Author Archives: Peter Briggs

The Sudoku of Site Design

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Grading plan and sudoku comparison by Kristina Zalite

Grading plan and sudoku comparison by Kristina Zalite

A friend posted a grading plan on facebook and commented: “If you love sudoku and you are wanting a creative career, consider landscape architecture because site grading is real-life sudoku (with real life consequences).”

If you’ve played sudoku (or created grading plans), that’s about the best comparison I’ve seen. It also underlies how reliant on three dimensional problem solving landscape architecture is. You know where you’re starting (bottom of a hill), you know your destination (top of a hill), and you either brute force your way through solutions (trying different combinations until it works) or you have developed strategies that reduce (but don’t eliminate) the variations that you use.

This will resonate with anyone who has ever done a grading plan, and even more-so for those grading plans where you have multiple starting and ending points and you need to connect them to meet accessibility needs. For those of you that haven’t done this exercise… imagine a three dimensional sudoku game. It’s not a 3×3 grid, but a 3x3x3 grid. That’s what we’re solving on a complicated site. [ED: I’m also hoping you take a bit of pity on us… this stuff can boggle the mind.]

You also have to keep track of your solution iterations, and make tough choices on which ones are better than others as you assemble them into a cohesive plan. Balancing access, constructability, cost, aesthetics and client opinion… and what the architect is pushing for to blend with their thoughts, and the civil engineer is pushing for in their approach. Imagine playing sudoku where you have the pen, but it’s a bunch of people around you telling you how to do it.

So… landscape architecture is about aesthetics and design, but it also involves us trying to find the simplest and most graceful solution to complex puzzles under the pressure of countless variables that should be considered. When most people think of what we do, they think of planting plans. The reality is that math and strategic problem solving and client/team management are likely closer to our reality.

[ED: I love brilliant flashes of the obvious and things that help me understand (and describe) my world better. Thank you Kristina for this lovely revelation.]

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About the Author: Peter Briggs is a landscape architect who has a current preoccupation with the business of design. For more bio information, please see: www.highestexpertise.com/who-is-peter/

“Thank You” as a Part of Your Brand

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image Thomas Leuthard https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ cropped from original

image Thomas Leuthard https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ cropped from original

Feeling Good About Ourselves

When was the last time that you received a hand-written note or card, where the sentiment was crafted by someone other than Hallmark? When was the last time that someone stopped to offer genuine thanks for something you did?

We often don’t remember the power of taking a few minutes of time to reach out to someone to thank them, compliment them, or otherwise add value to their lives.

When we take the time to reach out, we have the opportunity to reinforce the good that we see. When you are thanked for something you’ve done, you are more likely to do it again.

Building Your Brand

You want to be the person who is known as thoughtful. Your company/department should be remembered as having thoughtful staff. Instituting a ‘culture of thanks’ takes a little effort and support. By doing this, you reinforce your brand and create a positive atmosphere surrounding how people perceive you.

Case Study

We decided that we wanted to celebrate thanking people, make it was easy as we could, and to integrate it closely into our brand.

  • Step 1: What form would it take?
    • We like getting thank you cards, so we decided that having thank you cards on hand would be great.
  • Step 2: How does it reinforce our brand?
    • We are designers, so we wanted our card to emphasize our personality and ability:
      • Brand: With a raven as our logo, we already had a strong visual identity that we could draw upon.
      • Story: One of the reasons we chose our logo was that many cultures have stories revolving around Raven.
      • Approach: We wanted the card to be interactive so that not only would they get a thank you, they would spend a little time experiencing our card.
  • Step 3: A card.
    • Our card comes to you in a square envelope (with lots of stamps… more on that later).
    • You open it, and there is a round card  with a grommet in the center. It spins!
    • You notice that when you spin it, it shows you a word in a language that isn’t English and tells you what the language is.
    • You spin it some more, and you see that they’re mostly Native Alaskan languages, with some other languages commonly spoken in Alaska as well.
    • When you get to ‘English’, you see that the word is ‘Raven’
    • When you turn the card over, there’s a message from one of us to you.
  • Step 4: The psychology.
    • We hope that you are happy we’ve reached out to you to say something.
      • We’re trying to build and reinforce a relationship with you. We value you.
    • We hope that you see the card as something cool, and because it has a purpose/value, something you might keep.
      • You may show it to others, and expose them to our brand.
  • Step 5: Implementation
    • We have cards, envelopes and postage handy at all times.
    • We encourage staff to send these cards whenever they have an interaction that would benefit from a thank you.
    • We remind people that this includes all people, from the CAD tech who sent us a file to the Principal we had lunch with.
    • We keep a record of to whom they’ve been sent.
    • We also have Corvus Design Stickers, so we usually put one in the envelope. Everyone likes stickers, or knows someone young who does.
  • Step 6: Lessons Learned
    • We’re super excited when we go into an office and see our card on a cubicle wall. Success!
    • There are people we’d like to thank more than once, and this card would have minimal impact a second time. So, worked with a photographer to do a set of cards with winter, spring, summer and fall photos of ravens. Now we have the option of five fresh cards to send to any given person.
    • As an interesting “unintentional consequence”, we chose square envelopes because they are cool, and are perfect for a round card. Little did we know that the postal service charges $0.21 extra for square envelopes for special handling.
    • There are so many good times to earnestly thank someone. It’s a meaningful exercise for us to stop, and think about who we’d like to thank.

The Card

It’s hard to convey the card in a photo since it’s interactive, but here it is along with the sticker we include, and our branded USB drive. The USB drive is also a bottle opener, which aligns with our desire that people interact with our freebies. It’s also fun to hand to someone and say, “It holds memory… but helps you forget.”

Corvus Design Circular Raven Card, Bottle Opener USB Drive, and Logo Sticker

Corvus Design Circular Raven Card, Bottle Opener USB Drive, and Logo Sticker

What Value Will You Leave Behind?

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construction

This might be the best interview question to ask someone: if you leave us, what value will you have left behind? People move on to bigger and better things, and at some point will leave your company. The true test of how good an employee was is what value they created in your company, and successfully left behind for the company to use.

Interview advice always includes researching an employer and showing interest in them. Taking this a step further is showing a company that you have the initiative to not only do your job, but to make your employer better. It’s an active realization that companies don’t just need workers, they need people who understand the company’s mission and want to take it someplace. Employee initiative builds on the foundation of a business plan, and begins to create a place that is not just the owner’s vision… but a collective vision.

If the right employees are hired, and they are actively engaged in building such value, a real benefit is that they will be less likely to leave a company (except for bigger and better things). It creates a collective agreement that all parties are invested in one another. ‘Collective’ is an important part of that statement. It leads to the fact that the question that started this post has an equally important question the potential hire must ask: How does your company enable employees to build long-term value within it?

It’s a partnership.

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About the Author: Peter Briggs is a landscape architect who has a current preoccupation with the business of design. For more bio information, please see: www.highestexpertise.com/who-is-peter/

Free Energy For All

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tesla

I’m fascinated by the concept of think tanks. I have this vision of one of those sci-fi war rooms with glass partitions that people draw and write on to illustrate their ideas for how to stop that asteroid from destroying the earth. It’s a room of highly (dys)functional people (the ‘dys’ part for Hollywood effect… and some reality likely). All of the stereotypical movie characters are there: thinker, firebrand, action guy, lone wolf, leader, genius, wisdom. There are sparks, conflict and… alignment (usually based in an achieved grudging respect). It’s a boiling pot of intersection chaos that slowly takes form and aligns with more and more clarity. Brainstorm.

My wife asked me what my dream job would be. My response was to be with a group of people operating at their highest level of expertise. The intent of this is to work at that tension point where you have a room brimming with skill and experience, and you can achieve the cold fusion of ideas from the future.

Talking about cold fusion… where do you get your energy?

Batteries on Samsung phones have been combusting. Things might look normal, but then a bunch of protons and neutrons get excited and can’t control themselves. Boom. Burnout. The goal for a battery is to have controlled chemical reactions that release energy as needed, not less than nor more than what you need. When the battery gets low, it gets plugged in and replenished. Eventually it wears down for that graceful slide into being replaced.

We all need to have an idea about how our batteries work. How much energy can they produce? How sustainably? What peak demand can we exert on them? How do we recharge them?

I asked a friend the other night where he gets his energy from. He spoke for a while, and I needed to laugh since I realized that his response was effectively “cold fusion”. His energy comes from ideas and the opportunities that have not yet materialized. His energy comes from future possibility. He’s drawing from the future to power the present.

How do you draw from the future? The future exists purely as an idea. In order to draw from that energy, you need to be a broker or participant in the realm of ideas. There are some among us that are visionaries who have a direct connection to this, but for the majority of us… the energy that the future provides requires a chemical reaction in the present.

A chemical reaction requires something precipitating change. My friend has placed himself in a position where he has access to people and the ideas that they bring. Another way to look at this is that change occurs when two things intersect. When we optimize our ability to harness intersections, then we can begin to direct and manage change, and the intellectual result is the ability to harness ideas.

So, he harvests the energy of ideas. Conscious or subconscious, he’s not fully drawing power from the land of the future. He’s tending a farm of potential intersections where each collision creates sparks. His excitement and drive come from a knowledge that some of these sparks can then be grown into something more. His energy comes from interacting with people who also align themselves with ideas and the potential for change. It’s a bit vampiric feeding on this energy created by those around you, but… we all find our ways to contribute. Or, just get to be lucky to be along for the ride?

Where do I get my energy? Some intrinsic instinct to try to make sparks.

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About the Author: Peter Briggs is a landscape architect who has a current preoccupation with the business of design. For more bio information, please see: www.highestexpertise.com/who-is-peter/

Design: What Are You Buying?

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My ultimate goal in these posts is to try to provide concrete ideas and actions. A previous post (The Beauty of Being a Hack) was more along the lines of musing, but a few minutes after I posted it I realized one of the more concrete things to which it might lead: you get what you pay for. [brilliant flash of the obvious!]

One of the tangents in the post was that I’m in a creative profession, but as a landscape architect much of our work relates to function. When we are scoping new projects, I usually have two very important questions:

  • For the client’s aesthetic, how ‘high’ of a level do they want? (I see the simpler version of this now which is, “How much design/art do they want?”
  • How linear do you expect the project to be? (I see the simpler version of this now is, “How actively will we have to manage the process to keep it on track?”

We work in a city with a landscape ordinance. At the simplest, our projects provide a client with a landscape that meets local requirements. We have systems in place for this that allow us to do it quite efficiently, and we have the design experience to add some flair within it as well. These projects can be super linear, without the intricacies of reflecting a higher design aesthetic. We can be confident in providing a very reasonable fee.

BUT… realize that you are hiring us for our project management capabilities. We have an agreement based on the very high level of knowns required for that very reasonable fee. You are not hiring us as designers/artists. Luckily, that’s what you generally DON’T want for this particular scenario. You’re looking for fact and a successful permit, not design and opinion.

When we are approached as designers, the interesting by-product is that we need to provide an even higher level of project management services. Design is incredibly messy and opinion-based, and takes significant time and effort to create what might seem to be a linear design process. The fees will be higher.

A small fee indicates a discrete and known task. A less discrete and less known task has a higher fee. All of the above is logical and sets the stage for the conclusion of this post. The above has a foundation of us wanting to deliver an optimized client value. Our goal is to find the fee where the client gets best value in our market, and to have our internal processes where for this fee we make money.

So… as a client there is the spectrum between frugal and patron. Reasonable frugality gets good value that leans toward the sparse. The emphasis on control in this relationship lies with us. A frugal client will always hope for more scope for less, and we are in control of what we deliver. My interest is in the concept of patron. The emphasis on control in this relationship is the patron. They need to determine the level of patronage that gives them their desired return on investment. There WILL be a point where the value of patronage is optimized, and beyond which will have no benefit… if not beginning to result in negatives.

The tongue-in-cheek point of the above. Pay us little and you get exactly what you pay for. Pay us more and you get what you pay for, but you do place some more control in our court to exceed your expectations. Pay us a lot, you might just make us lazy.

 

Beyond the humor intended within this, the summary point is: As creative design professionals (a licensed profession), your fee always gets you a high level of project management to ensure that we meet your expectations. We will be very careful about setting good expectations (which takes a high level of effort for small fees, disproportionate). To enable us as creative designers, we need to be compensated. We are fair in our approach, and our goal is to find the right level of value for you. With the right fee, you will engage us in a manner that you may just get more than you pay for… that’s the beauty of creatives. We develop new and unique things that sometimes deliver much more than what they cost.

Endnote: If you see us driving an Audi… it’s because we eat ramen for lunch. =)

Endnote Two: I drive a 1998 Ford Bronco II… because I grow attached to things… and it has an awesome turning radii for city driving. And I’m frugal. And I like to fix things.

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About the Author: Peter Briggs is a landscape architect who has a current preoccupation with the business of design. For more bio information, please see: www.highestexpertise.com/who-is-peter/

This blog post was originally posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/design-what-you-buying-peter-briggs?published=t

Pokemon Go for Professionals

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Coloring Book

Coloring Book! Creative Commons Copyright Elizabeth Albert https://www.flickr.com/photos/elizabeth_albert/5027163965 edited for size and to remove name on drawing

If you haven’t played Pokemon Go yet, you might be making a mistake. Especially if you are a design professional. Even more especially if you ever deal with the planning and design of people’s environments.

When was the last time you explored where you live with a fresh set of eyes? I know I stopped exploring  where I live years ago. By explore, I mean wandering around like I would when I’m a traveler in a new city. My lack of exploration of my home is in part because I’m goal driven, and I haven’t set goals that relate to wandering around and (re)experiencing the world immediately around me.

I typically explore when I hear of a new restaurant or destination, when we have guests in town, or during that rare instance when we choose to get out and do something we normally wouldn’t do. Like play Pokemon Go downtown.

Humans like reward. That’s why the concept of gamification can be quite successful. Pokemon Go is fascinating in that as the first truly successful augmented reality effort, it’s turned the world around us into a game’s playing surface. There are now new rewards for people to walk around and explore their environments. As a design professional, if you don’t understand and ‘get’ what this means… you’re doing yourself a disservice.

I’ve been playing Pokemon Go distractedly since shortly after it was launched. My wife loaded it onto her phone recently. We decided to go downtown yesterday and enjoy wandering around as we played the game. We drove and parked on the edge of our city center, and started walking. We developed a system for how we’d order our meandering:

  • Walk up and down the streets.
  • Within each block, we’d go to the Pokestops and try to avoid looking too nerdy.
  • We’d be unable to look anything but nerdy when we encountered Pokemon that we would then need to trap in a Pokeball. (swiping fingers on our screens)
  • We would linger at any Pokestop that had a lure activated, hopefully having it coincide with a beer and some food.

Many of the Pokestops in downtown Anchorage seem to be focused on art. We stopped a few places in the museum’s garden, and realized that we hadn’t been there in a long time. We took a bit of time to enjoy, and get some pleasure in seeing the work of friends. Around downtown, we found pokestops for art that we didn’t know existed. We walked places that we might never have walked. We looked at buildings and spaces, and learned the name for art where we have not known the name before. All the while, we had the overlay of the fun of pursuit of playing a game and the rewards within it.

KEY#1: Pokemon Go provided us with a form of tour guide that took us from place to place, with a focus on art. Since that aligns with our interests, the game provided us with a meaningful service. (note: in Hood River, Oregon… many of the pokestops focused on historic buildings.)

We stopped in for a coffee at Side Street Espresso, and as we passed Darwin’s… someone activated a lure on Darwin’s Pokestop. That drew us inside for a beer (close enough to noon to be okay).

KEY#2: Wise businesses realize that Pokemon Go exists and can be used to their benefit. We would not have stopped in at Darwin’s at that time of day if a lure hadn’t been activated. We came in, spent money on beer, and had fun.

As an augmented reality game, Pokemon Go is simplistic and in an infancy of potentials. As someone who works with urban design and planning (with a goal of engaging people into their environments), there is a fascinating potential for delivering information and the potential for interaction. At the moment, most players use Pokemon Go to “catch ’em all”, so it’s highest cultural success is likely getting people out walking. But, what’s next?

KEY#3: We went downtown with the sole purpose of meandering and catching Pokemon. We learned some things about our city in part because of Pokestops, but more so because we actually went downtown! It took a reward to get us to do that. In the future, when augmented reality tools incorporate different levels of reward, tied to local opportunities and knowledge, then they move beyond augmented reality into integrated reality. A logical step for that would be to require interaction (knowledge or activity) to get the rewards at a Pokestop… rather than just swiping the screen.

Pokemon Go is a digital treasure hunt. A pub crawl. First Friday art walks. Any community event with the goal of offering something in return for effort. It’s just a new approach to getting people out. I find it funny that many people and professionals dismiss or even sneer at Pokemon Go… as they miss the point. The point is the opportunities that it alludes to… and… fun.

Original posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pokemon-go-professionals-peter-briggs

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About the Author: Peter Briggs is a landscape architect who has a current preoccupation with the business of design. For more bio information, please see: www.highestexpertise.com/who-is-peter/

The Line Cook Crux

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Restaurant_cook,_Seattle,_1954

Who’s your line cook?

A new friend owns some restaurants in Portland. When it comes to hiring, a challenge in that market is finding and retaining a good line cook (def’n:”Line cooks are usually responsible for prepping ingredients and assembling dishes according to restaurant recipes and specifications. Kitchens can be hot, noisy and stressful places, so you’ll need to be able to work efficiently and quickly to be successful as a line cook.”). The challenge in finding and retaining line cooks is that in most markets, the pay isn’t great and the work is hard. Those two conditions mean that it’s not necessarily an attractive position. It’s a pathway to something else inside the food industry, or a temporary stop on the way to something outside of the industry.

A dishwasher, a busser, a waiter, a manager. All positions that are somewhat formulaic and transferrable. They basically are about the successful delivery of a product. Without a product, they have no job. Who creates that product? The line cook. Hence, I find it interesting that this position is typically undervalued.

In your industry, who’s your line cook? What happens when you lose them?

The answer lies within specialization, and how an organization develops its staffing through evolution or importation. A line cook not only needs preparation and cooking skills, they need to be familiar with your recipes, imbued within your culture/brand, and have that certain zest/zeal/initiative where food gets  a bit of its magic. Whether an eye for detail, or artistry, patrons love to love their food.

Specialization. What kind of a person can step in and immediately get the job done? What proportion of the potential employee market have the ability to do this? How much training will it take?

Evolution. Do you have the ability to smoothly transition people within your organization from one position to the next? Do they have the skills and interest to do this? Do you have this person when you need them? Has someone already passed through this position and are they able to step back to it in a time of need? If they step back into this role, can they do both jobs?

Importing. Is the position one where someone can step in from outside and carry your business vision? How much training is required to provide them with the skills and knowledge they need? How much is required to invest them in your vision?

As an employee or business owner, you’ll identify with the challenges of having the right person in the right place at the right time… and the effort needed to manage doing it. The point of this post is for you to go out and find another business person to speak with. Ask them who their line cook is? What position is undervalued? What position is harder to fill than you think it should be? Then figure out why.

The restaurant owner I spoke with emphasized how important his company culture is to him. Vision/passion/brand/promise… whatever term you use, how his staff operate and interact with each other and the public is critical to him. When it comes to the ‘line cook crux’, his approach was to stop and look at the market around him. He sees it as an undervalued position, so his response is to value it through higher than industry pay… and also to value it through the culture he fosters for all of this employees. If the rarity of good line cooks is related to being undervalued… solve some of the problem by creating value.

A certain position within your company may always be a critical skill or resource. When you imbue that position with the right value, then people might seek you out, and certainly lessen the impulse to see  whether the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Once again, a brilliant flash of the obvious… but it’s a good exercise to go through to recognize that staff are your most important resource. Some are more ‘replaceable’ than others, but why put yourself in a place where you need to replace someone except when they are moving on to the next phase of their life? When your line cook goes to another company to be the same line cook there… what happened?

 

Survey Says? Fact, Value or Policy.

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1280px-Dennis_Weaver_Gene_Rayburn_Michael_Landon_Match_Game_1964-ed

Sitting down on a plane, within the first few minutes you can probably predict whether the person beside you will be an interesting conversation or not. Some never even get to the point of acknowledging your presence, and most never get past hello. Some… they really get someplace!

Fact. Value. Policy.

When supervising, a goal is to give people the framework within which they can get things done. A fantastic in-flight conversation left me with the memorable fragment that one of the keys to success in enabling people to get things done is to train them to understand whether an answer is based in fact, values or policy.

Fact.

There are such things as facts. These answers are knowledge-based, and team members should be fully comfortable in making decisions based on facts.

Value.

Some answers will lie within value calls. These answers need some more consultation, as answers that lie within values need someone that is responsible for them (and experience/wisdom is also helpful). Typically, this needs to move up the chain of command until someone not only has the power to take responsibility, but also says they will stand behind it.

Policy.

A form of value, this one becomes more political in that it relates to the organization surrounding you. It may differ from your values, but it follows a similar pathway where something moves up the chain until someone recognizes the grounding in policy, and approves the answer as reflecting policy.

That’s it…

I’ve made the decision that some blog posts should be short. Hopefully the above gives you something interesting to contemplate… and to make into your own thing.

The Beauty of Being a Hack

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Pinning

(Working Title: Fake it until you make it… and beyond)

Let’s assume that change is good. We’ll call it positive change. Change typically means being placed in situations that are unfamiliar. The unfamiliar has the ability to produce discomfort. Let’s introduce the concept of positive discomfort.

In order to grow, discomfort needs to be recognized as a good thing.

In conversation #8 of 100 Conversations, a goal was phrased as wanting to speak with authority about a subject. It was also phrased in wanting to get to the point of not feeling like a hack. The phrase “fake it until you make it” came to mind. I think that we have all been there, or are still there. It can take a long time until we achieve expertise (or close to it), and it sometimes takes even longer to actually realize that we’ve made it there. The trip to expertise is long and gradual, so we probably carry the feeling of being a hack with us beyond when we could have left it behind.

So, we get to a point where we have the tools and skills to deal with the majority of what we encounter. Things become more static, and there is a resultant decrease in discomfort. Well… in theory. The truth is that we find ourselves opening doors to new opportunity for new experiences, and the accompanying ability to be a hack again. This time you get to be an experienced hack rather than a freshman hack. Reassuring, right?

[I’m going to try a new thing in my blog posts. You’ve just reached the first point that I’d like to make: we do fake it until we make it, and then keep on faking it BUT in a more controlled/experienced manner. It’s normal. You can head on over to People magazine now, or continue on for an expansion of this reassurance.]

There is truth in this ever renewed hackdom. Most of us seek to develop a core expertise, and then we build upon it or expand it in new ways. When my work is directly related to my company’s mission statement, I am a landscape architect and apply that skillset for our clients. The episodes of truly being a hack relate to major chapters in our lives. I can be a landscape architect with my eyes closed, but when it comes to the current chapter where I’m the guy running the company? That’s where my discomfort lies. That’s my current chapter. These chapters take the form of receiving a big promotion, moving to a new company, changing careers, having a kid, etc…

The conversation that spurred this blog post was with an artist. And, my brain is finding some challenge with processing where it wants to go within this discussion. Let’s assume that success is predicated on having a specific set of skills to apply to a specific set of problems. Most careers are based on someone approaching us for a specific expected outcome. What happens when the specific expected outcome IS being new and different?

We look to artists to provide us with things of aesthetic beauty (which is in the eye of the beholder), but we also sometimes seek a deeper need to have them connect us to new ways of looking at our world. The easiest “specific expected outcome” for an artist is to provide us with something of beauty. An artist can achieve an expertise and spend their life creating the things of beauty that we surround ourselves with. This can be their career.

If their artistic identity is grounded within a higher level of engaging an audience with ways of looking at the world, then comfort is a stale sign. Positive discomfort is the indicator that they are in the place that they should be. The level of discomfort probably being directly proportional to whether growth is incremental, or a massive shift. My empathy for artists is huge. “Success” is grounded within finding popularity. The majority of people like the familiar. How many times does our culture reject the “new” that our artists create? At a concert do you shout loudest for the new songs, or the old one that you know by heart? How did you feel when Picasso entered his blue period? [you probably don’t have first-hand experience unless you’re immortal]. So not only does discomfort arise from the challenge of investigating a new approach to your art, it comes from how people will react when you change how pleasing you are to them.

As a landscape architect, I am in a design profession. We exist within a spectrum between the functional and the artistic. Technical expertise. Craft. Art. The discomfort that I experience relates to the vagaries of running a business, and trying to do new things.  We do artistic things, but are we artists? At least in my world, I don’t think we have enough discomfort to be artists. Our artistic efforts are grounded in function.

The tangent I find myself considering now in this post is how much discomfort can we accommodate? At the moment, I spend much energy on the discomfort that arises from running a business, managing clients and the challenges of communicating with all involved. I think my discomfort quota is mostly full. That (unfortunately) leaves less room to seek the discomfort of the artistic side of what we do. I think that’s typical to our world and what happens as we age and gain expertise.

This leads to the beauty of patrons. Perhaps the most important role of a patron is that they free artists from the discomfort and constraints of ‘fitting into’ society and ‘making a living’. They can focus their discomfort quota toward pursuing the change and vitality of examining (and shifting) views of the world within and around us. They gain the freedom to seek discomfort.

So, back to the concept of being a hack. Over time most of us pursue vocations or careers where we incrementally develop our knowns and the certainty that tomorrow will look mostly like today. We get better at being a hack, as the hack we were yesterday looks like the hack we’ll be tomorrow. For artists (or creatives in general), the beauty and pain of it is that they might wake up as a completely new and different hack. Perhaps yesterday provides some tools for them, but maybe not. What they carry with them as their core certainty is a desire to look at the world and show others what they see. Comfortable or not.

Well, I find myself at the concluding paragraph (and once again, it just feels like I spent hours contemplating something that is just obvious once I get to it). Most of us are like kids in a scouting program. We work within a system where each badge you get prepares you a bit more for the next one, and the sash that you wear them on illustrates your incremental momentum toward being less and less of a hack. There are those around us who just wander off into the woods alone to create their own badges. The freedom of discomfort. The perpetual hack.

State Your Assumptions

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Feynman

Positive change. How do organizations achieve it?

Part 1 – A mechanism for coordination

“Top-down” and “bottom-up” are familiar concepts for discussing where change originates within an organization. They’re based within some level of organizational hierarchy, with a simplified view being that there are two levels of power: workers and managers. The power they each possess stems from the fact that they need each other.

As an aside, this has been a very hard post to write and edit. It’s been difficult to distill into not only something of interest, but hopefully something useful. The underlying assumption I’d like you to embrace is that our goal is positive change. Let’s take this apart and agree that change is a fact of life, and that there is always room for improvement. Hence: positive change.

With the goal of positive change, success is found when both entities find agreement and are aligned in a common direction. Without alignment, change is difficult. The sheer potential for change is stymied when the groups don’t even have a mechanism in place to listen… let alone an ability to work to agreement.

Another main point I’d like to introduce is that your organization needs to be intentional with how it approaches change, and have processes in place to evaluate whether change is positive or negative. If you wish to be an advocate of positive change, you need to understand how your organization handles change.

Part 2 – Institutional limits on innovation

A concept of which I was recently made aware is that of a conversational ‘anchor’. These anchors are the biases or preconceived views that we bring with us. They anchor us to one way of thinking and as a result shape how others interact with us.

If organizationally rooted, these anchors define the ideology of an organization. If they are leadership rooted, they will have the same general effect. It’s simplistic, and it is a spectrum, but I’d like to introduce the idea that organizations are either solution-focused or ideology-focused. Either entity may have an inspirational vision of the future, an action-oriented mission to support their vision, the goals to support their mission, and the strategies to achieve their goals. But, I suggest that they differ greatly in the anchors that they carry and how they carry them. How do anchors limit positive change? I would hypothesize that the more anchors there are, the more limited an organization is in finding and implementing positive change. At its most open, an organization engages with its staff to tackle issues and develop solutions. This becomes less and less effective the more anchors that there are.

Part 3 – Assumptions vs. Premises

I don’t think there is any judgment of either organization type. Another way to view anchors is to call them assumptions. In our everyday lives (and episodes of Three’s Company), assumptions can be quite damaging because we’re not operating with all of the information. The scientific/logical approach to assumptions can be very powerful (and necessary), when we state them, recognize them and ideally confirm them. They serve the purpose of narrowing down the scope of a discussion, ideally beginning with people having agreement on the assumptions that will be made.

So… for the sake of this post, let’s say that an anchor is something subconscious (or undeclared) that we bring with us… whereas a premise is a declared assumption. A solution-focused organization is likely to be built on declared and agreed upon premises that are open to change. In other words, the organizational type predisposes itself to always questioning. Whereas, an ideology-focused organization will need to protect itself from the potential negative impacts of anchors. It is an organization that is already predisposed to a particular way of thinking. Extra effort will be required to ensure that any ideology has a solid premise, and is only applied the way that is intended to be applied.

Part 4 – Engaging the Highest Level of Expertise

Back to positive change. Each of us has our highest level of expertise. We are at our best when we focus on that, and others consult with us for our abilities. That’s where we provide our highest value, and often it provides us with happiness when we are engaged at that level. In a perfect world, that means that everyone is vested with vision and mission where they understand and support the goals and strategies. When this is the case, challenges are approached with a more comprehensive understanding… and we open an organization to an opportunity: people will offer solutions that may solve multiple problems… or… they might stop and challenge the question, helping the right question be asked.

This requires an organizational approach that is open to critical thought. This is a very simplistic discussion as it’s not as easy as saying, “you need to be solutions-based”. That could lead to amazing chaos with everyone being enabled to suddenly be philosophical. There is a hierarchical overlay of a number of levels of leadership, but the idea is to enable people to grow and initiate growth.

[As an aside, are you familiar with kaizen? A system of continuous improvement. If you’re not familiar with it, take a moment to check it out on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen). The foundation of this system is a solutions-based system where everyone is integrated meaningfully within every corner of the organization. If someone sees an opportunity to improve the organization, the systems are in place to hear them, evaluate ideas, and implement positive change.]

Part 5 – Right Person, Right Place, Right Time

Let’s also realize that an organizational challenge is to find the right place for the right employee at the right time of their career. The Peter Principle (not named after me) is summarized as being people rise to the level of their incompetence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle.  People usually receive promotions based on how well they do their current role, rather than assessing their effectiveness and skills as suited for the role they will rise into. So, you are amazing at your job and you get promotions… until you are in a role that you aren’t as good at. Then you stay there. Ideally, everyone would be at the level just below their incompetence. Easy to say. Our culture is grounded in the idea of upward mobility, and organizations and individuals aren’t good at saying when they’re in the right place.

So, a solutions-based system needs to enable all employees and ensure that the right person is in the right role at the right time in their career.

Part 6 – Bringing it home

So… I’ll pick on ideology-based systems. I’m maybe really getting into the realm of opinion and bias here, but the reason for this is to address a system that has preconceived notions. An example of this is polarized government. Investing any organization with vision and mission is a challenge, and has an inherent weakness in the face of people who aren’t integrated. If they are just ambivalent, the system rolls on with them in it (but not the better for it). If they work counter to the system, a few can severely damage the whole. Unfortunately, being an elected system, government doesn’t typically reflect an integrated system of vision, mission, goals and strategies (sadly)… people are often elected based on specific strategies or goals (election friendly soundbites). Organizational effectiveness requires a continuum, so in a system where vision/mission/goals/strategies can change drastically… long-term benefit can be crippled.

What I’m getting at in this is that a solutions-based system maintains a high level of flexibility in how to achieve a vision. An ideological based system has more constraints on how to get there. It’s the difference between trying to solve a problem with a single tool versus having a tool box. “Our mission statement guides us to use a pipe wrench,” versus “Let’s assess the problem and figure out the ideal way to solve it.”

Part 7 – Epilogue

Phew. The above was hard to write, and I’m uncertain I did a great job of leading you with where my brain was going. At the end of it, I likely just restated the obvious. I think the most important part of this is to state that to work toward positive change, we need to understand the system within which we are working. Each system can offer advantages, and it likely depends on how much of a paradigm shift is needed for the positive change that is initiated.

The point is that we recognize that we are surrounded by systems that are grounded with assumptions/premises of which we may or may not be aware. Many entities predispose themselves toward certain solutions for one reason or another. This could be politics, religion or just doing it the same way it’s always been done. My worry is that these organizations are complacent to existing within these anchors, and they become an accepted organizational mentality with unintentional (?) limitations. If an organization has been taught that direction comes from the top, it doesn’t encourage personal engagement. People begin to show up, do their job like they’ve been told, and go home.

So. Does your organization clearly state its assumptions/premises? Do they recognize that these do frame how they operate? Do they have strategies in place to ensure that these premises are used correctly and don’t influence other areas? Do they have strategies in place to ensure that these premises encourage and spur positive change around them? Can these premises be changed? And to take it back to something I asked at the beginning of this post, does your organization have a mechanism in place to genuinely listen, assess and implement?