Commitment can be hard. Being non-committal is the reason so many people fail. How might you do more than just think about it?
A non-earth shattering confession.
In my five decades I’ve never roller skated.
My young daughter started skating this year. It’s been a good lockdown exercise. For months I’ve been contemplating joining her. Of course overcoming the inertia is hard, there’s fear too. A fear of looking ridiculous, of failure, of other people’s opinions, etc. Of course kids don’t seem to have those fears, they just commit. I needed help to commit. So I told my daughter my idea. She was enthusiastic, but still not enough to overcome my inertia. So I told a few friends. I asked one to teach…
If goals weren’t such a pain, maybe we’d achieve more.
Recently, to get out of my head in lockdown, I picked my bass guitar up to play. It had been over 7 years since I’d practiced in any reasonable way. Up until then, I had spent about 3 to 4 years learning. I’d had the idea (you might call it a goal) to have a big party for my 50th birthday and I’d play my bass. Plans changed, and the party never happened, I went to Burning Man instead and helped build a temple — admittedly it was another pretty…
Working remotely is not the same process as working in an office. Nor should it be. So how might architects do remote work differently?
When confronted with change the tendency is to try and rebalance and find a way to revert to the status quo. When everyone was forced to move home to do their work, the reflex was to find a new way to continue working the way people always had. With people telling themselves a story that the way they worked previously was superior. Instead they could have put their energy into new and better ways to do their work.
There is no right way to work remotely. Just new and different ways. The trick is to treat it as an iterative…
Architects are more than designers and it’s essential for architects to embrace this. Here’s why…
I’ve previously written about why architecture is more than design. My original article here, Architects, Not Just a Matter of Good Design and has been one of my most popular. I later added a couple of paragraphs and tidied it for The Architecture Bulletin. It focuses on the importance of recognising that architects do more than design because of the value of that story to clients and potential clients. In this post I’m interested in the story architects tell themselves, why it’s important to consider and why they should identify as more than a designer.
I’ve recently been teaching in…
Standing for something builds respect, identity and confidence. It’s also the most effective way to create lasting change in the world.
We all know social media is a bin fire of opinions and reactionary posting. I’m nevertheless curious about what percentage of posts stand in favour of something rather than against something. One is constructive whilst the other is destructive. I start here not in an interest in social media but to pull a thread from a previous post, Architects finding their seat at the table. The thread, Stand for something, not against something.
Before pulling that thread, I need to go on a brief tangent to note the challenges of overcoming the negative. Humans have a predisposition to focus on…
In order to make change happen sometimes, instead of driving it, we simply need to be vulnerable, modelling it for others to follow. This is the action of a leader.
Today I was witness to an act of generous leadership by architect Stephen Collier, speaking about his struggle with mental health issues. He stood in front of a “virtual” room of architects and publicly shared these challenges for the first time. It was moving, powerful and incredibly insightful. I learnt more in those 15 minutes than I had from numerous articles I’d read and impersonal talks I’d heard.
It took an act of great vulnerability to do this. He has lead example, and in doing so encouraged others to also share, giving them implied permission to follow. He’s made it…
If you’re not taking the time to ask hard questions of your practice and answering them, you’re probably not advancing your practice.
One of the hard unspoken and neglected parts of architectural practice is challenging the way we do things and the assumptions that accompany this disregard. This happens for a number of reasons. It might be that if the practice is going well there may be no need to challenge your practice. Practice success may be due to luck, hiding unchallenged thinking, or indeed you might have a well honed practice. The thing is, how do you know whether your practice is lucky or well designed unless you ask questions and identify areas that might need to be rethought? Is your…
No matter what anyone tells you, book covers and first impressions matter. We can nevertheless reframe their importance.
Last week I wrote a blog post I had titled What architects can learn from super heroes. It’s a reasonable post, perhaps not my best but certainly not my worst. Very few people read it. That wasn’t because it wasn’t good and they didn’t like it, it was because they didn’t even visit the post’s page in the first place. It’s likely that there are some people that had read previous posts of mine and simply aren’t interested in what I have to say and that’s fine. The issue is that those that might normally read what I have to…
Our identities are often tied up with our way of thinking. By rethinking our identities we begin to overcome habitual thinking that might be holding us back.
“Our ways of thinking become habits that can weigh us down, and we don’t question them until it’s too late.” — Adam Grant
Our ways of thinking are tied up with how we perceive ourselves and what we do. They’re part of our identity. It’s uncomfortable discarding one part or other of your identity, your way of thinking. It might challenge what you do, why and how you do it. You might ask, what fills the void left by shedding a part of your thinking? …
Change can be gradual or sudden. It is inevitable. So there’s a choice for architectural practice, be forced to change by the context in which you practice or choose to change into the practice you’d like to be.
There’s an old saying that change happens when the pain of changing is less than the pain of staying the same. I think that’s true, I also think that it’s not the only reason change happens. It can be motivated by ambition, a desire to be better or do better.
Change might relieve pain points or be driven by ambition. It’s aspirin v aspiration and a choice to be reactive or proactive.
Architects are paid to think in the service of others — creatively, critically, analytically, systemically, strategically, etc. I’m curious why they often don’t take enough time to think…
