An artful analogy is a powerful way to connect at an emotional and rational level with your client and characterise your value. — ommunicating hard, or unfamiliar, concepts to an audience is challenging. Making the unfamiliar familiar, requires effort and skill. And often analogy will be the best way to approach the task. The art of analogy Steve Jobs was a master of analogy. It allowed him to describe new things Apple made that were unfamiliar and…

Get out of the weeds on decision making. The easiest way to make a decision is to place yourself in the position where there’s only one clear choice. — Let’s be clear, there’s always more than one choice. And for all the important decisions. The ones for important change. You should take the time to uncover and understand all the options you have. Even the seemingly crazy ones. But I’m not talking about those types of decisions.

Addressing the misconception that distributed leadership requires everyone to be equivalent and in a flat organisational structure. — Leadership is not the same as management. When leadership is conflated with management we run into problems. They’re not the same, nor should they be. Leadership is not a position it’s an action. You are not made a leader you choose to lead. Management is a position, it’s given to you.

and architects aren’t going to learn from new questions and their answers if they continue to just talk amongst themselves. — It’s astonishing the number of talks and conferences that are concertedly architects speaking amongst themselves. This isn’t to critique any particular talk, symposium or conference. …

Putting something out in the world that others might not agree with or vehemently oppose can be uncomfortable. It’s also an act of leadership. — When Construct the Pantomime hits the stage, it’s either the architect or the developer who’s the villain of the piece, depending on your perspective. Black cape, pencil moustache, creeping in from stage right to the jeers and boos of an audience taking great joy in theatrical vilification. …

8 reasons why adopting distributed leadership in an architecture practice is [not] a bad idea. And how to address the challenges. — This post was inspired by the In Detail podcast called Komrade Kate vs Captain Order. Shout out to Kate, Warwick and Mick who do an amazing job of taking us behind the scenes of small architecture practice. Discussing the challenges of practice and arguing about solutions in an informative and…

This one is personal. It’s not a story about regret but one about joy and love for speaking up. — Just after I left architecture practice to establish Unmeasured, my father died. It wasn’t unexpected. He’d been unlucky to work with asbestos early in his career before it was known how harmful it was. It finally caught up with him. Dad was outgoing, active and an extrovert who loved people…

8 reasons why adopting distributed leadership in an architecture practice is [not] a bad idea. And how to address the challenges. — This post was inspired by the In Detail podcast called Komrade Kate vs Captain Order. Shout out to Kate, Warwick and Mick who do an amazing job of taking us behind the scenes of small architecture practice. Discussing the challenges of practice and arguing about solutions in an informative and…

Leadership is a choice. How might we might we stop discouraging nascent leaders from choosing it? — Leadership isn’t for everyone. But it’s for more people than give themselves credit. And often we’re the ones stopping them from stepping up into leadership. Leadership can be uncomfortable, scary. It’s a skill that can be practised and developed and need not be fraught. Yet there’s discomfort in extending, stretching…