Obstacle or Opportunity?

You did it!  This is week nine, the final installment in the Breaking Points and Turning Points Novena.  Thank you for taking this journey and exploring the issues that affect your very identity as an architect and creative person.  This week, we focus on recognizing what are often considered necessary evils as the true roadblocks they are and eliminating them from our path.

Way up there on my list of thoroughly annoying turns of phrase is the application of the word “challenging” as a euphemism for everything from the truly problematic to the downright irritating.  It is my belief that people who use this term are tying to force themselves to be relentlessly positive in the face of a negative situation.  In other words, they don’t know the difference between an obstacle and an opportunity. 

Yes, there are times (daily) when we have to suck it up and deal with life’s messy surprises, but we shouldn’t have to deal with permanent or recurring frustrations as any kind of rite of passage.  In your quest to find and enriching and fulfilling career as an architect, there are only a few true rites of passage.  I have separated them into three groups:
The Quantitative Rites - the attainments - are the prescriptive things you have to do to be considered an architect from a literal perspective. All architects complete these rites.
1.  Graduate from an architecture program with a professional degree
2.  Qualify, through proper work experience, to take your licensing exams
3.  Successfully complete exams
4.  Maintain license in good standing, including continuing education

The Qualitative Rites - the judgements- are the milestone achievements that gain you recognition in the eyes of your peers, clients and consultants.  Most successful architects complete these rites.
1.  Specialize in an area of design
2.  Publish or have articles published featuring you or your work
3.  Receive an award for design or professional merit
4.  Be sought out for your expertise and asked to participate on a board, committee or panel

The Influential Rites - the impacts -are the transformative moments you have where you bring your knowledge and experience to bear to positively influence the world around you.  Only truly great architects complete these rites-but all of us could-if we stopped viewing obstacles as challenges and wasting our creative energy.
1.  Inspire someone to see the world differently
2.  Contribute, through design, to the welfare of others
3.  Mentor others to help them achieve their fullest potential
4.  Be a voice, through supportive environments, to those who cannot or do not know how to request what they need
5.  Advocate, through the person that you are and the way you live your life, all the ways that design does matter

Notice how none of the rites of passage involve any of the following “challenges” I like to call the Seven Deadly Sins of Architecture:
1.  Endure abuse by clients, co-workers or superiors
2.  Manipulate clients, co-workers or superiors
3.  Overstrategize every action in an attempt to stay one step ahead
4.  Seek credit and recognition for accomplishments
5.  Blame others (even when deserved) for unfavorable situations or outcomes
6.  Overpromise or overcommit to projects, organizations or events
7.  Undercut perceived competition both in and out of the office

That’s because none of these things make us stronger or better in any way.  They frustrate and aggravate us and suck up all our creative energy. Far from being challenges, they are obstacles (many of them self-created) and the sooner you recognize them as such, the sooner you can overcome them and focus on your true architectural Rites of Passage.

I recently saw a photo of the destroyed Berlin Wall spray painted with the statement “We are the wall.”  Nothing could be more true.

What We Really Learn from Benchmarking

It’s typically one of the first steps taken when designing a new healthcare facility.  We look at data from facilities modeled similarly to what our client wishes to consider.  There may even be tours, surveys or interviews with staff from the comparative institutions.  This knowledge ostensibly helps our user groups to understand clearly the pros and cons of a given design model and sharpen their own vision for the project at hand.  But....benchmarking is relative.  Unless you presume to be in the prototype business and use post occupancy analysis and benchmarking to keep improving your model, nothing you look at with a client will be exactly like what you design for them. To avoid going astray with your efforts, observe the following benchmarking protocol:

Determine what "best" really means
The idea of benchmarking is rooted in comparison- ideally you find the best performer in the industry and look at ways to compare their results to your own.  Where you are lacking, you look to the means and methods applied by the benchmark and try to incorporate them into your model.  In the design world we have a small problem with that idea- who is really the best?  There are so many variables that might make a given hospital a good performer that may be unique to their circumstances. These same strategies may fail miserably if applied within your client’s market and culture.  Make sure that you spend time defining the needs and wants of your client and developing a discrete list of objectives. Place only institutions that dealt with these issues in design and operations on your benchmarking list.  Because you can learn from failure as much as success, it is important for your benchmarking to be based on a set of predefined criteria that has been addressed by every hospital you study. 

Understand your extrapolation
It’s unlikely that you will literally copy design features straight from another facility. You will be instead applying elements and concepts to your design problem.  Make sure that you understand what made something work for the benchmark facility- was it a combination of placement and protocol?  If you don’t understand the dynamic behind the result, you can copy design elements and not achieve the goal. Create a matrix that lists facilities across the top and then contains rows of your client's design objectives. In each cell, discuss specifically how a particular facility dealt with that client objective.  Leave room at the bottom to expand the objectives if a particular benchmark inspires the client to change or add a priority. 

Don’t exploit the process
Many times, we want so badly to sell our client on a given design solution. If they are not on board, benchmarking of similar institutions is used as a brainwashing technique.  Ethics aside, you may be very sorry later when the design you ramrodded down the client’s throat doesn’t perform well for them.  It’s equally as important to not allow administration or staff to become enamored by a facility and want to emulate it if it won’t provide similar benefits for their organization. Use facility tours to look at trends and filter out what will have lasting benefits vs. quickly becoming outdated. 

Benchmarking is a useful tool, but only after clear needs, goals and priorities are set by the client.  It is about setting standards for best practices, and that can be a highly subjective undertaking.  The Evidence Based Design process embraced by the Center for Health Design champions benchmarking as part of the initial research needed to define the problem.  I agree that benchmarking belongs firmly in the learning phase of the project, a source of information and a contributor to how the design problem at hand will be defined.  How have you successfully used benchmarking on a project and how did you work to remove bias from your facility selections and review of data?  Please join the discussion and share your thoughts.

Is Your Ocean Red or Blue?

Have you ever thought about how architecture is practiced?  Why so many architects are just not very collegial with one another and our professional organizations serve more as a source for legal documents, status, and continuing education instead of as a true collaborative resource?  Maybe you just naturally assume that you have to compete, after all work pays the bills.  Our profession has accepted the premise of a business strategy called Red Ocean (think blood in the water),  that assumes at its core that we can only win if everyone else loses.  Our work becomes a product or commodity and offering more of it for less is the only way to stay ahead of the game (sound familiar to how we undercut our fees and lose money on jobs to keep or get a client?) 

A more recent strategy to emerge turns that premise on its head.  Called the Blue Ocean strategy, it asks us to rethink the idea of beating the competition and instead examine that for which we are actually competing.  In other words, is the prize really worth it?  Are we decimating ourselves just to win?

By looking at who we really are and what we really want to do; we can, according to Blue Ocean thinking, define a new market that we can serve with the full force of our individual talent and passion.  It seems almost too good to be true.  I am transported back to my days as an idealistic student full of dreams and ambition, not the soul-crushing professional environment that awaits said student ideologues.  

Of course, there is a catch: you have to actually be innovative (and not too risk-adverse either). In a Blue Ocean paradigm, the focus is on the value of what we have to offer and finding a market that is actually seeking that value.  No building industry, creating niche markets requiring hyper-specialization is not the point, it's about innovation.  Innovation that also takes into account utility, price and cost in an attempt to make competition irrelevant.  That's something that we have a hard time with, because we want to keep designing buildings, and so do all the other architects. Also,blue ocean is an ideal that may not prove lasting. Mohammad Jamil of the Change Management Community is his article "Red and Blue Ocean Strategy" argues that the two strategies are in fact interdependent and cyclical, with blue oceans driving innovation, which in turn drives the red ocean competition that will eventually spawn more innovation.  I think that what matters most is that we realize that we are not constrained by the "way things are" and instead start asking a lot more critical questions:

1. What are you really trying to achieve and why?
2. To whom will it matter?
3. Can you abandon old habits and dependencies?

Stop swimming with the sharks and chart a course to peaceful waters.  When survival isn't the primary issue, it's amazing what you can achieve.

Are you an Opportunist?

An architect friend recently posted this philosophical question: "What matters more to you, process or outcome?"  I wanted to shout, "Both! Neither!" Then I realized that it comes down to whether or not you are an opportunist. 

I define opportunism most simply as the ends justifying the means.  However, this doen't make either the ends (outcome) or the means (process)  more important.  It just means that you are willing to take advantage of what situations present themselves and do whatever it takes to get what you want.

Opportunists take risks, opportunists leverage situations, opportunists are schemers and plotters.  They get what they want- at least in the short term.  I think that the pitfall of being an opportunist is that our world is so focussed on the immediacy of success.  Opportunists accept this premise defacto and can easily become addicted to orchestrating a short term success. Being an opportunist is makes you seem powerful, but you might just be building a house of cards if you forget to factor in that old economic principle of opportunity cost...Do you buy into that?