Thoughts on Commencement

Graduation ceremonies are marked by commencement- a ceremony that celebrates not the ending of the educational process, but the beginning of a new life as a professional.  But what exactly are these new graduates setting out to do?  In the spirit of the season, I wanted to take on some of the myths that are born in our architectural education system and carry forward into professional life:



Myth #1 Winning is everything
No matter how many group projects are assigned, the fact that our individual grades make or break us can lead many students to be more concerned with proving their own worth than harnessing the power of collaboration.  That is a lesson that has no place in the working world, where your fellow staff members and you are all on the same team. Yet, many managers, principals and other firm leaders did not get this memo.  So while they pay homage to the idea of interdisciplinary collaborative work, the culture of the firm is set up to reward individual achievement, and the design process is sliced and diced into so many factions that no one has a grasp on the whole project.  As we train young professionals to negotiate their success, are we teaching them to do it through collaboration or compromise?  Schools never discuss this nor do they address the real “career questions” that many young architects face: Will you be placed in the management track, the coveted designer/primadonna track, the business development track or the construction administration track?  Perhaps you are best suited to production, specifications and detailing and will remain a background support person.  Just like choosing a major, pick your specialty now and stay with the program if you want to get ahead. 

TIP: Reject this mindset now, no matter what stage of your career.  Collaboration has been shown to be a much more powerful negotiating tool than compromise, and a collaborative approach isn’t competitive, so it brings out the best in the entire team.

Myth #2 Time + Energy= Creativity
My Dad used to always tell me “work expands to the time allotted” in a scolding tone whenever I complained about the long hours I had to spend getting studio projects done.  Despite many discussions about its abolition, the all-nighter remains a staple of students’ academic experience.  They sacrifice most other coursework for studio and many professors also perpetuate the myth that spending more time on an assignment is critical to a successful outcome.  We whisper about the student who “hasn’t been in studio at all over the weekend,”  or who “left at 9:00 pm” the night before the deadline.This expectation that our time and energy have no value and that creativity is a byproduct of lavish overspending of both moves with us into the work world where interns work long hours, often for no extra pay.  This carries forward- with the expectation that senior staff is available on-call 24/7 and that overtime will be worked to meet impossible deadlines.  While the staff grumbles, they don’t bat an eye because they are conditioned, as are the firm owners, that this is the proper way to work.

TIP: It turns out that Dad was right. The myth that quality, let alone creative or innovative, work is linked to exhaustion has been dispelled in numerous studies from sleep researchers to business performance analysts.  You will be happier and better performing in general, not to mention more creative and willing to try new ventures, when you have a balance in your life and actually take care of yourself.  Your clients and colleagues will notice the change in your attitude and be much more receptive to your ideas.


Myth #3 The task knows no limits
Sure, you can always do more, but didn’t our pal Mies van der Rohe  already prove that to be a blind alley?  This is a bit of a corollary to Myth #2, but how we define the problem goes a long way to what it will take to solve it.  Often, students are not taught how to define a problem at all.  As they toil away during studio class, they are visited by their professor who will often ask a series of questions or react to an unfinished scrap of idea at their drafting table, then move on.  Because the student does not have a clear idea of what to solve, let alone how to solve it, they can’t communicate with any clarity, and the professorial reactions only serve to muddy the waters further.  Instead of developing a concept and building on it through design, the student embarks in a series of tailspins hoping for a eureka moment during one of those all night sessions.  Isn’t that what we do with our clients too?  We freak out and prepare dazzling overkill presentations instead of taking the time at the front end to clearly understand their needs and gather the proper information to define the project properly and in terms of their time and budget constraints.  We get caught in the redesign loop, frantically hoping to impress them, just like we hoped to impress without knowing why during all those crit sessions.

TIP: If you were really paying attention in all those studio classes, you should have learned that aesthetics are secondary to how well you defined the problem presented to you and what design measures you took to address the issues you identified.  If you couldn’t present a good argument for the design measures you took, it was all too likely you were going down in that crit regardless of your impressive manipulation of “architectonic elements”.  This works with clients and employers as well.  Take the time to clearly define the problem, the stakeholders in its solution and what role each, including yourself, will play in achieving the solution.

My congratulations and best wishes go out to all who are graduating this spring, as well as anyone ready to embark on a little career commencement of their own.  With self-awareness, clarity and conviction, you will achieve your  dreams.  Please share updates on your commencement experience with the Patron Saint of Architecture community.

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.

Emanate to Innovate

Top-down, bottom up, there are all kinds of theories out there on innovation and how to cultivate it.  Most focus on creating a collaborative work environment where everyone feels empowered and where leaders are selfless mentors who walk the walk and set the tone.  Sign me up to work there and find some more companies like this to be my clients! 

The truth is that often neither the worker bees or management gets it, and those that do don’t get it right all the time.   I stumbled across this fun little site a while back called wecreate and read a fabulous post called The Key to Sustainable Growth that focuses on what research has shown to be the biggest innovation firestarter- company culture.  While the article offers quite a few handy tips on how to mean what you say and walk the talk, what I found most interesting was the idea that a culture should emanate from each worker. 

Being empowered doesn’t mean a whole lot if you don’t understand what you are empowered to do.  This idea that making people accountable will lead to innovation is a fallacy.  Accountability makes people retreat inside themselves and take the safest and surest route since they are implicitly going to be blamed if something goes wrong.  Empowerment is a whole different beast.  When someone is empowered, they are able to shape the process and terms for which they will later be held accountable and agree to those terms not just stand there holding the bag at the end.

Understanding what you are empowered to do isn’t helpful if you are not inspired by the mission.  Does your company have a mission statement?  Do you even know what it is?  How about your clients?  Long, vague statements are irrelevant.  A short sentence that captures the essence of who you are and why you do what you do means something and serves as a guiding principle to staff at every decision point along the way.  This mission will either resonate with employees and cause them to radiate the company culture, or it won’t.  Those who aren’t inspired will leave or soon emerge as ripe for the chopping block.

No mission can be undertaken fully if it doesn’t have the proper resources behind it.  By resources, I am not necessarily talking about money.  I am talking about good processes, and good ability to obtain and share knowledge.  A mission is just words if it isn’t backed up by tools and expertise as well as a willingness to share it freely with others.

So how do you create a culture of innovation for yourself and your clients? How do you have it emanate from each and every employee, every project?  Its not top down or bottom up but in between, across and through that matters.  Please share your innovation experiences- I’d love to hear what worked and didn’t for you!