High Performance Practice
Q1 2020 Newsletter
Coinciding with the launch of Dept. of Sustainability, I’ll be posting a quarterly newsletter on what I see as the major topics and trends in the world of architecture and sustainability. This first issue will serve as an introduction to the company and it’s a vision for the profession.
Friends & colleagues,
As many of you know, during the past year, I’ve been dipping my toes into the waters of entrepreneurship with the soft launch of ‘Dept. of Sustainability’, my new sustainable architecture consultancy. So far, the feedback that I’ve received has been positive and I’m planning to more formally launch the company in 2020. Since the current sustainability consultant eco-space is full of people who are already doing excellent work, it’s important to me to be able to offer something unique and impactful. In my search for a formula to allow every project to achieve something great, I’ve been focusing on two questions:
Why do some projects perform better than others?
Why do some firms consistently produce high performing projects?
The answers I’ve received while casually asking these questions have a similar ring: “the client wanted it”, “the project had the budget for it”, or “the firm had the resources for it”. These answers strike me as fatalistic since I know from experience that project outcomes don’t always correlate with client wishes or project budgets. My understanding is that deeper and more entrenched forces are at play and the factors that determine eventual project outcomes are often far upstream from the project itself.
These forces, the culmination of pressures, incentives, relationships, processes, and resources form an environment or “innate structure” within each architecture firm that leads to certain choices being made over others and produces predictable outcomes. From this perspective, the reason that some projects perform better than others is that they were created within a structure that’s conducive to high-performance outcomes. The structure is what determines the outcomes and so in order to change the outcome, you need to change the structure.
A firm’s innate structure develops naturally through the culmination of many actions, small and large, conscious and unconscious. The decisions that project teams make are influenced by factors including the way a firm talks about its work, the way projects and employees are evaluated, and even the precedent images that are frequently discussed. On top of this, firms have different in-house resources, levels of knowledge, skill sets, and interests, all leading to different discussions, decisions, and outcomes. Within a hierarchical framework, the way most architectural firms are organized, seemingly minor actions by those at the top send strong signals to the rest of the firm about priorities and acceptable outcomes. These signals, even when unintentional, can have a larger impact on project performance than many intentional efforts taken at the project level.
Since the factors that determine a project’s performance exist at the level of the firm, the most effective way to improve project outcomes is to design a firm structure that lays the groundwork for the best decisions to be made naturally. To help firms accomplish this, I’m proposing a framework for building such an environment. The Elements of a High Performance Practice defines a full suite of initiatives and programs that a firm can implement to guide projects towards success. Targeted, yet flexible, the elements of the framework are designed to fit within an existing structure rather than build something new and can make existing efforts more effective. Firms can initially use the framework as a diagnostic tool, to better understand their own structure and to determine what’s working, what’s missing, and what’s holding projects back.
Click for a higher resolution diagram
The High Performance Practice is based on five tiers of impacts: Vision, Culture, Process, Resources, and Strategies which are then broken down into forty distinct elements that can support projects at every level. Similar to the model of “leverage points” described by Donella Meadows, as you move up the tiers, implementation of individual elements becomes more difficult, but the impacts are far greater.
The reason for creating The Elements of a High Performance Practice framework is that when trying to “make a project more sustainable”, we almost always approach the situation in the wrong way. My intention is that this framework will help firms see sustainable design as an accessible and neatly formulaic exercise rather than an onerous and expensive abyss of unknowns. As a new year and decade open up before us, my resolution is to shift the paradigm of sustainable design from something that is fought for to something that emerges naturally once the right conditions are set in place. This proposal represents the initial step.