Future Vision

COLLABORATIVE CONSTRUCTION

Prognostications and Advice

I hold these issues to be self-evident after a half-century in design and construction. Others in this book seem to agree.

Organizational Systems Thinking: The 7-S+1 Model

For those who seek change in their project, firm, or process, I return to a favorite paradigm. Lest I lapse into a business lecture to an unwilling audience, I'll offer this: search for “McKinsey's 7 S Organizational Effectiveness Model,” or its source article, “Structure Is Not Organization,” by Robert Waterman, Thomas Peters, and Julien Phillips.² In a still-timely-after-38-years stroke of genius, the model describes 7 factors that must align for an organization to function well. They are:

• Structure
• Strategy
• Systems
• Staff
• Skills
• Style
• Shared values

The model has a single premise: for an organization to succeed (or if you want to change it), all 7 factors must align. A change in one affects the others. Use this model to guide your change efforts. You'll be glad you did. The idea is so simple, even architects, engineers, owners, and builders can understand it. Some factors are “hard,” objective and measurable (i.e. structure, strategy, systems), and some are “soft,” subjective and less measurable (i.e. skills, style, staff). The model's primary author, Tom Peters, says, “Hard is soft. Soft is hard,”³ pointing out the easy-to-measure, objective nature of the “hard” factors, and the more difficult metrics of the human, “soft” factors. Even if you don't consider yourself a business strategy wonk, if you create buildings, the elegance of this model should inspire you. When faced with a broken process or team, odds are good that one or more of these seven factors are misaligned. Fix them and see if things get better. That's management – and leadership. To apply this model in real world project contexts, I took liberty with the diagram's internal focus and added an eighth “S,” the supply network, or context in which organizations operate.

Reach and Closure: Design Futures Council Summit on the Future of Architecture, 2018

To extend this book's breadth beyond U.S. soil and complete the exploration, in October 2018, I attended the Design Futures Council's “Summit on the Future of Architecture.” This event, held in Venice October 9–11, 2018, concurrently with the Venice Biennale di Architettura 2018, was attended by 50 industry leaders and guests. Highlights from its notable global cohort of presenters and guests include the following.

Opening remarks from host and DesignIntelligence/Design Futures Council CEO Dave Gilmore, in which he challenged attendees to consider:

• The accelerating pace of change
• The ever-growing specter of irrelevance for architecture firms, and outsider encroachment
• Reactive responses versus responsive relationships
• The challenge and opportunity to create our futures

Jim Anderson, OAA, AAA, AIBC, MRAIC, AIA, is Partnership Chair of the multidisciplinary Canadian design practice Dialog. His honest, introspective sharing of notable stories from his firm included:

• In Canada, the six urban centers are known as VECTOM (Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, coined by Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity (CSCA) at Ryerson University re: Canada's six largest urban markets with populations over 1 million.
• Canadian architectural graduates come from twelve schools of architecture, not all located in these cities. To attract them, firms must offer compelling purpose and culture.
• Start with why.
• To get better, start keeping score.
• A firm intern shared this: “The most important thing I learned this summer was that I need to understand different people's perspectives before I start solving the problem.” (During his short tenure he developed an app to provide metrics.)
• The firm has developed a community well-being framework. (You can't figure out what a community needs without asking it.)
• The firm's new IT leader, Roberta Kowalishan, has a masterful grasp of technology and also of people.
• Instead of listing our many design disciplines (e.g. architecture, planning, engineering, interiors, graphics), we simply call ourselves a design practice.
• We don't think of one hire, we think, “If this, then that,” considering the systems effects this hire could have on the firm.
• We enjoy an inherent Canadian optimism (We want to punch above our weight class.)
• We take the 100-year view.
• A reluctant CEO, thrust into the role by the untimely passing of the firm's managing partner, Jim and colleagues practice collective leadership: “We think in terms of a mosaic: each piece retains its identity, but collectively the group produces more.”

Francis Gallagher, managing principal of HKS London, presented: “View from the U.K.” His outlook discussed Brexit, and the growing interest in Socialist candidates by the country's millennials and its resulting potential impact on the U.K.'s global economic strategies and development.

Laura Lee, has taught professional practice and ethics at Carnegie Mellon University for several years and is a leading researcher. She served as Thinker-in-Residence for the Australian Government and is working as a strategy and systems designer for the public and private sector in Europe. In her recent work, her mission is to demonstrate the value of design and the impact of built environment on the quality of life. Her stunning presentation offered Buckminster Fuller-esque systems thinking to point the way for practitioners “In Search of Lost Humanism.” She shared these points:

• Are we relevant, resilient, and responsible as a profession?
• Architecture serves only 1 percent of developed work worldwide and is largely seen as a “product.”
• Current and projected distribution of the world's wealth (the 1 percent versus 99 percent) is also not sustainable.
• What must happen for architecture to disruptively evolve from 1 percent to meeting the needs of 10 billion in 2050?
• Integrated service, strategic, and systems design must connect to realize meaningful and convergent effects.
• We need incremental but clear evolutionary steps, to move from Now to New, and toward a full revolution.
• Architecture must develop from mainly private transactional to transition to public transformational value.
• Architects need to understand the upstream potential and downstream consequences of their work.
• Redefining building as commodity to architecture as outcomes and performance is the way forward.
• Design's greatest future potential is our ability to operate as a meta-discipline to construct conversations that lead to greater public productivity and prosperity.

The profession needs to develop an open, shared knowledge platform based on cases which demonstrate the value of collaboration in tackling complex problems for diverse contexts and a range of scales.

Mission-oriented practice-based design science research leading to industry innovation is becoming a differentiator for value creation in the profession and provides intelligence for evidence-based decision-making.

Radical reform of architecture education is urgent to reset the culture of the profession toward the public interest which is transdisciplinary and fully integrates research and practice from day one.

Paul Doherty is CEO of the Digit Group. Over decades, his firm and work have transcended traditional design practice, to master digital data, development, and facility management to position him as a global leader in the Smart cities movement. Now he deploys skills in politics and diplomacy with his digital designer and entrepreneur's toolset to realize change on a global scale. His presentation “The Perspective from China” outlined his work in the Smart Cities initiative and guiding principles including:

• Energy (e.g. use of piezo electric power generation to produce electricity from people walking on surfaces)
• Information Communications Technology
• Migration of 8 million people in China within the next 12 months (New cities are required.)
• Public Safety and Security
• Green/Sustainable Buildings
• Water, waste, education, healthcare
• Transportation (including transportable buildings and carless cities)
• Architecture must break free and emancipate itself from traditional shackles.

Adrian Parr, Dean of the University of Texas at Arlington's College of Architecture, and UNESCO Chair of Water and Human Settlements, an Australian with global perspective, shared these points:

• Global wealth inequity is worsening, to irreparable levels. As designers, responsible for physical and social change we bear a transboundary, transgenerational responsibility.
• Manfredo Tafuri's book “Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capital Development” (MIT Press, 1976) spoke to the relationship architecture and capitalism.
• In continuing to take work on reactive terms, designers are being “fatally complacent.” Venture capital firms are using us as tools to achieve their goals; designers overcatering to markets is problematic on a world scale.
• In her work to prepare students for their professional futures, she sees typical graduates facing six-figure debt, yet possessed by social responsibility.
• The notion of architects returning to roles as leaders or master builders is nostalgic, and no longer possible. But we have historically offered and still offer unique skills: we expand problem bases, redefine problems, and transcend simple solutions. The result can be that we improve peoples’ quality of life on a large scale.
• How we ask, answer, or reframe the question can reframe and begin to solve problems on a more socially responsible scale.

Peter MacKeith, Assoc. AIA, Dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas, shared these thoughts:

• His mission is to build a culture of collaboration at Arkansas.
• Coming into a practice now means giving up ownership of a name, ego, and historic design notions to pursue a higher purpose and selling that our projects and work will make a difference.

From the University of Cincinnati College of Architecture, former and incoming Deans Robert Probst, FAIA, and Tim Drachna shared, with a rapidly emerging digital future and artificial intelligence on the horizon, the 13 Deans of the University of Cincinnati, discussed and envisioned the future of education and speculated on subjects of greatest importance to teach:

• Consensus areas included communication, collaboration, empathy, compassion, ethics, trust, and truth.
• For impact, designers must learn to act through and in concert with others.

A few romantic notions persisted. One example was client and founder of the White City Project, Elena Olshanskaya, who is developing new cities in Africa. Her recounting of her comprehensive education as a shoe designer in Russia that included means of production, factory lines, materials, aesthetics, and business rang true in its recalling Bauhaus-ian learn-by-doing pedagogy. But she and we all had to agree that while we share frustration about the growing number of parties and experts now needed on our teams, the fact remains that we have many more kinds of “shoes” to deal with these days in making buildings. And no one of us can know all that is necessary about them all.

In response to an audience question about who will be in charge in these future teams, I shared my perspective as architect-turned-contractor, turned design-construction connector: “As CMs, we don't care who's in charge.” If the team is functioning well and succeeding, we don't care whether the owner, designer, contractor, or someone else leads. Of course, every team leads a leader and so does every discipline. Eventually even in alternative, shared-incentive contracts, the collective team needs a leader to lead, report and be accountable. But, in day-to-day work, any of us can rotate into the leader's chair at rapid intervals when we have something of value to offer.

President and CEO of DC Strategies, Barbara Heller, FAIA, reflected on the adverse impact of the insurance industry on design practice, in effect co-opting the profession to risk aversion. I added that, as contractors, we embrace risk and manage it every day – a radically different mindset than most design firms have today. Jeffrey Stouffer, executive vice president of HKS Dallas, reinforced that, too often, architects are seated, or have allowed themselves to be seated, at the “kids table,” and must return to the “adult table” through their actions. Darryl Condon, managing principal of HCMA, cautioned architects who believe they are immune to commoditization, urging them to keep the “50-year” view.

Scott Simpson, FAIA, DFC Senior Fellow, moderated a panel discussion with Gary Wheeler, FASID, FIIDA, DFC Senior Fellow, HDR's Interior Design and Global Workplace Strategy Leader, and Dr. Ted Landsmark, Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, and former head of NAAB and ACSA. In this discussion, practitioners’ needs were compared against the speculated future abilities of the academy to meet them. Findings included practitioners’ needs were compared against the speculated future abilities of the academy to meet them. Findings included:

• Architecture is how we tell our stories. How we produce it must change. The 1 trillion construction economy is 30 percent inefficient. Forces such as consolidation, scale, integration, speed, AI, robotics, drones, wellness, sustainability, materials science, and so on will have major impacts on the profession.
• We need new business models (e.g. royalties, or value-based compensation).
• Design education program length should be reevaluated. Its needs will come from practice.
• Schools should institute tenure term limits and periodic contract renewals to avoid turf protection and stale curricula and introduce students and interns to design management practices.
• Learn to demonstrate outcomes and use metrics instead of guessing and talking to ourselves.
• Use more case studies to learn from failure versus approaching design as a “start from scratch” approach.
• In collaborative teams, the response time is becoming dramatically shorter. Teams working together in real time are achieving short, fast, informed cycles. This contrasts with their former non-value-added time-lagged, wasteful, call-and-response modes. Speed demands it. Value results from it.

Dave Gilmore and Jamie Frankel's conference summation and consulting work with more than 50 firms this year included reminders to understand, own and act on the following advice:

• Business reinvention will be required.
• Demonstrable value creation is a prerequisite.
• Value exchange starts with want or need.
• Financial modeling is a given.
• Anecdotal decision making is flawed. (Three data points is not a trend.)
• Energy modeling is a new minimum expectation.
• Intellectual property and new products should be created, managed, and sold.
• Data: Do firms know they have it? Do they harvest it? Do they understand the ascending scale of epistemological knowledge: from data, to information, to knowledge, to understanding, to wisdom, all shared.
• Plot a course and reconnect the dots daily to remain flexible, strategic and responsive.
• Finds ways to break free of the “project/fee cycle” for revenue. Devise new revenue models that create value while we sleep.

Continuing

Based on this event and the experiences and opinions shared in this book, closure is not the point. How to continue and how to create new way ways to manage design are the objectives. Managing design has been and will be our purpose in two ways:

First, in the sense of the future of the profession, and how to increase the levels of self-awareness, change-agency, entrepreneurism, and social responsibility within the design professions.

Second, by discovering how to recondition the minds of those who do design and those who manage it, to want to work within schedule, budget, while balancing other objectives such as clients, moral and ethical issues, business, competitive cache, and be able to do so.

In that light, a few predictions can be drawn about the future of managing design and the profession:

• Those who are unable to learn to work collaboratively, across disciplines, will be left behind.
• Faster, rapid prototyping and strategic live work and decisions will replace the Diverge|Converge and Group|Individual models (See Figures 19.3 and 19.4.) Cycles will become fast and frequent. “I'll get back to you,” or “Let us study that for 3 weeks then price it,” will become unacceptable responses. Team are increasingly working live, real time with near-continuous cost estimating.
• A growing multiplicity of roles for designers will proliferate, including:
  • Specialists
  • Generalists
  • Enablers to connect and manage them
  • Most likely, a few vestigial small practitioners will still do small residential and commercial work, possibly by hand and head, without machine assistance.
• At the other extreme, major corporate giants of the digital age are likely to continue to expand their global dominance by expanding into the technologically lagging design and construction industries to acquire and transform firms. Some have already entered the development sector. In doing so, they threaten to relegate non-value-adding providers to being mere tools of production, deployed for the benefit of these more capitalized, larger companies. If the digital giants don't drive such acquisition, large private equity firms likely will. Perhaps both.
• Firms and teams that reject this prospect should act now to create value or be prepared to accept this possible new role as “producer” – someone who acquiesces to needing babysitting or management.
• The essential, invariant skills of architects are likely to continue, including the abilities to:
  • See and think differently.
  • Reframe problems at multiple scales.
  • Think in system terms to connect factors (art, science, technology, and now, business, environmental and political issues). If this growing list of design determinants is real, by definition, the relative weight of purely formal aesthetic design issues must be reduced in favor of balancing the larger list. They must be considered together.)
  • Those who can do these things in new ways wearing multiple hats have the potential to be valuable. We must “keep the magic” that design professionals can bring.

While I can't foretell the future of the profession, I can speculate it will be different. Aggregation, specialization, automation, and atomization all seem inevitable. As warned by some, extinction of some of the design profession's current, non-value-adding, non-technology-enabled forms is possible. Small firms will continue in varying forms, having adapted for survival. Like others of my kind, my pathos is connection. Like other servant leaders, my purpose is to mend the splits, connect, be tolerant, be my best, and help others be theirs. To achieve that, we need not only to be smarter, we need each other.

Constants and Encouragement

In talking to industry leaders I've confirmed a suspicion: designing and building are emotional pursuits. Labors of love. We have issues, but things change. People and attitudes do too. Tolerance, gratitude, and compassion can be learned. While my digging unearthed chronic issues, it also uncovered a community. Few other businesses are made up of such passionate people. Dedication, love of craft, outcome orientations, and a higher calling are common characteristics of designers and builders.

Another constant is connection. While many of us do this work because we love the doing, even brash project managers and lone wolf designers do it for another reason: connection. We're motivated by acceptance and recognition. Even egalitarian or selfless acts, on the surface, seek the positive experience of belonging and self-esteem. In other words, we want to be liked and to feel good. The result? Another continuum: self versus group.

One revelation was unanticipated: the common desire for change. Despite our lingering differences, each interviewee shared a desire to transform the industry. This commonality energized the dialogue. My hope, in sharing this change collective, is that it restores faith and catalyzes action.

I hope I've persuaded you to join me. Now it's your turn. In his foreword, Randy Deutsch describes this book as “like eavesdropping on a stimulating conversation among industry stalwarts at a dinner party.” But the party's over. Time to get to work. Let's do what we love: design and build, only better. While it didn't start that way, the book's purpose became to give voice to voices. I started with one – mine. What resulted is a chorus.

What is your story? What can you add to the conversation? What will you do next? Let's bring hubris back to designing and building. Let's come together and manage design. Maybe more expert encouragement will get us going:

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far it is possible to go.”

– T.S. Eliot

“What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.”

– Peter Drucker

“A man would do nothing, if he waited until he could do it so well that no one would find fault with what he has done.”

– Cardinal Newman

“I can accept failure. Everybody fails at something. But I can't accept not trying. Fear is an illusion.”

– Michael Jordan

Answers

What are the answers to the book's questions: Can design be managed? Are you managing design? Can we create a better future? My answer to all is yes. For most of us, it involves changing behavior, processes, and our minds. Some will use structured tactics like the Project Design Controls framework. Structure and limits are helpful. Others will use empathy. Migrating to the center can help us understand others and cope. Both seem like good starts compared to uncompromising, extremist positions, and outmoded, inefficient processes, with no controls in place.

Can we change the design and construction continuum? I think so. Engaging the here and now could be the answer, but not by keeping busy and doing things the way we always have. It takes will and intention. Throughout this book I've challenged you to change and given you a framework to apply. You might ask: “What are you – the author – doing about all this?”

“I like to live the life that I sing about – in my song.”

– B.B. King

Yes, I'm preaching it, writing it, singing it, and living it. I will be for a while.

Are you with me?

Yes, managing design is an oxymoron, but can be done by those who want to. And that's what makes this business fun. I hope you use these ideas to make it so for those you work with, and that we can continue the conversation.

Good luck.