Thought Leaders: Current Realities and Future States

To get a feel for the state of things, I surveyed industry leaders on all sides of the owner-architect-contractor triangle, and a few outside it. For those not skilled in statistical analysis or data mining, “research” is little more than talking to people. I adopted that model and interviewed industry leaders. What they gave back was astonishing; a series of outlooks and candid admissions of issues they face and optimistic future visions. While the introduction unearthed the issues broadly, Part 1 dives deep to explore individual views.

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”

– Michael Jordan

Topics

Interviewees are grouped in chapters by topic. To achieve a panoply of perspectives, I built a Noah's Ark of vantage points – two or more of almost every point of view: owners and architects, engineers and technologists, contractors and trade contractors, students and teachers, strategists and manufacturers. Having boarded this vessel, they share their world views for survival amid a heavy downpour of industry turmoil. With their shared goal to stop the rain, their words give us hope for sunny days and dry land. While many could be in more than one category, this topic-based organization offers a roughly chronological, subject-based logic. Moving from old to new, and clients first, past to present and future, it ends with new voices of advocacy from emerging leaders. Our mission is to build a cohort of understanding, an army for action. For readers looking for a place to start, here are synopses of what you will find.

“We talk a lot about hope, helping, and teamwork. Our whole message is that we are more powerful together.”

– Victoria Osteen

Chapter 2 Client Empathy: Listening, Collaboration, and Expertise

Chuck Thomsen, author of Managing Brainpower, and former chairman of 3D/I, has sustained design and construction relationships over decades. He opens the discussions with reminders of the importance of client intimacy, developing expertise, and the marked differences between design and construction processes. His comments on design philosophies frame the challenge: on one hand, you have a design firm, process, and building type that is predictable, rational, functionally driven by client needs, and straightforward. At the other extreme may be a design team diametrically opposed to rational process. Something may have to give. Assess your team's tendencies to find out.

Beverly Willis, a seven-decade practitioner, gives perspective on the evolution of practice from simpler “post-and-beam” times to technology-enabled, transdisciplinary experts.

Chapter 3 Owner Leadership: Programs, Users, and Talking

Barbara White Bryson challenges owners to lead and engage with their teams, making the case that owners have the biggest opportunity and responsibility to make a difference in our teams. Bryson's outlook is bold and optimistic, but not enough owners feel the way she does. How do we educate and activate more of them?

John Moebes's ' distinction between serial “program” owners and one-time owners reveals that leadership and forethought can develop policies and procedures for repeat use. There is not enough time to develop them on a single project.

Arthur Frazier's candor about the spectrum of owner responsibilities – leaks, diverse, needy unknowing users, and the perils of design micromanagement are revealing.

Together, Bryson, Moebes, and Frazier's insights into the owner's world are enlightening in their call for owner leadership and project-specific approaches, particularly by program, serial builders.

Chapter 4 Building Learning Organizations: Knowledge, and Research

Jim Cramer shares the history of developing the country's leading design think tank using the strategies of “learning from the best” and having “courage for the future.”

Renee Cheng's primer on knowledge management and research give value-adding levers to design practices. Her diverse cadre of students leads the charge.

Randy Deutsch invites design graduates to wear multiple hats as they deploy new tool sets and integrated thinking.

Chapter 5 Firm Culture: Management and Attitudes

Scott Simpson's integrated view of design and its management represents a studied approach from someone who has led several of the world's leading firms.

Thom Penney discusses firm culture and the viability of a regional practice model.

John Busby reflects on the evolution of AIA issues such as continuing education, international practice, the architect's education, cost awareness, and the many meanings and misunderstandings of design.

Agatha Kessler's analogies for empathy, leadership, and tough love suggest a necessary approach to leading designers. She uses different keys to open different doors.

As current and past firm and national AIA presidents, this group's perspectives offer a broad overlook of the state of the architectural profession, firm culture, and practice.

Chapter 6 Strategy: Early Questions, Planning Horizons, and Socialization

Bob Carnegie and Marc L'Italien offer practitioners' perspectives on the importance of collaborative practice.

Matthew Dumich gives us a look inside a global practice that enlists his firm's mastery of state-of-the-art tools to create performative buildings.

Chapter 7 Process: Lean Scheduling – Agile and Efficient

Jeff Paine and Peter Styx speak openly about architect-contractor relationships, trust, budgeting reliance, schedules, expectations, and showing empathy to satisfy client and team needs.

Chapter 8 Collaborators: Performative Design (Better Together)

Phil Freelon and Allison Grace Williams expound on the designer's mentality. They share a passion for client-focused, site-specific talent and team-led, high-design solutions that express the art of architecture. Designers asking tough questions to challenge assumptions is at the core. Phil's coachlike admonitions urge readers to push through the rain and pain. Allison's determined championing of design's value suggests we ask tough questions and challenge givens to transcend mere building.

Chapter 9 Design and Budgets: Architect/Contractor Collaboration and Trust

Dan Nall's honest assessment of the range of design subconsultant service types may give pause to architects, owners and contractors who procure such services. Which do you need? What have you bought: industry-leading synthesis and synergy, or a repeat implementation of a standard formula? Nall's elucidation of the need for “catalog engineering” makes sense.

Kurt Swensson, in his role as firm founder, owner, and practice thought leader, offers keen insight into the subconsultant's survival mindset. How to lead from behind? Can we anticipate outcomes, innovate, and manage at the point of attack? Serve situationally? Teams face these everyday realities in managing themselves and their clients. In a wide-ranging discussion he opens up about frontline decision making, trust, integrated teams, and the myths they can carry – realistic expectations for shaping the market.

Chapter 10 Strategy: Early Questions, Planning Horizons, and Socialization

Good owners challenge their architects to ask them the right questions. There is a market opportunity to serve those who manage and use buildings, not just those who design and build them. Why not move the conversation upstream to affect strategic business thinking?

Margaret Serrato's candid conversation about strategic questions reveals flaws in current approaches and the need for early analysis. While this may not be currently thought of as traditional design service, there is a need for it. Her contrarian, data-driven questions provoke clients to reconsider conventional thinking.

Phil Bernstein frames futures for practice: technology-driven change, identifying firms' reason for being, value propositions, forging alliances, and planning horizons.

David Gilmore illuminates early team-building best practices, leadership versus management, and the coming exodus of design firm leadership. His data and experience base draws from the world's best firms. He shares his business acumen to guide them, and us, in team socialization and design leadership.

Chapter 11 Engineers and the Consultant's Mindset: Leading From Behind

Bruce Cousins' application of Lean methodologies offers new rigors to contrast traditional design thinking. Readers encountering these processes for the first time may surprise themselves.

Chad Roberson, through his firm's simple, democratic, self-determining Lean work planning system, offers a palatable way to manage design: by the piece.

Chapter 12 Contractors: Risk and Design Assist Expertise

John Rapaport and his colleagues speak honestly about the untapped potential of trade contractor expertise to inform design and construction and the failure to use valuable project history and feedback. BIM's untapped potential and the need for capital investment in research and data reuse are discussed.

Jeff Giglio and Don Davidson discuss timing of trade contractor involvement, trust, and the collective challenge of keeping up with new materials and systems.

Wayne Wadsworth offers an eye-opening analysis of the importance of the participant supply chain in designing and building, including the industry trade contractor network in assessing and managing higher risk levels stemming from innovative design, and translating it into reality.

Jon Lewis shares a boots-on-the-ground constructor's point of view. As a general superintendent responsible for building major projects, he is a leading construction technology adopter and a sympathetic design thinker, manager, and collaborator who copes with and builds unmanaged design.

Chapter 13 Technology: Leveraging Data

Arol Wolford's legacy of data management and reuse in the design construction industries offer a clear opportunity. His investment in gaming engines shows continued leadership to enable new ways of seeing, thinking and collaborating.

Casey Robb's perspective and decades of experience as a manufacturer's representative reveals gaps in technical product data, knowledge sharing, and respect for relationships.

Josh Kanner's entrepreneurship in technology-enabled data reuse has resulted in industry-leading applications that have transformed workflows. Arol Wolford and Josh Kanner are serial entrepreneurs: builders, acquirers, and sellers of multiple enterprises that employ data to inform design and building.

Chapter 14 Entrepreneurship: Vertical Integration and Value Propositions

Scott Marble posits the need and opportunity for entrepreneurial attitudes and new alliances in redesigning the business of design.

David Fano and his firm WeWork are changing design and construction via vertical integration. Rather than complain about inefficiencies, they reinvented the market. Their model to design, develop, automate, and control their employee and customer experiences forms a new paradigm, reminiscent of Apple, Google, and the like.

Chapter 15 Change Agents: Advocacy, Equity, and Sustainability

As midcareer professionals, and firm and national leaders, this group points to larger, industry-wide issues with fresh voices and growing momentum.

Simon Clopton paints a picture of future practice for current graduates. His nontraditional career aspirations suggest a myriad of paths for millennial practitioners.

Emily Grandstaff-Rice frames a position of advocacy, holistic design, and the architect's responsibility to have a voice – to go beyond traditional practice. She is active in raising awareness for gender and racial equity in design and construction through Equity by Design.

Based on experience, facts, and personal passion, these leaders' experiences tell stories designed to help readers imagine alternative futures.

Let's get to them.

“Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.”

– Ray Kurzweil