotzky, the author of “The Upside: The 7 Strategies for Turning Big Threats into Growth Breakthroughs“, at an event for YPO. It was especially good, and prescient regarding the challenges that many organizations face, but it seemed especially relevant to creative businesses (design, marketing, advertising, architecture). At a high level everything comes down to innovation, being innovative, and how you innovate. Easy to say, hard to do. But beyond those relative truisms, there was one all encompassing concept that I loved hearing about:

STRATEGIC RISK MANAGEMENT

The presentation began with the concept of business model design and that business models that remain static are destined for failure. The environments in which we all operate are changing and evolving in ways that were not possible 10, 15 and 20 years ago. This demands reinvestigation, in an ongoing manner, of a company’s business model and introduces the opportunity for business design innovation. Most industries have seen dramatic change, and those of us who anticipate change and evolve our companies as our markets change will be around to talk about. Adrian Slywotzky not only aligns with this thinking, he takes it much, much further.

“Our greatest growth opportunities are our greatest risks - reversed.”

Adrian Slywotzky

The strategic risk management piece is important in several ways. Obviously, this is hugely informative as we investigate the threats and opportunities of a given business model, and the proper identification and understanding of strategic risk is what ultimately determines a course of action. Elements of this is knowing the reality of where your center of gravity resides with respect to your customers and clients. To ensure prolonged success, that center of gravity needs to reside at the heart of your company, at the core of what you do and the value you create. Inevitably, though, it resides with the customers who have a range of relatively equal options from which to choose. The challenge is in retaking that center of gravity and subsequently reversing or inverting the value chain. A traditional value chain begins with assets and ends with a customer, inverting it creates a business model around the customer that results in assets. Think about that for a second and get back to me.

Getting into more detail about strategic risk management… it is the perpetual survey of your landscape for those things which will make you irrelevant, those things which can damage your business design. Things like:

• Misreading your customers
• Damaged reputation
• Commoditization of your product or service
• Technology
• Ownership/leadership transitions
• Global politics
• Currency fluctuations
• Supplier changes
• Factor of costs
• Talent deficits
• Changing customer demographics

Now, that list is by no means comprehensive and is pretty high level. So, stop for a second and reflect on your own business. What would your list look like? Can any of these strategic risks be turned into opportunities? To be successful, the answer needs to be a committed “Yes.” We live in an age of volatility and our lives, our businesses, are subjected to a diverse and evolving range of generators and catalysts of this volatility. What we do about this is also evolve our businesses in advance of these risks and in answer to the volatility. When these risks are unmanaged they will affect even the very best teams and the very best business models. No one is immune, and we are seeing this play out seemingly everywhere. There are innumerable case studies of companies not managing this risk:

• Contrast the S&P High-to-Low Quality ratio of A-ranked stocks to C-ranked stocks over the last 25 years. The A-ranked stocks have decreased from 31% to 14% of total value while C-ranked stocks have increased from 12% to 30%
• Why has Procter & Gamble taken 5 years to recover from the 2000 market value drop? Why did they suffer the drop in the first place?
• Other blue chips face the same fate… look at McDonald’s, Siemens, Merck and Deutsche Bank. Their performance lines are nearly identical.
• More specifically, why has Coca Cola lost market value while Pepsi has gained market value over the same time?
• Sony has lost while Samsung has won, Johnson & Johnson is winning while Merck is losing, and Maytag tanks while Whirlpool takes off. Each example, two companies in the same industry. One wins, the other is losing.

What is going on here? The winners sited properly assessed risk and realized that the time of maximum value is the time of maximum risk. This is really tough for most companies, but especially difficult for historically successful companies to address. Legacy thinking persists. This can be scary, and sometimes is not something anybody really wants to talk about or bring up in a meeting. Even worse, it just is not what management wants to hear… they can’t handle the truth. The reality is that strategic risk is the killer of business models. It is killing the US automotive industry, it is working its way through consumer electronics, and (getting back to the beginning) it is challenging creative enterprise.

Knowing this, and anticipating risk at this level begins to tell you how to protect and grow your business. For creative enterprise it entails a concerted effort to identify what the true value is in the work we do. Really, do our clients VALUE the work that we provide on their behalf? Do we create value at all? Who in our space is being successful and why? What are they doing differently and what is setting them apart from the rest of the firms around them? This starts with shrewd competitive analysis, but it cannot stop there. What are the technology risks that we face and what are the event horizons for these risks? Where are we allocating capital to activities that give us no differentiation? Ultimately, after answering all of these questions (and many, many more) what are the business designs that take advantage of the fact that all of our competitors face the same questions, challenges and realities?

How do we turn our problems into our competitor’s problems?

A summary of the risks we face, and that successfully navigated will inform your business model design:

• Technology shift
• Industry economic squeeze
• Brand investment mix (advertising, design, PR, training, information…)
• Project risk
• Customer shift
• Stagnation risk

An ongoing area of interest for me is how we can innovate in the guidance and leadership of a creative enterprise, and thus sustain successful operations. This is centered around the challenges facing most professional services in the creative arena, something that it would seem all are struggling with, at least at some level. The core of this is the commodification of creative work, whether that be advertising, architecture or graphic design. Many firms have allowed themselves to become factories, to become production houses. In some ways, this is the result of our own devaluing of our efforts. In others, it is born out of an entirely different decision-making process that has been progressively gaining ground with the clients for creative services… the prevalence of value assignment based on time worked and not on value created.

I came across an article that was very insightful in relation to these realities by Avi Dan in Advertising Age. It succinctly lays it all out. His article is leveled squarely at advertising agencies, and why so many are facing the music as their business model is yanked out from under them. As I read his article I could not help but see strong similarities to the realities we face in architecture, and those I experienced in other creative businesses. Avi outlines five key areas that agencies, and by extension most creative enterprise, need to investigate:

• COMPENSATION
  Should be tied to value creation and not based solely on labor. Clients and creative firms need to work out a fairer compensation scheme recognizing the value of intellectual capital.
• OUTSOURCING
  Smart creative organizations should evolve into creative portals, outsourcing external creative talent in areas such as production, as well as in logistical operations.
• REVENUE STREAMS
  Firms need to explore ways to monetize new areas of involvement such as licensing, e-commerce applications and even the work itself.
• SPEED
  Creative enterprise must recognize that in a web-based world that moves at warp speed, speed itself is a strategic asset and those that can help their clients with speed-to-market executions will have an advantage.
• SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
  The firm model should recognize that social responsibility is at the core of the modern firm, hand in hand with its financial accountability to shareholders, and is essential for recruiting top talent.

Of special note are the ideas around outsourcing and revenue streams. There is a controlling mindset in most creative firms that they must own all waypoints in the project process. I cannot help but ask “why?” Outsourcing is a tremendous opportunity to not only diversify your talent, but to allow you to focus on what you are truly good at… and seek support from partners who are better at the other project roles than your team may be. Additionally, seeking complimentary and supplemental revenue streams is enormous. As creative businesses we are perpetually innovating with respect to our client’s businesses. Why is it that we cannot bring this same approach, this innovation, to benefit our own businesses? Over the course of a year there will be any number of revenue opportunities available to a firm that are outside of their traditional business model, but because of that model these ideas will make it scarcely farther than the whiteboard.

All of this to say, many companies face an environment of intense change and competition. Those that get it are focused on changing with the environment in which they operate. Some are changing fast, with a cultural premium on innovation and knowledge in the value created by their own people. Those that do not are not going to last. I feel it is that simple.

There is an excellent article about Julius Shulman in the latest issue of Metropolis. I was familiar with his work, but really knew very little about the man. The article is a terrific primer on Shulman who, at nearly 97 years old, has just had published a three-volume set of over 400 images of architectural projects shot over his 70 year career. The set, from Taschen, is entitled “Modernism Rediscovered.” Shulman began shooting modern architecture in 1936 when he photographed a Richard Neutra house. Over the next few decades his client list would read like a who’s who of modern architecture and design. He photographed the work of my favorites, like Neutra, Pierre Koenig, and Rudolf Schindler.

I plan to own these books. Soon. Here’s a choice quote from the article:

“We’ve always had green - those of us that are concerned with the environment. So why should we suddenly discover that green is good?”

Julius Shulman

Yours truly was referenced at architechnophilia as a blog worthy of checking out. I have enjoyed that blog for a very, very long time and greatly appreciate the mention. Note that architechnophilia has been in the schneiderism blogroll (over there, in the right column) from our very inception. I subscribe to their RSS feed and have a 100% hit rate for viewing posts. It’s comprehensive. It’s good.

There is a terrific article in Motortrend about Ron Dennis and his new “office” (pictured above). Ron leads McLaren… the designers and builders of incredibly high performance road and race cars. Most notably, McLaren has long been involved in Formula One racing, historically building and sponsoring (if not outright leading) some incredible winning campaigns. Think Mika Hakkinen in the late 90’s or so. McLaren is also behind the McLaren F1 BMW V12 powered roadgoing supercar of the mid-90’s that made my jaw hit the floor before I knew any better. It was hand-built by McLaren and sold to very wealthy people for around $1m.

But I digress, and though Ron Dennis is all kinds of cool, and although McLaren is an incredible design/engineering/R+D force in the world of high performance automobiles, this post is actually about workplace design. The article in Motortrend does an excellent job documenting, describing and exploring the new McLaren Technology Center designed by the starchitect Sir Norman Foster, the same knighted gentleman doing surreal projects all over the UAE and Dubai.

The new center is enormous, definitive in its design, and is a hub of quiet and focused activity for the 1000 staff that work there creating and developing high-performance vehicles. It is technically state of the art, and actually looks more like the HQ of NASA… or at least what NASA’s HQ should look like in movies. The environment created by Sir Norman Foster for McLaren is pure and unadulterated Ron Dennis. Ron is very much a top-down leader, and makes no apologies for this. In fact, he seems to revel in his level of control and influence over his organization. The design of this environment was not about focus groups and it was not about surveying employees. It was about listening to exactly what Ron wanted, analyzing that, and turning it into architecture. Here is a choice quote from the author of the article in Motortrend:

“Backwoods philosopher Henry David Thoreau warned we should ‘beware of any enterprise requiring new clothes.’ Dennis now has one of the biggest sets of new clothes of them all, a gleaming monument to the client’s uncompromising obsession and the architect’s near-perfect ability to deliver it. Architecturally speaking, it’s what you should expect when one of the world’s most technically bonkers architects is given a huge budget and a sympathetic brief. And it’s startling. But it’s clearly more than is strictly necessary to build Formula 1 cars.”

It goes on to state that the goal was to give the employees the absolute best environment within which to do their work. I get that, but looking at the photographs, and contrasting that with the facility VW created for the assembly of their Phaeton luxury car in Dresden, seen below, you cannot help but feel the concept of “the best environment” has very different manifestations.

I mean this in the most objective way possible, but where would you rather work? I have spent an inordinant amount of time wrenching on cars, and fast ones at that, and have a love for a clean, well lit and organized garage with everything in its place… but I also crave an environment that I would like to spend time in. This brings us right to the core of issues around involuntary, or non-preferred environments as illuminated by Orfield Labs in an earlier post about the Open Plan Work Group, and efforts to move our workplaces to align more closely with the other environments that we prefer, that we engage in voluntarily. The question I would love to ask the engineers and technicians that spend their days (and probably many evenings) in this operating theater environment is “Does it work for you?” Maybe it does, but I sense a chasm between the efforts to recreate the set of the movie Gattaca and provide the best possible environment for your people to toil in.

Do I sound harsh?

This commentary is in no way to imply that I do not think the new facility is cool looking. It is incredibly cool looking. Maybe too cool looking. The goal here, I believe, is not to just create environments that look “cool.” The goal here is to create environments that work, and this means work in relation to the human factors of the people that inhabit the environment. Given this, and when seen through the lens of architectural dynamics, I cannot help but think the McLaren Technology Center harbors enormous liabilities as it relates to human factors… especially when contrasted with the VW facility pictured above. We see this all of the time, where an organization decides to build a new headquarters and an enhanced presence. Inevitably, this comes down to how design is deployed to reflect the culture and brand of the organization… and it seems to stop there. How these environments actually engage the people that make up the organizations seems to not make it onto the agenda, or not until the very end when it is more of an afterthought. There is more time spent on the public face, on materials that are impactful, than on supporting culture and environments that enhance health. Foster’s firm, Foster+Partners, has a workplace consulting group… they must be engaged in these issues, and they may have brought them to the table in their initial design discussions with Ron Dennis. I surmise, though, that Ron’s style precluded anything being entertained that was not within the boundaries of his aesthetic vision, of which he is admittedly obsessive. The headline, “Dust Can Be Eliminated” is a direct quote from Ron Dennis.

One last quote from the article:

“Staff are allowed no personal mementoes on desks. Dennis tried a total ban on food and drink in the workplace because ‘food contaminates.’ There were slight mumbles from the normally docile staff. Water was offered as a concession.”

Check out the slideshows of VW’s Phaeton facility and McLaren’s new Technology Center, what do you think? Let me know in the comments.

The image above is of a typical big-box style retail construction site. These sites are typically a mess, both in terms of waste and in terms of their impact on the environment.

We’re still surrounded by waste and energy inefficiencies in the building industry, and this is in the face of knowing better. There has been tremendous research into more efficient, less wasteful, environmentally sensitive building techniques and methodologies. These improved techniques are being used, but on a much smaller scale than really needs to be required. This is due, in large part, to the mistaken belief that new and innovative building practicers, those that are better for us and for the environment, are also much more expensive. A few years ago, this was the case, as many of the building technologies were very new and had not yet been properly tested nor had the opportunity to scale for efficient and cost effective implementation. That is no longer the case.

I read a great post on Inhabitat the other day that brought this issue to light, and pointed me to a report put out by the World Business Council For Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

The report is premised on the reality that people tend to overestimate the true cost of sustainable building methodologies. It bases this premise on an expansive survey of building industry professionals which exposed the still prevalent misconception that the added cost of sustainable construction is as much as 300% higher than reality, equating to as much as 17% above conventional construction. This misconception, and its commonality of belief, is enough to turn developers, contractors, end users, and the public at large away from sustainable options and opportunities in building construction. The kicker, and this really hurts given the consequences, is that added cost of building sustainably is typically less than 5%, and often close to parity with traditional legacy building techniques. How can such a huge, prolific, and pervasive industry be so wrong?

But wait, there’s more. The report also looks at the other side of this equation… at these professional’s perception of the impact of the buildings they construct. The survey found that most tend to misunderstand the environmental impact of legacy building practices and greatly underestimate the greenhouse emissions put out by buildings being constructed. The reality… buildings contribute over 40% of total emissions. Again, how can they be so wrong?

The answer is education and increased awareness. But that is only the start. Industries are powerful, and they fund well-armed lobbies to protect their interests. If the misconception is that sustainable building practices are expensive, that is being communicated to the end-user… who is most likely being held to very tight project cost accountability. The result is the impetus for an incredibly effective lobby to prevent legislation mandating improved efficiencies and lessened impact on the environment in the building industry. Ultimately, the answer is in the rest of us agitating for change, requiring the building industry and end user audience to adopt a sustainable building practices (as WalMart seems to have done), and to effectively articulate the importance of this reality to the people we put in office.

I had the opportunity to participate in a design charette yesterday put on by Steve Orfield and Wes Chapman at Orfield Laboratories. The charette is part of their Open Plan Working Group, which seeks to address issues of building performance, user experience, and innovation in workplace design. Steve Orfield has been working, through effective and substantive research, for over 30 years to support investigations into workplace quality, worker health, and challenging accepted norms of office design, organization, and function. Human factors is a huge driver of Orfield’s work, and the belief that the concept of “Architectural Dynamics (AD)” can change the world.

Organizations like Herman Miller and Lutron support his efforts, and sponsor the OPWG. Both were present at the charette yesterday. Specifically, this event was to explore opportunities to improve a building environment by the creative application of Architectural Dynamics. AD refers to environments that are controlled and influenced over time based on knowledge and inputs from occupant preferences and actual occupant behavior. AD seeks to effect change in these environments through such things as bio-mimicry, cuing, stimulation, calming, and other forms of occupant reinforcement. The goal is to change the workplace from a non-preferred and involuntary environment into a preferred and voluntary environment. Specific areas of influence are lighting/daylighting and view, thermal comfort, and sound addition and attenuation. Lofty goals, to be sure, but Steve and his group are far down the path of effecting real change.

The charette began with occupant research presented that challenges suppositions and assertions we all have about the places in which we work. A great example of this research was measurements of occupant valuations in regards to daylighting and view. Having an outside view is shown to greatly outweigh valuations of natural daylight. That was surprising.

The design charette involved looking closely at an existing structure with significant design liabilities, and how the individual design teams might mitigate the building limitations by creatively applying AD concepts. The results were very, very cool. While there was quite a bit of similarity between the teams, there was also great difference… especially with regards to how far each team was able or willing to push the concepts. Ultimately, there was tremendous alignment on enhancing audience experience, both from a macro (building-wide) and micro (individual) perspective. There was much discussion on how much control should be given to individuals, and how to manage this control to maintain energy efficiency and minimize negatively affecting other individuals in close proximity. I came away with a much enhanced understanding both of the impact of design decisions in the workplace, and how to design to more effectively enhance the occupant experience. We want the environments we create to enhance health and well being, and to align appropriately to an individuals work style preferences. Yes, this has dramatic affects on productivity, but first and foremost it supports more healthy work environments. Increased productivity is a nice result from this goal.

All of this seeks to challenge and change the reliance on the 1950’s metaphor of workplace design. This is a metaphor that needs to be cracked open as the places in which we spend upwards of 8 hours a day, five+ days a week are not designed to support us in our work or in our interactions. They are created out of economic decisions based on minimizing expense and gaining as much space efficiency as possible. They are created out of building practices that have stood largely unchallenged by research and health assessments. We have a responsibility as designers to hold ourselves to research based standards of performance in the environments that we create, to ensure that our designs are adding health and NOT detracting. To paraphrase Steve Orfield, we should look to the Hippocratic oath for inspiration and commit our work to “doing no harm.”

A colleague of mine has launched his blog at knowlesystem. His focus is honed and specific to the forces changing and shaping the world of architecture and design. Cool stuff. We have had an infinite number of incredible discussions and brainstorms on this topic, and this was suggested as a way to begin capturing this content, and involve others in the conversation. I highly suggest subscribing as there will be a proliferation of compelling content coming forthwith.

Congrats on the site, Stephen.

Another colleague introduced acmesiren a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to offer a more formal welcome and congrats to Nick as well. His blog is focused on finding and revealing what is new, cool and interesting in the world of experimental music. Also, very cool stuff. And a terrific resource.

Both blogs are featured in the schneiderism blogroll in the right column, which is naturally an incredibly high honor.

I’ve been reading and really enjoying “House: Black Swan Theory” by Steven Holl. The book comprises a selection of 15 of Holl’s more recent residential projects, focusing on site-specific homes that range from a +20,000sf ambassadorial residence (see image above) to a small and efficient sub-100sf lakeside studio. This idea of the ‘black swan theory’ stems from analyzing design needs from a “specific-to-universal” point of view, one built upon dissimilarity and variation. Each of the examples in the book is a house that has a completely different focus. One grows from a musical analogy of Bartok, one inspired by Moby Dick, while another is the reinvestigation of an 18th century nail factory. All are elemental in their use of natural light and the integration of the surrounding environment, with the result being that each home is an integrated dynamic instead of simply being an object. Each home represents a series of relationships.

The homes featured in the book are from all over the globe, including an intimate and private location in Hawaii, to the Hague in the Netherlands. Each of the projects includes examples of Holl’s initial sketches and ideations for the project, as well as specific details and observations that were incorporated into the design solution. It is a beautiful book, and Steven Holl is an excellent designer. Getting a window into his process and approach is immensely interesting.

I have really enjoyed the Manifesto issue of ICON, and posted earlier the manifesto of Bruce Mau. It is interesting to read the results of a person’s efforts to catch something smart and concise for the benefit of us all. Admittedly, some of the manifestos are pretty weak. But some were pretty great. Joshua Prince-Ramus’ was pretty great.

Prince-Ramus is an architect and designer, and a partner in the recently formed architecture studio REX. He came out of OMA, the studio of the famous “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas, where he led various projects like that for the Seattle public library. My first exposure to the thinking of Prince-Ramus was via his presentation at TED in 2006 (absolutely worth watching). In that presentation he dropped more than a few bombs on the world of architecture. Nothing we didn’t know or acknowledge already, but powerful to hear spoken out loud. He described a “hyper-rational” approach to architecture, explaining how logic can act as the catalyst for extraordinary buildings and yield opportunities otherwise hidden by the bias of the designer. This hyper-rational approach is something paid lip service to by most design fields, but Prince-Ramus lays bare the the essential mechanics, and results, of this approach to solving design problems.

His manifesto in ICON is a summary of that TED presentation, and essentially forms the mission statement for his studio. Following are a few of my favorite excerpts:

“We design collaborations rather than dictate solutions. The media sells simple, catchy ideas; it reduces teams to individuals and their collaborative work to genius sketches. The proliferation of this false notion of “starchitecture” diminishes the real teamwork that drives celebrated architecture.”

Design is riddled with myths, and designers are perhaps the best at perpetuating those myths. The reality is that successful design solutions come directly from a thorough understanding of context, constraint and audience. Meaningful design is also most often the result of effective collaboration and the blending of perspectives. These perspectives, and the efforts of the team to develop a 360 degree understanding of the situation, are the foundation on which opportunities are built. Anything less is at best a stylistic bias.

“We embrace responsibility in order to implement vision. The implementation of good ideas demands as much, if not more, creativity than their conceptualisation. Increasingly reluctant to assume liability, architects have retreated from the accountability (and productivity) of Master Builders to the safety (and impotence) of stylists.”

We see this all of the time. Sometimes we are like gold miners. We strike a rich vein of ideas, or a successful approach, and then mine the hell out of it. We become identified by those results, it becomes our genre. Ultimately, this leads to commodification and the disregarding of the importance of context, constraint and audience. It is a one size fits all approach to design.

“We side with neither form nor function. REX believes that the struggle between form and function is superficial and unproductive. We proffer the term “performance” instead: a hybrid that doesn’t discriminate between use, organization and form. We free ourselves from the tired debate over whether architecture is an art or a tool. Art performs; tools perform.”

If you watch the TED presentation that Prince-Ramus gave last year, it is abundantly clear that REX is practicing what it preaches. The approach that resulted in the team’s solution for the Seattle public library is exposed for exactly what it was… total understanding of the context, constraints and diverse audiences for that project. It is also clear that from its inception, that project was about performance and the inextricable integration of form and function, of the aesthetic with the need for the solution to work.

“We love the banal. REX dares to be dumb (like a fox).”

“At the beginning of the 21st century, architecture can be the most effective instrument for reconstructing the relations between our species and the earth”

Steven Holl

“So long as architects self-marginalize by purposely excluding the business of development and its real burden of complexity and decision making from their education, from their business, architecture will remain a gentleman’s weekend culture, unwilling or unable to take on the heavy lifting and big problems, happy to polish fancy baubles for our urban entertainment.

The business model for architecture is singularly unsuccessful. One in a thousand architects can afford to enjoy the pleasures that they are capable of producing for others. Architects accept enormous risks without the commensurate rewards. It is time, in this new millennium, to get dirty, to take on more of the scope of urban projects, to contribute more to a sustainable future and to participate in more of the wealth architects create. The world would be a better place if more of what we built in our cities was determined by people educated and trained with culture, civic awareness, aesthetic sensitivity and historical knowledge. I look forward to the first school of architectural development!”

Bruce Mau - 50 Manifestos, ICON magazine

That, my dear friends, is going to leave a mark.

Think about this for a moment, why do most workplaces today look much like they did 10, 20, or even 30 years ago? How is it, with all of the changes in our society, in technology, and in the ways in which we work, the workplace still looks like a 1950’s cliche? It does not make any sense. The stasis that office and workplace design finds itself in cannot have a very positive effect on worker performance, happiness, or quality of life. Really, this is huge.

A big realization that I’ve had recently is beginning to understand the disconnection between the cycle of workplace renovation/investigation and how frequently work itself is changing. I know that facilities renovations are rare and infrequent largely because they are expensive, and most companies resist rethinking their workplace because of a combination of perceived expense, complexity, and fear. The sad result is that so many people are working today in office environments that reflect assumptions about the nature of work (and technology) that are even older, in many cases, than the actual employees.

My team recently toured a number or organizations recognized for having innovative and creative leadership and cultures, organizations that promote distributed work and enable employees to create their own optimal work patterns and methodologies. They provide their people with a diversity of ways in which they can work, with options. These organizations have had tremendous success in their respective industries, have hugely productive staffs, and generally exhibit a great culture and quality of life. Clearly, there are benefits to investigating the ways we organize around our work. And yet, most office remodels that occur are really just updates on the 1950’s model… some new carpet, new cubes, and maybe a kitchenette over there. The people that work in these “new” offices still have to deal with issues around thermal comfort, lighting, isolation, work interruption, and general discomfort. There is no psychology, no research backing the decisions made in most office rethinks. But what if there was?
Things are beginning to change, as there is some quality research out there that supports very smart changes to the ways we work, the strategies behind the way offices are designed. The good news is that we are seeing more and more examples of workplace layouts that are inherently flexible and open (in a good way) with mobile, modular furniture, terrific lighting, and reconfigurable working space. We are seeing more office design that takes advantage of new technologies and anticipates how technology in the workplace will be changing over time. We can remain optimistic, and the merits of reconfigurable, technology supported working space are becoming more and more accepted. This is partly because of the strength of the research that is out there, and also because almost none of us does precisely the same thing day after day, week after week, and most of us are sick of working in crappy environments.

Tremendous effort is being spent trying to figure out how we need to be working together, motivated by the belief that there is a better way to do things. Nowhere is this effort more apparent, and visible, than in architecture design (though it is abundantly visible in a number of other creative efforts). The whole notion of trying to find a better way to do things sounds quaint, but it is actually quite serious. In the world of the built environment there are giant gaps between design teams and manufacturers of building materials and technologies… and these gaps negatively impact all sorts of variables related to successful projects, the most obvious being timelines and budgets. This has a dramatic effect on the ability to meet the needs of clients and deliver solutions that create value, preventing teams from breaking the mold of convention and unhinging the negatively controlling aspects of process. When you have to bridge great distances every time you initiate a project or seek true innovation for solutions, you are forced to redundantly cover territory that should be innate to project success. This perpetual backtracking is like an anchor that restrains project momentum and creative impetus.

Big questions come out of this reality. What if you could eliminate this distance between designers, manufacturers, and fabricators? What if manufacturing processes could be influenced at the front end of a project to provide solutions that are custom to the problems faced by the project and client teams? With these questions in mind, is there a collaborative model that supports creativity and helps in identifying opportunity? It would seem obvious, at least it is to me, that if you could support a more holistic, integrated approach to solving design problems you stand to go a great distance to finding the answers to these questions, and probably a lot more along the way.

I have fairly strong feelings about this, and have been working through the understanding and analysis of these issues with a close colleague (Stephen Knowles, AIA) for a number of years (five, to be exact). Stephen and I have been exploring and experimenting with the concept of the “Action Network,” and how this network serves to cohesively pull all actors together to support problem solving, creativity, and the opportunity for innovative results. The Action Network is about mutual participation and it is about the contribution of expertise when that expertise is most needed, not after the fact in a reverse engineering exercise. It is also about how projects are coordinated, and ensuring that this coordination, or design management, serves to efficiently and effectively bring the best talents and expertise to bare. All of this, on its surface, sounds absolutely obvious. Yet organizations struggle to make this happen. They struggle to change even the smallest aspect of how they approach these issues and seem to refuse to engage a concept of continuous improvement. This is partly due to the domination of process in the design world, but it is also because of fear. This is a different approach to design. It invites different people to the table and asks them to contribute their perspectives, experience, and ideas. Design, and architecture especially, are interesting insofar as they train people to resist this collaboration (though they love to claim collaboration as their own). It is not about the power of THE idea, it is about the power of MY idea… so to speak.

Our investigations into an Action Network, at least for the most part up to now, have been about identifying and engaging individuals and organizations that share our feelings on this matter and believe that there is a better way to do things, to work together. We have been very fortunate, and have been surprised by the reception of some pretty key players in the design world for considering an approach of this nature. The odd thing, and this was pointed out to me recently during a meeting of people/companies dedicated to this type of an approach, is that outside of design there are people desperate to get on with this approach to collaboration. These people already understand that there are better ways to solve problems, and they are ready and willing to collaborate to do so. Their companies are willing to do so. What is interesting is the legacy, territorial approach to design that gets in the way. Some of this is driven by individuals, but most if it is driven by cultures. Technology and the opportunities created by it, especially related to materials and manufacturing, are demanding that we work closely together to maximize what is possible, to liberate ideas from the restrictions of process. The Action Network is one of many ways to achieve this.

The concept of the Action Network is really very simple. Bring the best expertise and knowledge to the project at the best possible time. Anticipate project constraints, and ensure that the right talent is there to overcome them. Share in the collaborative problem solving at the front end of a project, and share in the design opportunities. Create a culture around knowledge sharing, and acknowledge the importance of a diversity of contributors to the success of the project. The size of a team will flex given the design issues at hand, supporting the need for expertise and for allowing ideas to go beyond the expected, or beyond what was even thought possible. The network is there to support the power of the idea, and to work to make this idea a reality. Ultimately, an Action Network is the ultimate manifestation of value creation. This is value creation on behalf of our clients, and the meeting of their goals, but also for the team and the desire to not limit the creativity and innovation that leads to great solutions.

For so many industries, the competitive situation is perpetually morphing. There is more seemingly asymmetrical competition for the same customer, and that customer’s expectations are changing as they become more and better informed. Lately, I have been part of an ongoing discussion and effort to generate understanding on the way that the architecture industry has changed, and how to take advantage of this change. It seems strange to call a design enterprise like architecture an industry, but it is… and its history would seem to self-fulfill this type of description. Oddly, in some cases it seems that architecture functions more like manufacturing than like design, and that mindset is everywhere and unfortunately goes far in devaluing the work of architecture design. The opportunity for innovation in the process of architecture, in the ways we organize, problem solve and design for the built environment is huge, and only beginning to really be tapped.

There is no denying that the world of architecture has already begun to change rapidly, and on an international scale. It is actually humorous, and a little scary, to talk to architects who were practicing in the late 1980’s and ask them to contrast that to the present. I am sure this is not unique to architecture (reference my previous post on online publishing). In so many ways, this change is driven by a flattened competitive reality, one where small firms empowered by technology can leapfrog the decades of capabilities building invested by larger and more established firms. There are 5-10 person firms beating forty year old 100+ person firms for projects that in the past would require thirty person teams to complete, that only the large firms could have taken on. Small studio teams are able to accomplish incredible technical feats, and accomplish them quickly. This was rare if not impossible 10 years ago, and it is because technology had not caught up to the practice. Now, the obstacles to talented architects and designers starting their own firm are becoming more and more minor, and this is empowering as it allows them to eschew the politics and mind-numbing hierarchy of the legacy firms and get on with the creating and the making. They are fighting the commodification of architecture design by competing on the merits of their ideas, and the efficiencies with which they can deliver these ideas on behalf of their clients. Small is the new big, and all that phrase connotes.

These small studios are driven by innovation in their process, in the ways in which they leverage technology, and by the materials solutions they create in the name of both sustainability and cost effectiveness. At least, that is the hope. In some cases there is just a flooded competitive situation with an abundance of small firms and a shortage of work to support all of them, and the big ones too. There is something important here, though, and it warrants exploration by all in the field. There are opportunities for architecture firms to investigate the way in which they organize around their clients and their projects. Within this is the investigation into how process can change to meet new challenges and support innovation. The practice of architecture is damaged by every firm that looks at their work as production, and that fits the previously mentioned manufacturing analogy. There is a studio model, one that is cross-functional, multi-disciplinary, and with a flattened hierarchy that is gaining prominence and is being maximized by the successful smaller studio based firms. At the heart of this model is the drive to create value for the client, and to support design, and the reality that these are inextricably linked. That is a competitive differentiator.

What does all of this mean? It means that to stay in business a firm needs to deeply understand what it is to be competitive, what is the value to the client, and how to structure and organize itself around this. It means that the old methodologies need to be assessed, and potentially dispatched. It means that there is a powerful generation of empowered designers entering a capital intensive industry who are figuring out how to do things right, do them better, and are not afraid to take the risks to do so. Ultimately, it means that those controls that allowed so many firms to get where they are today may now be the obstacles to their success from this point forward, and that is a very difficult reality to acknowledge.

Last month I took my team on a three day innovation tour, the goal of which was to spend time with and survey a diversity of businesses that had overcome significant challenges. The commonality between them is that they achieved this by creating and supporting a culture of innovation, by thinking far beyond their typical model. The results in each case was that these unrelated companies had accomplished incredible change in relatively short periods of time, and these changes were game changing events within their respective industries. With all of the companies we were fortunate to spend generous time with senior leadership and really begin to understand what it took to ideate, support and execute such significant reinvention. We visited a total of six companies, but there are two that I want to focus on as their stories are especially compelling, and this is the first in a two part series. This was our messiest stop, and we had to go to Iowa to see it:

Robotic Brickworks
Bricks just aren’t that sexy anymore. They are still desirable as a building material and various designers have come up with some cool and innovative applications of the brick, but really… a brick is a brick. Historically, they were made at smallish family-run brickworks that were distributed around the country and served the brick laying needs of an immediate area or region. Like many other manufacturing industries, brickworks have been disappearing altogether or have been bought up and merged into larger industrial conglomerates. This has become an incredibly competitive business, and brickworks located in the southeast, northeast and midwest vie for the same customers all of the time. Typically, because a brick is in fact a brick, this comes down to a competition on price.

United Brick decided to get aggressive and dig into what it really means to be competitive in their industry. Business as usual in the brick business did not bode well for their future. They knew that they had to continue to manage costs effectively, but their approach needed to be innovative as compared to the labor management solutions of their competitors. The leadership of United Brick trekked to Europe and toured manufacturing operations looking for opportunities to innovate. They landed on one immediately. Robots. This is a significant opportunity, as serious contributors to the cost of manufacturing brick is labor and the rate of flaws in the manufacturing process (and how those two are linked…). Typically, a brickworks with a traditional human manufacturing line will have a failure rate between 10 and 20%. They believed that with a robotic production line they could shrink this failure/flaw rate to well under 10%, which would be a significant reduction, and reduce labor costs dramatically in the process. The second opportunity they found was by accident while visiting a factory facility in Spain looking at fuel alternatives for firing their gigantic kilns. Traditionally, the kilns had been fired by coal or natural gas… both very expensive and coal obviously being incredibly damaging to the environment. A factory manager at this facility in Spain mentioned in passing that they should explore petcoke as a fuel alternative. Petcoke is a waste product from the petroleum industry and it is typically dumped in landfills. This idea had serious promise.

The team returned from Europe and set about investigating the options they had uncovered. They partnered with a French robotics company, after intensely interviewing several from around the world, for designing both a fully robotic brick manufacturing facility and in creating the world’s first petcoke fired brick kiln. The United Brick facility in Iowa would be the test case for the technologies they created together. The French robotics company dispatched a team to Iowa to begin what would become an intense and valuable partnership. At the same time they began intense research into creating the world’s first petcoke fired kiln, and again partnered with the French robotics company to both fully automate the firing process AND provide this alternative, efficient, cost effective, and more environmentally friendly fuel alternative. The plant opened this last spring, and to great success. First, the plant is achieving its production goals with one shift, though the robots would not complain if they were asked to work more. Second, the failure rate for the bricks produced has dropped below 10%. Lastly, the prototype petcoke fired kiln is working incredibly well, and the cost savings here alone contributes significantly to United Brick’s competitive edge.