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.

Because Someone Had To: The Flawed Thinking of being a Trouper

In the last three weeks of our novena, we are focusing on transformation. Last week we looked at our career path and how to make the necessary adjustments to achieve maximum potential.  In week eight, we do the same for our work process.

At my old firm, there used to be a mantra uttered by the staff whenever confronted with an impossible situation.  “Get ‘er done,” frazzled architects and interns would say, as if a results-oriented approach would make the crushing deadline, impossible budget, or demanding client seem less overwhelming.  The objective was to hunker down and focus on the most streamlined path possible to meeting the objective, then put your nose to the grindstone and crank it out.  There was a certain pride, even, in the ability to be uberproductive in the face of such odds.

How many times have you found yourself faced with a problem for which you were ill-trained, understaffed and poorly equipped and just muddled through and made up a way? Woe to anyone who dare criticize the final product, means, or method, so proud are you to have accomplished the task.  If you feel like an innovator in situations such as these, you’d be right, but only in a can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees kind of way.

You feel proud of yourself for accomplishing something in a jerry-rigged half-assed way- because someone had to.

Perhaps it is our experience of studio instruction, where professors try to avoid placing too many parameters on the task at hand in order to encourage individual exploration.  We are just a little too comfortable as architects with working with an ill-defined problem and making the best of it.  A lot too willing to make sacrifices in order to get the job done (hello, all-nighter mentality). The trouble is we are diverting our creative energy to dealing with procedures instead of devoting it to design.  We make managing the schedule and the budget the design problem, not the design issues.  We’re rewarded for this flawed thinking when the metrics of success for a project are: 1. On Time and 2. On Budget and the people assessing our performance have taken those two measures completely out of the context of design.  It’s time to realize that being a trouper means only that you were willing to be put in a box and not complain about it.  What kind of team player does that really make you?  How to break free:

Don’t accept the premise.  Dealing with impossible design parameters is exciting, challenging and opens the door to innovation. Dealing with impossible demands from clients, co-workers and bosses is draining, stressful, and leads you to keep recycling the same solutions over and over again because you know they will work.  Do not confuse the two. 
1.  Schedule, budget, and aesthetics are interdependent variables of the design problem. They are not design problems in and of themselves. 
2. Use the pre-design phase to determine design parameters that will meet schedule and budget goals.  3.  Stay focused on the design problem, knowing that these are addressed. 
4. Start saying no to the things that aren’t about solving the design problem.  These things are not only distractions, but they affect all of your variables, therefore compromising the design itself.
5. One you define the problem to be solved, don’t dilute your efforts by allowing others to introduce new problems.

Always take time as a team to revisit the view of your project from 35,000 feet.  This helps everyone understand the goals and big design ideas and stop obsessing about the details that are actually off the reservation.  It's easy to get distracted by concerns crises that seem critical to one or more team members, but responding to panic with panic sends the project off on a tangent.  Instead, ask how a given change in direction or new area of exploration will help meet the overall goals.  If it doesn’t, then it’s a waste of time and money.  How’s that for meeting those on-time/on-budget metrics?

The Possibility of Transformation

In the last three weeks of this novena, we will move beyond our exploration of the limitations that are placed on us by others as well as ourselves.  The focus of these last posts will be on transformation and leveraging of strengths. 

As architects we have to believe in the ability of things to be transformed. An empty parcel of land becomes a building, an old building gets a new lease on life, an interior space is remodeled for a whole new use.  What we do is centered around seeing possibilities in existing circumstances and bringing about a change that goes beyond what our clients can imagine.  Tell us something is impossible, and we view it as a challenge to find a solution.  This is an amazing talent.  Too bad we don’t see it that way.  It’s time to start designing your career and bringing to bear all of the same creative skills you would to a creaky old building on a difficult site.  Be your own next project.

The pre-design analysis
Before you begin design, you collect information, determining all of the parameters and possibilities, schedules, budgets, delivery methods.  Take that same analytical view of yourself (see week five post Be your Own Stage Mom, if you don’t know how to get started).  Do your own mini-report that includes:
1. An assessment of your existing conditions, including strengths and weaknesses.  Don’t editorialize, just state the facts. Include a list of opportunities available and required improvements.
2. Benchmark the careers of others you admire in order to collect baseline performance measures
3. A definition of the problem, including goals and objectives.  Note: this is not a proposed solution- just a definition of what you want out of the finished project (your career).  Make your own career space program and schedule so you can begin to understand the magnitude of the task at hand and what things are the main vs. ancillary “spaces”.  Don’t be afraid of making big bold moves or determining that some existing career element just doesn’t work in your new plan and needs to be “demolished.”
4. Make a bubble diagram of your problem so you can start to identify relationships and critical adjacencies related to your program elements.
5. Code check: are there credentials you should be pursuing?
6. A test fit of how your problem, as defined can be addressed. Design options help clients see opportunities and doing the same for your career path helps you see what’s possible as well.

Design build phase
Now that you have your big idea and goals in place as well as a good handle on the parameters in which you will be operating, it’s time to get to work. 
1. Plan. Using all of the elements you identified, create a blueprint of how things will work.  Just as with a building, you will discover ways to combine program elements, circulation routes and guideposts will emerge and you will likely find that you need to add program elements.
2. Visualize in three dimensions. A building shouldn’t be the result of an extruded plan.  Neither should your career.  Allow the particular choices you have made about implementing your goals to add to the richness of your career design, informing you about further opportunities and really giving you the opportunity to create the form that follows the function.
3. Detail.  Embellish your career design with details that support and reinforce it.
4. Monitor implementation. You can get too caught up in the process of implementing your career design and lose sight of the purpose.  Revisit your goals often to make sure that your efforts stay on track.

Post occupancy
Your career is a work in progress.  You will never stop needing upgrades and remodels, even some radical demolition from time to time.
1. Conduct a post-occupancy evaluation.  What’s working and what isn’t?  Survey others to see if they can see your vision.  The best strategies are the ones that are easy to explain and that other people can understand.  Note: this doesn’t mean that you should avoid the unconventional or stop taking risks, just that your strategy is clear and trackable.
2. Measure your performance results every year.  Assess how well you are doing at meeting six month, one year, and five year goals as well as whether you want to add, remove, or change goals.

You can have the career YOU want, you just need to envision, design and implement it.  Thanks to your wicked skillz as an architect, you already know how.  Nothing is impossible.