Weeknotes

The past week in the life of MEREDITH Strategy & Design

Saturday, October 22, 2011 at 7:06 pm

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Week 41: A team barometer

One of the team members on a core project we are working on has developed a stress curve for our project. Although “curve” is perhaps the wrong word.

He posted the expected graph of the potential tensions on this very complex and yet very short project (an approximately $100 million project, to be programmed and designed in 5 weeks). Against this, we’ve been tracking the actual developments in the studio. It is a very jagged line in both cases.

Although the project has a long history in other places, and althought the goals had been well-articulated before we entered its trajectory, we’ve found that our peripheral vision was not well developed. Our design and development activity has been affected by an almost daily interjection of unexpected issues arising from a confrontation with reality that had not been present in the previous five years of this project’s development as it made its way through vision, politics, projections and other background stuff.

Part of the complexity is that we are designing for an organization not yet developed, with representation from departmental rather than thematic avatars, without a COO who could help develop a hierarchy of values, and in a comain of funding that will engage both public (governmental) and private (yet to be identified) sponsors.

We’ve tried hard to stay on a solid path but, in addition to the external surprises, we, ourselves, bring matters into the mix that clutter our movement. Every day we uncover data, special interests, individual interpretations, operational scenarios, discipline challenges, differential development, and other (logical) vibrations that shake the confidence, spirit, or energy of the team.

It was an odd delight to have ended the week with a meeting that should have been comfortable and collegial but became competitive and challenging. A delight because its emotion placed it on the stress graph  much higher than we’d predicted for Friday but, as we look to next Monday’s predicted very high stress level (because it would set the tone for the final push week), we think the week could be much more relaxed now that we’ve surfaced a bunch of the underlying clutter.

Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 5:01 pm

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Week 40: Intentional misalignment, misaligned intentions

We are into week 3 of a very intense focus to develop a design for a new multidisciplinary lab building in 5 weeks. The endpoint is a critical application to the state requesting a commitment of financial support to make the project feasible.

A primary ingredient of the week was therefore the continual testing, calibration and adjustment necessary to assure that the design program and the design are in metrical alignment. That is, the program of space requirements (not the full and robust design brief) will be the defining tool for the evaluation and approval of the developed design in later phases of the project, and the guiding metrics must be set now.

A key struggle for us, and everyone who does these things, is the net-to-gross ratio – the relationship of the area of the building assignable to uses like labs and offices, and the areas of the building that are essential to its functioning but not occupied by the “users” like mechanical rooms, custodial spaces and the like.

The state limits this ratio. Appropriately, it attempts to assure that its money will be used for the direct purposes of, in this case, research and not for other purposes of the institution and nor for what might be considered luxuries. This is where a significant misalignment occurs.

At the forefront of the national agenda Is the reduction in the cost of healthcare and the increase in access to it. A key strategy in this quest is the reduction of time it takes to get an idea developed in the lab to actually benefit the patient. To facilitate the velocity of developments, the National Institute of Health has developed programs and incentives to promote “translational” research – to develop facilities in which research, development, and application come together. These are multidisciplinary and multi-use facilities.

Through research into the processes of innovation and observations of the earlier facilities of this type, we’ve come to understand how all innovation in social. That is, almost al new ideas in science take place outside of the lab, in conversation and collaboration between researcher colleagues and others from other disciplines who may have something to offer to invention and innovation.

These collaborations take place only after there is an atmosphere of trust. This is derived primarily from social interactions in which people get to know each other’s values, come to find mutual interests, and open up to working together. And these social interactions take place where you would expect them to take place – outside of the conventionally dedicated and focused activities of labs and offices, and in places where refreshment, casual contexts and open conversations normally take place.

And there’s the rub. The wider hallways, open atria, coffee bars, casual living rooms, and similarly effective spaces lie in the “gross” side of the net:gross ratio. However, the conventional demands of research buildings like mechanical rooms, shafts for piping and air ducts, and similar spaces are also on the “gross” side of the space ledger and, with a limitation on the net:gross ratio, these essential functions crowd out the potential for the social spaces of innovation.

The state, seeking to incentivize greater economic performance and promote research that will contribute to the health and welfare of its citizens, offers funds to catalyze development yet must use a control on the use of its funds that directly contradicts or limits the development of the types of facilities that will help it achieve its goals.

I’ve frequently said that design is subversive. I mean that so frequently we design in ways that our clients are unaware of or even intolerant of in order to actually deliver the places and spaces that will help them achieve what it is that they are trying to do. Maybe that’s next week.

Jim Meredith

Sunday, August 28, 2011 at 7:34 pm

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Weeknotes 34 – Failure to learn

I am moving back into weeknotes somewhat cautiously. I had expected that writing a weekly reflection based on some aspect of the experiences of the past week would be easy, and beneficial, to do. Instead, here I am, about 20 weeks overdue.

The catalyst for today’s note was an interview with Michael Raynor in Inc. magazine. The interview focused on Raynor’s claim that it might very well be possible to predict which innovations might be “disruptive” and thus deliciously valuable. While I am very interested in the subject of innovation, what caught my attention here was his comment on the frequently referenced adage of innovation, to “fail fast.”

Raynor retorted that it was instead much more important to learn fast, to ask the question, “what are we trying to learn here?”

This resonated with me because earlier this week I had sat with a couple of colleagues in a session updating our thinking on how to find more success in this economy which seem uniquely unfriendly to our core practice. There was the natural step of looking to the list of those with whom we’d done business in the recent past. In reviewing the list, several waves of dread washed over me. This was a list that had no relevant information as part of it, only contact names and numbers, and most of these were woefully out of date. Then, I realized that, if making tracks in new territory was of interest to us, almost nobody on this list represented people or organizations who were interested in or capable of catalyzing innovative action. That critical observation, however, brought the realization that my assumption was not valid because we had not had recent conversations with any of these entities.

The entire effort was a “fail” in the sense that we had not developed and sustained a disciplined practice of “learning.” We had not engaged our friends from the past in a continuing conversation about what concerned or interested them, and we had not taken to them the learnings and thinking we’d been doing in our own context that might have relevance to them in their own context.

I challenged my partners on the concept of the adequacy of our CRM system. What really matters, however, is the importance of respecting and appreciating every contact we’ve had, and being generous with valuable information for them that could keep the trust high and the conversation open and robust.

It is time, now with summer past, to get out and restart those conversations…to learn fast!

(Source: meredithstrategy.wordpress.com)

Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 11:27 am

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Saturday, October 30, 2010 at 11:33 am

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30 October 2010

This was a relatively quiet week for us, spent mostly in preparation and coordination for what have been lagging engagements. As with many of our opportunities these days, the state of the economy still has a direct influence on the commitments of clients. While in many cases there seems to be an urgent need for change, the ability to fund the change slows decisions and project commitments. In the meantime, we have continued to work (but are lagging ourselves) on the definition of a “call” to developers.

Although more of a position statement and point of view on the new world of work, we are nonetheless very interested in finding a way to take the initiative and lead development into a new way of thinking about workspace and the workplace. Concepts of stocks and flows are informing our thinking for a workplace that is not owned by the company but by a 3rd party.

Stay tuned for developments, which we’ll post at MEREDITH Strategy & Design in the next week.

image by noneck at flickr.com

Monday, October 4, 2010 at 4:42 pm

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Anticipating permanent change

Last week we had the pleasure of a request from a leading global real estate organization to participate with them in the development of a workplace trends report, looking both 20 years back to assess where design has gone, and 20 years forward, to assess how design of the workplace should respond to other changes we might anticipate in society, technology, culture and the workplace.

These are always great assignments to have. They act as inflections in the normal course of business. They allow a short bit of time to stop and reflect and, in the reflection, to recalibrate.

One of the simple insights that came to us came to us as a result of the final question in all of these exercises, which is something on the order of, “Okay…and what should we do now?” This brought us back to an assessment of what we’ve been doing, and what we’ve been doing right over the past several years.

What I found uniquely fresh in this review was our belief that we are on the front edge of a future that will should radically reformulate what the/a “workplace” is. What I found uniquely surprising in this context is that the processes we’ve been developing over the past couple of years to define the context for design of the workplace provide a robust framework for meeting the challenges that have been emerging and that are becoming more visible now. We are preparing future posts for our work in other places discussing the subject of trends and the best-practice processes that can be used to day to prepare for any future.

Friday, August 27, 2010 at 6:34 pm

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Back to school

Will Fall and renewed activity drive us back to the opportunities for reflection that weeknotes provide?

It has been a long, hot, slow summer so far. Now, however, maybe with that back-to-school anticipation and optimism that seems to be built into our genes and into our annual cadence, I expect that the discipline of these notes will return.

We are in a flurry of activity with new opportunities developing in a number of places. we are getting excited about the Fall with international work emerging, with the regeneration of some our research and development projects, with the restoration of collaborative relationships, and with new opportunities in the domain of technology startups.

So this week has been proposal week and we haven’t felt better for a while.

Monday, July 19, 2010 at 9:48 am

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July 16, 2010 – Customers…and clients

The iterations of business sustainability subjects as the recession grinds on for architects and designers seem to be reaching, finally, that point of difficult decisions. So many firms in our area, and firms I have been associated with in the past, seem now to be confronting the need to restructure. Large firms, especially large architecture + engineering firms, grew to handle big projects for big clients. Most are now finding that the big projects are not materializing, and may not any time soon. Resources have been spent holding on to critical staff, and there is now no source for interim funding. Project opportunities with fees in six figures used to be avoided, but now are celebrated, cautiously, as big wins.

Our own agility has been helpful in gaining opportunity to discuss alternative paths to collaboration. It feels as if there is a move to p-time, as the necessity of alternative strategies opens up the professional space to more and multiple synchronous conversations.

Because of these collaborations, a couple of things this week had us reflecting on the differences between our profession’s approach to clients/customers and our clients’ approach to customers, wondering why there is such a difference and why clients don’t calibrate architects and designers to their philosophy.

Our clients have generally evolved to reflecting deeply on the experience that their customers have with their products and services. Architects and designers, however, despite claiming a dedication to long-term relationships, still call what they do “projects” and still measure their work by the acclaim given the physical place or space by peers.

In between the two, and perhaps the reason for the perpetuation of the abstraction, are the internal and external agents responsible for the selection of architects and designers and the delivery of their work to their constituents. In most cases, it appears, their metrics and their own approach to their “customers,” the people who will use the space, remains in the “push,” or control, mode of service delivery – “Here, use this space.”

As we’ve noted elsewhere, in between a business and its customers is this space where its people work. Overcoming culture and paradigms of practice to make the connection between purpose and place, never easy, seems more difficult in times of reduced resources, times when it seems the pursuit is more critical. We’ve reignited some thinking we’ve done about “creation spaces” in the past and are beginning to think about independent development as a means to prototype a model and prove our thinking.

Monday, July 12, 2010 at 10:34 am

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July 9, 2010 – Sustainability, ethics, and the RFP

We’ve been after a major project for a while. We have now, however, entered that silent period that is usually the signal that there is negotiation taking place with a preferred or selected firm, and sometime soon we will receive the news that we were not selected.

I’ll be disappointed if this is the case, of course. My disappointment, however, will not come from the deflation of not being considered “pretty” enough, nor from the anxiety of not having the business in a time in which business is so difficult to get. I’ll be disappointed because we felt we understood this client and their needs very well, and were comfortable that we were truly differentiated in this respect.

We had developed an approach to the project that was based on research and that uncovered the client’s deeply held values that had gone unexpressed in their RFP. We believe that our approach would not just yield a great project, but lead to the development of a “technology,” of sorts, a body of knowledge that would resonate both for the client and for us in all of our and their subsequent work. The opportunity was to use this project as the device to research, develop, test and prove a set of values for workplace design that would align physical space concepts with human performance in ways that have only been speculated on in the past, and rarely, if ever, thoughtfully applied in mainstream practice. We would be bringing concepts from the edge to the core that would not only enrich this project but enhance and enrich the voice of influence of this client in a sector of great significance for them – human dynamics in the workplace.

Being on the edge of a loss has me reflecting on the process that seems to characterize almost every project we are invited to propose on. A need is identified somewhere in the organization and is passed to a corporate facilities or real estate function of the CFO’s office to develop and implement. An outside consultant is engaged, usually a real estate broker or property manager who has some touch on the organization’s facilities, who then develops an RFP to solicit proposals from architects and designers. The RFP may contain some hints to larger organizational purpose, but usually only in physical planning terms and usually very tactical in scope. In this case, the request was for a design “refresh” for a small segment of the organization, with some implication of its use as a pilot project for eventual application across the enterprise. As is typical in these RFP’s, there is a request for a variety of information about the proposing firm and its approach to the project, but the real focus is on the proposed fee.

Nowhere in the RFP is there mention of a number of other considerations that to us were core concerns. The segment of the organization that the project addressed is a group that occupies only 10% of the space of the organization, but delivers more than 60% of its revenue. The current offices are among the most antique I’ve ever been in, and certainly inappropriate not only for the type of organization, but also for the type of work being done here and the types of people engaged in this work. The mean age of the staff in the group is well over 50 years old in a type of occupation that has skewed much younger in the occupation overall, and in an organization where new research and practice is the source of relevancy and influence. It would be impossible to recruit a younger generation to the type of space currently occupied by this group.

Most importantly, this organization sees itself as  promoting knowledge and methods to facilitate the resolution of personal, societal and global challenges in diverse, multicultural and international contexts, yet none of any of this is in any way directly, indirectly, or by implication, visible in the current workplace. In addition, the organization has a core component that has established a scientific link between employee health and well-being and organizational performance, yet nothing of what we know of healthy workplace design concepts is in place here, nor was anything of this subject requested in the RFP.

This failure to link organizational purpose and mission to the planning and design of the workplace seems to me to be a source of extraordinary waste, in opportunity, in resource use, in performance. I’ve begun to think a bit more about how to move practice in a more fruitful direction, like these small steps, but remain deeply concerned that the disciplines and metrics associated with projects delivering place and space consistently shape an inaccurate message and deliver inadequate results.

We’ve come to think of sustainability in broad terms, and certainly as ethical practice. RFP’s like this one, where selection is being made on the basis of inadequately defined problems and metrics cannot yield a project that is truly sustainable nor contribute to the sustainability of the organization or the people it serves. How can this sense of ethical practice be brought to the RFP shaping practice? Who are the types of people and what are the types of conversations that need to take place to assure practice in this form? How does an organization in the throes of developing a physical space project come to think of resources in broader terms than with conventional and limited metrics of cost? How can the productive capacity of an organization be made more integral in the development of project criteria?

Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 7:40 am

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Week 15 | Eastern tour

We spent the past couple of weeks in visits to several cities in the Northeast. Our objectives were to meet with some very interesting people doing great work in those places and to see how our work intersected with theirs.

We were impressed, despite the press reporting a turning in the economy, that everybody we spoke with was still greatly concerned and significantly affected by the economy. We’ve tended to look out from the black hole of the Great Lakes economy and imagine that everything is better in other places. Well, it is, but not in the much better way that we’d thought.

Among the impacts of this condition is certainly the fact that all are operating with considerably smaller teams and with a significantly narrower spectrum of work. They are dealing with conditions of surprisingly diminished differentiation and dramatically increased competition. In these markets, former brackets of firm size and project scale no longer apply as even the biggest firms are after any available work.

The strategies for dealing with this condition vary. Some are looking to newer, more robust markets (or expected soon to be) like health care. Some are moving firmly into the implementation space, working with a smaller volume of work but providing clients with integrated approaches to reduce complexity and cost, and increase the value of the relationship. Some have considered whole new ways of doing business through unexpected partnerships, but have not yet found the path or the resources to realize the vision.

In general, it seems that all are in an expectant condition, but it was clear that each and all must get energetically moving on a plan now or risk a backslide as the economy does warm up.

Previously loyal clients are opening projects to competitive bidding. There is certainly an apparent economic incentive for this, but in a number of cases, it appeared to us that the change in the competitive landscape has opened clients to new resources they had not seen before, and even to premium services to which their budgets had not previously given them access.

We think that this may be the most dramatic impact of the recession: that creative and innovative thought leadership is moving into secondary and tertiary tiers. As the big and complex clients have collapsed and are still caught in a cost conscious mode, this may be a significantly dramatic shift for the agile and nimble companies who can capitalize on knowledge, experience and expertise that had previously been out of reach.

We also think that this is an unappreciated shift. Firms that are looking at comparative volume and costs associated with the practice of the past generation are missing a tremendous opportunity. The knowledge gained by these firms, now applied to emerging energetic, motivated, agile, and clever clients can provide a rich resource for creativity, contribution and growth.

In this spirit, an unexpected delight in the trip was moving through a landscape coming into Springtime.