Editing out the opportunity

It’s week four of the Shattering the Meme Novena.  Especially in a recession economy, which focusses on lack and limits, our focus must shift to releasing judgement of ourselves and others in order to be more open to the possibilities that come from less rigid thinking.

How well do you know yourself?  Your real interests and capabilities?  I bet they are in there buried down deep, disconnected from what you actually do for a living, expressed maybe as a hobby, or maybe not at all.  Today, I would like you to ask yourself why.  Why are you so disconnected from what you really love to do?  Go, on, give all your reasons.  I’ll bet you have some really good ones.  Masterful rationalizations, all.  So good in fact, that I bet you have never even attempted to set any of the things that would help you realize your dream life in motion.  Or maybe you did in a halfhearted way, since you didn’t want to take that much risk or invest that strongly in something that wasn’t going to work out anyway.  Yeah.

What you have actually done without even realizing it was to edit opportunity right out of your life, just as a surgeon would excise a tumor.  You never truly explored the possibilities or made many plans.  You just knew you couldn’t or shouldn’t go in that direction.  What an insidious meme, the one that leaves us subconsciously longing and always suppressed, all the while believing that we are better off just doing what life expects of us.

Judge and Jury
When I work with coaching clients, this is often the biggest hurdle I find.  As a first step, I encourage them to do some very introspective work to get clarity about what they love to do and attach that to the reason they want to do it.  Then I ask them why they are not doing it already.  That is a profound question.  The answer, when you stop to think about, it is that you are not allowing yourself.  This lack of permission comes wrapped in all kinds of reasons that seem valid until you dig a little deeper.  Things like, “I have too many responsibilities right now to spend the money it would take to get set up,” or “The market for that is too small to really allow me to earn a living.” When I ask my clients how they know that those outcomes will occur if they allow themselves to explore a particular passion, they often have no answer.  They just know.  Because their conditioning (education, early childhood, work experience) told them so.  Before they even allowed the idea to be fully formed and vetted, all on their own, they shut it down.  Deemed it unworthy of seeing the light of day. 

Make the investment
It can be scary to follow your heart.  But you need to think about all the things you are losing by not doing so.  What is your happiness worth?  What does the stress you are experiencing right now doing work that doesn’t serve you cost in terms of your health and well-being?  What does the rat race do to your quality of life, or that of your family?  In economic terms, this is called the opportunity cost.  What you choose to forgo by playing it safe.  Playing is safe also prevents you from receiving the big payoff in every dimension of your life that comes from living with passion and purpose.  Clients, employers, members of your network, will all notice you in a much more positive way once you choose to invest in acquiring the skill and experience you need to do the work that you really love instead of the work that gets fed to you by default.  When you look at all of the costs of playing it safe (physical, mental and spiritual), it becomes obvious just how precarious of a position you put yourself in by staying stuck instead of making the bold moves towards living your true life’s purpose. Playing it safe isn’t so safe after all.

Beat back the lack
We can all fall prey to focusing on what we don’t have.  Especially in this economy, where we are faced with constant bad news, it’s easy to believe that we need to hold back instead of charging forward.  We want to conserve instead of expand.  To carefully guard our reserves, whether time, money or networking capital “just in case.”  Well, the rainy day is happening right now if you are anything but fulfilled and purpose-driven in your life and career.  The stress of trying to maintain the status quo is what makes you feel like you and what you have to offer will never be enough. Believing that there just isn’t opportunity to be had becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  What’s needed instead is to look at what you have to offer and to whom it will make a difference.  Sharing what you have to offer starting right now and making a difference in the world is far more important than holding back.  I liken this thinking to refusing to make a $20.00 donation to your favorite charity because you want to wait until you get rich and can give them an endowment.  It’s kind of ridiculous when you look at it in those terms, isn’t it?  Every little contribution you make does make a difference.  What’s more, is that they add up and propel you forward.

Shatter the meme:
The number one regret of the dying as reported by nurses who cared for hospice patients was that they had not lived a life true to themselves, but instead tried to meet everyone else’s expectations.  Allow yourself to think about who you really are and what you really want, even if it seems ridiculous or frivolous.  Play with the thought, get comfortable with it instead of immediately filing it away because you can’t see the path to achieve it.  In fact, banish all thoughts of “how” and just focus on why you have this dream.  The more you can get in touch with what motivates you, the easier it will become to not only see opportunities, but to fearlessly pursue them.  Then, choose to take action.  Once you do, you will be surprised at all of the opportunities that start to come your way related to your true life’s purpose.  It’s not a miracle, they were always available to you, but now you no longer have them painted over with wite out.

Pre-Fab is Ab-Fab

I remember playing with Legos as a kid. The bricks were modular and contained prefabricated specialty elements, yet I never felt that my creativity was threatened by these constraints. Why is it then that as grown-up architects we bristle at the idea of modular and prefabricated construction? We think “trailer park” and wide load trucks on the freeway. We think that all design has been taken to the lowest common denominator. In reality, the prefabricated industry has evolved into a highly sophisticated range of projects. While you can buy the cringe-inducing whole house, you can also buy pre-engineered systems that are your kit of parts to make amazing buildings. Prefabricated elements can also be a more planet-friendly solution.

One of my favorite sustainability sites, Inhabitat, had a recent article on a prefabricated house built in Seattle by Greenfab and designed and assembled by HyBrid Architecture. The model home is working towards LEED Platinum and qualifies as restorative with it’s net zero footprint and ability to generate its own power. While Greenfab makes a kit of modular parts, they also can work with clients to create custom design or just to reassemble their offerings in new ways. There is also a great article in ED+C magazine by Dru Meadows that details how by reducing waste on the front end, prefabricated construction can outperform other downstream efforts using the more traditional reduce, reuse recycle method. It’s a dramatic difference. Enough to make all of use reconsider prefabricated and modular construction as a matter of conscience.
Prefabricated elements have better quality control and produce less construction waste. They also allow a higher degree of integrated elements like smart technology, LED systems or materials that contribute to the design or flexibility of a component. I myself have always dreamed of a “walls on wheels” concept that truly allowed one to adjust the spaces to your individual needs. The one thing we know about the spaces in our world is that they need to support ongoing change of needs and function. Another plus of prefab: pieces and parts can be adaptively re-used to suite the needs of the occupants over time and easily dismantled and recycled at the end of the house’s life. Because they can be delivered to the site 80% installed, the actual construction time on site is greatly reduced.


So what changes? As a designer, you should develop a relationship with either a pre-fab constructor or manufacturers of pre-fab elements so that you can collaborate with them. I have also pulled together some advice to help you channel the modular mindset (you can also visit the Modular Building Institute to learn more):


1. Know your team. The fewer players, the fewer points of accountability, which is always a good thing. Many modular construction companies will also provide the option of constructing smaller commercial or residential structures as part of their package, which further enhances the design-build relationship.

2. Understand the kit of parts, what is considered partially custom and fully custom. Don’t be afraid to bring your imagination along. Because the modules are factory built, you can develop prototypes to get the design to work perfectly.

3. Design mindful of how each element can be a variation on a theme. The more repeatable modules you can use, the greater the efficiency of construction and lower the cost. This can be an especially effective strategy for large buildings like hospitals that contain many repeated elements like headwalls that are found in some form across many different departments.

 4. Think more about how the building will be used and how each element will support that use. A module doesn’t have to be as dumb as: wall, 10 foot high stud with drywall. Instead it can be: wall 10 foot high with built-in light source and touch activated media.


Far from being a limit on your design sensibilities, prefabricated and modular elements can actually set your imagination free and allow you to do things that would not be possible or feasible with traditional construction methods. Please share your thoughts and experiences with modular construction. I'm interested to hear the good, bad and ugly as well as how you got over any negative stereotypes about this construction method.

When Green Isn't Enough

Sustainable healthcare design is a strange beast.  It's not just about saving energy, but about providing a better quality of life for the users of the building.  A handy source for melding the two is the Green Guide for Healthcare, which acknowledges some of the distinct issues facing sustainable hospitals, and begins to take it one step further, weaving in elements of evidence based design (EBD). Other sources I like to consult are Practice Greenhealth, Healthcare without Harm, and the treasure trove of information on EBD that is the Center for Health Design.  Emerging mateirals such as the UL Environment hybrid standards and CSI's new GreenFormat also can help filter through a wide range of data in multiple formats. 

The best way to pursue sustainable goals is to understand that most of what they are working to accomplish can either lay the foundation for or amplify other goals that an Owner aalready has.  By taking the time to identify and codify Owner Project Requirements (OPR), they can be matched to green goals.

Being sustainable as a matter of conscience or energy savings is nice, but healthcare organizations should view it as a prerequisite to meeting their infection control requirements, staff retention goals, and patient satisfaction plans as well as a tool to improve the overall outcomes for cases.  When you look at green measures through an EBD lens, you get a whole different game plan for your project.  As my diagrams below illustrate, there are parallel paths for both sustainable and EBD strategies, which helps strengthen the argument for any measure that satisfies both aims:

These diagrams illustrate sustainable strategies (some linked to multiple LEED credits) and parallel EBD strategies with outcomes listed for both. As this comparison shows, many sustainable strategies also lead to direct EBD gains-a win/win/win result for your project.


Integrating EBD and sustainability into the project from the planning and conceptual stage encourages Owners to select strategies that support and inform their design goals for the project. To get you started on the visioning path, consider these strategies:
1.  Stepping back to look at the big picture from a “whole building” point of view
2.  Master planning infrastructure not just buildings- systems expandability
3.  Making bold moves for big results
4.  Incorporating redundancy and reliability into the sustainable plan

Go forth and be life-sustaining, not just sustainable.

Cheaper, Better, Faster: The Case for Entreprenurial Marketing

The increasing pressure to design and construct buildings cheaper, better and faster can seem like the surest path to a landscape of mediocre, throwaway buildings.  Architects prefer to look at projects as a factor of the dependent variables quality time and budget, explaining to a client, that meeting a low budget might compromise quality and perhaps argue for building a better, but smaller design.  Those relationships are weakened by market forces such as fewer resources or shorter client timetables to effectively launch a project and build, maintain or increase their market share. Clients demand that they want it all and want it now.  And there's a business theory for that.  Called Entrepreneurial Marketing,  Len Lodish, a Professor at the Wharton School of Business argues that smaller businesses need fast results with minimal investment.  Even the largest institutions in our industry operate much like small businesses, which is why I find this idea so compelling.  

To help get inside our client's head, let's focus on making the business case for ideas:

It's hard to focus on the long term when you have an immediate need that will likely exhaust your capital budget.  That's why so many large institutions look like they have tumors of one story buildings growing out of them and are a wayfinding nightmare. Schedule and budget concerns may be non-negotiable, but your client didn't hire you to smile and nod your head.  They hired you to think about the problem in ways that they can't.  As long as you have truly listened and respected their concerns, presenting a less literal solution than the one they asked for will gain their respect and produce a better project. 

There is also an implicit assumption on the part of the client by playing its safe, they know what they will be getting, and that the project will proceed more quickly and cost less.  Looking for proven solutions, they may be a little hesitant to explore innovative design practices, cutting edge research or sustainable tactics.  Or, they may  require integrated project design or minimum LEED certification without really understanding what is involved.  

Innovation does not have to come at a premium, and sometimes, the payback on implementing a cutting edge technology , unconventional method or research makes its own compelling argument. Architects are not necessarily known for their financial wizardry, but by presenting a strategy in terms of its return on investment, the conventional understanding of cost, schedule, and budget are transformed.  design time frames can become more elastic, with more time spent in pre-design and schematic design in order to brainstorm and then vet options as a team.  When we view a building project over its lifetime, the way that the problem is framed and eventually solved becomes more dynamic as well, leading to what the client wanted to achieve most- value.