Positioning for Architecture and Design Firms

Jack Reigle

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780470918715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Berufspraxis in der Architektur

An essential guide for a firm of any size to effectively position itself in the marketplace

For an architecture or design firm to survive and prosper in the new economy, it needs to redefine and reinvigorate its position in the marketplace. With dozens of how-to cases, examples, and guidelines, Positioning for Architecture and Design Firms provides the entire menu of tools, plus the inspiration needed, for making the changes required to stay competitive in the design world. Offering strategies for leveraging a firm's strongest assets into the formulation of a successful long-term plan, this book breaks with tradition to introduce the latest concepts specifically developed for building future business opportunities in an unstable economic landscape marked by shifts in competition, technology, and client expectations.

With a wealth of information targeting the subject of positioning, readers will learn:

• Why the aftershocks of the Great Recession are likely to linger, and what you can do about it in relation to your firm's success
  
  

• How the coming generational shift will change the design business
  
  

• What positioning is, and how it needs to be developed to support and implement your strategic vision
  
  

• How your firm can establish a robust identity and operating model
  
  

• The importance of your firm's essential purpose
  
  

• How to turn your marketing department into a true marketing system, transforming it from production mode into an integrated positioning machine
  
  

• Why it is important to engage in advanced research and open innovation initiatives
  
  

Addressing issues of firm identity, including an understanding of how to create the market positioning desired, Positioning for Architecture and Design Firms shows how a design firm—large or small, new or well established—can position itself to gain greater control over its destiny, and reach loftier levels of achievement.

• Learn about firm types, and match the right type to a firm's goals
  
  

• Develop and maintain a firm's identity in the marketplace
  
  

• Discover how organizational design and marketing support a chosen firm type
  
  

Chapter 1

Future Tense

THE BIG SHIFT

One way to view the events of the past few years is to recognize that the future is now upon us. It’s a bit more uncertain than we expected. “Future tense” means that the next 10 years will deliver more larger-than-life anxieties, significant changes, surprises, and sharp edges than we’ve been used to. The era of normal is over. And despite all the talk about a “new normal,” it will take a while to arrive. The United States, along with most of the civilized world, has undergone a system failure unfamiliar to all but those of quite advanced age and scientifically improbable memories. The list of culprits has now become familiar: global climate change, terrorism, economic excess, federal debt burdens, the opacity of the bond markets, demographic shifts, and the sense that these disasters are bearing down on us all at once. Few industries and professions are flourishing, and many are braced for aftershocks that are yet to arrive.

As this wave has washed over us, many thinkers and theorists have weighed in on what it is, what it means, and how we should plan for the future. Looming larger than most among this group is a team from the Deloitte Center for the Edge (DCE), a division of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison (we’ll call them HBD), who lead the enterprise, are prolific authors, bloggers, and speakers exploring this new territory of what they call the Big Shift. DCE conducts original research and develops substantive points of view for new corporate growth. Its aim is to help senior executives make sense of and profit from emerging opportunities on the edge of business and technology. The Center focuses on the boundary, or edge, of the global business environment, where strategic opportunity is the highest. From a business perspective, the philosophies espoused by the HBD trio include embracing the opportunity offered by the evolving environment, increasing the speed of learning, acting boldly to seize the moment, and accepting an overarching goal of changing the world. As indicated by the group’s name, the concept of “the edge” is important to think about. As new patterns emerge from the chaos, edges are the areas of high potential—for the economy, for professions, and for individuals. Emerging economies form a geographic edge, as do new generations of people. Technology has an edge, perhaps best identified by new, rapidly growing social media tools and connections. The “core,” in contrast, is where the financial power and other resources reside. This includes the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe from the geographical perspective, and the aging Boomer population from a demographic point of view. At the firm level, the core is the accumulative value in the marketplace represented by experience, capabilities, and main revenue sources. For individuals, the core is primarily represented by personal and professional relationships.

According to HBD, the patterns that begin to be recognizable as change occurs are those where “the edge transforms the core.” Edge-dwellers tend to be explorers and risk takers who band together with other like-minded thinkers and doers. There is more willingness to share information and insights with others out on the edge. Yet there is initially a limited inertia within the edge, because mature, traditional institutions are in the core and maintain control over resources, customers, and profits. The edge and core have a strong need to reach out and connect, yet many barriers prevent this from happening easily and efficiently. One provocative thought brought forward by HBD reverses the common approach of disruption theory, which would say that in order to participate in this overall dynamic, a firm would bring the edge to the core. Instead, they suggest bringing the core to the edge, exposing your organization to innovations, new management practices, and new tools that emerge on that edge. Of course, choosing the edges to participate in, to invest in, and ultimately to use to transform your business is the big decision. Each firm needs to spend time deciding which edges represent a potentially new platform that, over time, could be utilized to design and implement new initiatives. From a design industry perspective, a few edges are already visible. Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) represents a significant shift for many firms, and when pursued to its highest form, transforms the client experience and the whole of project performance. Building Information Modeling (BIM) holds the same promise, and is gaining more traction every year. Social media growth among design firms, although generally lagging behind that of other industries, is also gaining significant acceptance that should accelerate rapidly as the new decade unfolds.

These three edges are already visible and moving ahead within the design industry, but others are out there and deserve exploration. Within the sustainability movement, these may take the form of diverse collaborative teams seeking to innovate for new materials, develop more effective building products, or research new methodologies for tracking and measuring building performance.

With all this progress on edge-related thinking, some readers may believe that the job’s done, but that thought is a dangerous one. The speed and quality of implementation mean everything to IPD and BIM. A firm that installs a new system but doesn’t utilize it to its fullest, or collaborate with forward-thinking partners, will remain in the back of the pack as the edge takes over. Those who do no more than act as if they’re on track with these innovations are trying to bring the edge to the core, where it can easily be smothered by institutionalized traditions and processes, the firm’s essential inertia. Leaders must think hard about these dynamics, see the shifts taking place in their markets, and decide which platforms to develop for a future with the promise of new opportunities. Sometime this decade, the wheat and the chaff will be separated, the winners and the laggards easier to identify. A strong positioning program, in addition to an unambiguous long-term strategy, is critical to the future of successful firms. Multiple systems and platforms will need to be identified, developed, and adjusted. Old platforms will need to be transitioned out, converted, or shrunken to make space for the maturing edge systems and processes. The real power of the new ideas taking shape will be shown by how much muscle they provide us for escaping the old ideas that will be left behind as the Big Shift continues.

In their white paper called The Big Shift: Why It Matters, HBD discuss the intensified competitive pressures that firms have experienced over recent decades. Returns on assets for U.S. firms have steadily eroded, falling to almost one-quarter of 1965 levels. Big companies are losing their leadership positions at a higher rate, and their replacements at the top occupy increasingly precarious positions. Customer and client disloyalty has increased their power, creating more uncertainty and instability. The digital infrastructure has seen massive gains in price/performance capability as increases in computing, data storage, and bandwidth drive an adoption rate that is multiple times faster than that of previous infrastructures. These factors will continue to put performance pressure on all parts of the economy, potentially maintaining the downward trend in overall performance. This dynamic demands a shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning. Scalable learning requires that firms find ways to unleash the creative potential of their entire workforce, and partner with firms interested in doing the same. It requires the pursuit of knowledge flows, as opposed to stocks of knowledge. As the world speeds up, stocks of knowledge depreciate at a faster rate. Product life cycles shorten dramatically, and new learning demands appear as soon as the current demand has been met. Participating in and benefiting from flows require more focus on “know how” than on “know what.” Taking knowledge from a source without contributing knowledge will cause takers to be marginalized. Firms need to find and create new knowledge flow networks and economic webs that will reduce risk while enhancing learning and creating value.

Making these connections is the first order of business for making progress through the growing power of “pull.” Pull platforms (Figure 1.1) help us make more flexible connections with people and resources in order to maximize our performance potential.

Figure 1.1 The three levels of the pull platform describe our mobilization in the new era. “Access” means reaching out; “attract” denotes connecting with the resources we need; “potential” represents how this process will help us meet our individual aspirations and goal. (Adapted from the writings of Hagel, Brown & Davison of DCE)

Access is defined as the ability to find, learn about, and connect with resources as needed to fill unanticipated needs. In the Big Shift, this capability becomes increasingly central to our survival and a prerequisite for our success, according to HBD. The world is moving from top-down, hierarchical push techniques to bottom-up, collaborative approaches emphasizing learning over efficiency and talent over routine organizational processes. Search engines and business networking tools such as LinkedIn represent basic examples of access tools. When organized correctly, these tools aggregate resources across many thousands or even millions of people. The second level of pull, attract, is a more serendipitous process than searching and making deliberate connections. The overall landscape of social networks represents a growing opportunity to shape serendipity, increasing the probability and quality of chance encounters that offer people and resources you actually didn’t know you were looking for. The third level of pull is achieving our potential, the ability to capture the insights and performance we need in order to move faster and learn faster by working with others. Moving up this collaboration curve requires broader and deeper commitments than those associated only with individual projects.

Central to reversing the decrease in performance and returns is the building of the plan your firm needs to harness the power of these pull dynamics. It starts with paying attention to individual catalysts in your organization, then proceeds with the steady, deliberate construction of a new platform to expand from nascent ideas to strong positioning for the firm, as the Big Shift continues to unfold. Expectations that this disruption will end soon should be discounted. The quick arrival at a new resting point, allowing for a stable business environment, is unlikely. We have entered a lengthy era of instability that requires our greatest skills to convert threats into opportunities, and edge ideas into core components.

Although various aspects of these trends and potential solutions apply to the design profession, also think about how they affect the markets and clients you serve. What pressures can your firm help them address through design, innovation, and improved project control and delivery? What decisions do you need to make to meet their emerging demands with more powerful tools and approaches to problem solving? Answers developed through a new lens will be required to meet the complex challenges of today and those just around the bend.

THE FOURTH TURNING

Also high on the list of thinkers speaking to us as we enter this unfamiliar terrain is a duo of historian-writers, William Strauss and Neil Howe, who have authored a series of seminal books relating to the cyclical nature of generational experiences and influences. Within a number of their books, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584–2069 (1991), Gen X: Abort. Retry, Ignore, Fail? (1993), The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997), and Millennials Rising: The Next Generation (2000), they have defined, posited, and captured a series of prescient events and cycles that all professionals and business leaders should become familiar with. Strauss and Howe believe that history is marked by 80- to 100-year cycles that match the lifespan of most human beings. These cycles consist of generations of 20 to 25 years that show remarkable consistency over history. Of course, not everyone in every generation acts alike, but we are shaped by our joint experiences and the forces of the time period in question. According to Strauss and Howe:

Turnings last about 20 years and always arrive in the same order. Four of them make up the cycle of history, which is about the length of a human life. The first turning is a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order becomes established after the old has been dismantled. Next comes an Awakening, a time of rebellion against the now-established order, when spiritual exploration becomes the norm. Then comes an Unraveling, an increasingly troubled era of strong individualism that surmounts increasingly fragmented institutions. Last comes the Fourth Turning, and era of upheaval, a crisis in which society defines its very nature and purpose.

Looking at recent American history, our High began in 1946 with the victory in World War II. Dutiful sacrifice was made, and energy turned towards prosperity, solidarity, and stability. Our second turning, the Awakening, began in 1964, when institutions were challenged, and the quest for the greater meaning of things took hold. The fabric of American life that was constructed in the joyous postwar period was torn apart. This Awakening lasted until 1984, and the Baby Boomers became Yuppies. Thus began the Unraveling, even with the relative peace and prosperity of the times. However, what was developing underneath the good life was cultural wars, dramatic technological changes, and increased debt burdens that most never took the time to focus on, much less fix. According to the authors, the attacks of 9/11 marked the end of the Unraveling, and the beginning of the Crisis, the Fourth Turning. This would portend another 10 or more years of this crisis period before returning to the High of a first turning.

Along with the generational cycles, Strauss and Howe describe four dominant archetypes that dominate each generational phase. A summary of those archetypes and phases follows (Table 1-1); the generational descriptions are summarized in Table 1-2.

TABLE 1-1 Archetypes and Phases of Life

TABLE 1-2 Generational Turnings

As the Baby Boomer Prophets enter their elderhood during this crisis period, pragmatic Nomads replace them as their midlife responsibilities to society grow. They portend a more conservative, tougher resolve to defend society, while safeguarding the interests of the young. This is in direct contrast to their early childhood experience of being underprotected by their indulged parents. This more hardened Generation X is inheriting a world where the simple imperative is: “Society must prevail.” Given the range and depth of the current crises—environmental, fiscal, international, governmental—there will be an increased need for public consensus, aggressive approaches by ruling institutions (think of the Federal Reserve’s actions), and personal sacrifice, to find our way through.

As represented in an August 2009 New York Times article by Nicolai Ouroussoff, by the mid-1960s, the Modernist dream was in ruins, along with the belief that architecture could act as an agent of positive social change. Failed urban housing projects, government buildings without a soul, and sterile concrete plazas left the world of architecture in crisis. The argument could be made that the economic tailspin of the past few years will help architecture by putting an end to the gaudy boom of residential towers. Rents will fall, allowing a younger generation, creative and hungry, to begin a new cycle of more purposeful, human-scaled design. Who knows which direction this crisis will push/pull us in?

What is certain, however, is the importance of comprehending the generational cycles that regularly appear and, in their own way, allow us to ultimately move forward. It may not make a big difference whether this new crisis period is now 10 years along, or only began with the market turmoil in 2008. What does matter is that we take the time to view the world through this cyclical lens in order to better understand how society is likely to behave as the eras march ahead. For firms awaiting the return to normal, for those frozen with uncertainty or fear, it’s time to thaw and begin to act. For those who grasp the opportunities presented by each cycle of life and civilization, it’s time to design your firm’s place in the spectrum of solutions that will get us through the fire.

PRAGMATISM

A third element of this funnel into the future is the philosophy of pragmatism as a response to the seeking of truth. Originally developed by Charles S. Peirce, America’s original logician, pragmatism’s essential maxim is that the process of inquiry results in the product called belief, certainty, knowledge, or truth. Peirce was a contemporary of William James, America’s first great philosopher/psychologist, whose version of the pragmatic theory says that beliefs are not true until they have been made true by verification. James believed propositions become true over the long term through proving their utility in a person’s specific situation. A period of crisis such as ours today is likely to draw out attempts to determine the absolute truth about our situation and the problems that define it. However, as seen throughout history, truth is relative to the times and to the knowledge an era has gained through science and other methods. The point is that there are going to be new forces in play, as our Fourth Turning plays out. The upcoming generation will be seeking to solve problems in a more practical and realistic fashion, and judgments of the quality of the outcomes will be primarily based on what worked, not on what might have worked better under different conditions. This phenomenon tightens the gap b...