I don't usually favor the precooked methodology workshop. You've seen this before, you pay a bunch of money to go to a presentation by a renowned 'expert' (who you've never heard of) so that you can learn the guaranteed method to (pick one): lose weight, influence people, succeed in real estate, make a million dollars in just six months. To me, no matter how sophisticated the presentation, these things inevitably reek of snake oil.
To be sure, not every version of these workshops peddle fantasy- some really are well designed presentations by people who have actually done the heavy lifting in their respective fields. But even the more realistic and well designed presentations usually suffer from one big problem. They usually present a baseline scenario that differs in important ways from the one that you are usually operating in. For example, a project management workshop might utilize a given set of tools developed with a particular methodology in mind, but what it doesn't do is give you an insight on whether the tools that your own firm has developed internally are workable or flawed. So when you do get back to your own work environment, you are usually at a loss to apply the toolset you've just been learning about to the one you are already expected to use. This is why I prefer a 'coaching' model to an offsite workshop.
Ok. So now you have my take on workshops.
So here is a workshop that is one of the exceptions that prove the rule. I think its a good one for designers to look at and think about because it is about something that good designers do all the time: having a different idea.
Having a different idea is probably not sexy enough to sell well, so the smart people at Frog Design and NYU school of business have called this Crafting a Disruptive Hypothesis. Basically what they are trying to do is to look at counterintuitive design (and by design I'm including things like marketing, industrial design, product design and so on) and analyze what makes the counterintuitive design successful.
One of the things they point out that I particularly like is that a good counterintuitive design disrupts preconceived ideas about certain scenarios. So they give the example of a good restaurant. In a restaurant you would assume that you arrive and are given a copy of the menu, you choose your 3 courses and then the waiter brings you your meal. There's a certain set of assumptions about the experience, for example you are given particular choices in a particular sequence.
But what if you decide to question and up-end this sequence of choices? So what if you have 30 courses, you don't get to choose your meal and the waiter brings you the menu at the end of the meal not at the beginning? Sounds preposterous doesn't it?
In fact this is exactly the model at El-Bulli, widely considered one of the worlds best restaurants. So at El-Bulli, you show up (having made a reservation several years in advance) and are given 30 courses in a sequence that only the chef's team really knows, are feted and feasted with this amazing molecular food and then, only at the end, you are given the menu signed by chef Ferran Adria as a souvenir of your evening.
One of the few criticisms I have of the workshop is that by focusing on the disruptive hypothesis as a marketing strategy, it really diminishes the importance of intent. Intent is really a critical element in the success of the something like El-Bulli. What I mean about this is that Adria has a particular intent about food, and a particular conception about what food should do for the diner, how the dining experience should unfold and what it means to be a chef. So in order to fulfill this conception he develops a disruptive model around it-which is to say he shuts the restaurant down 6 months out of the year so that he can do R&D, he charges $300 a head and serves 30 courses to you where you don't know what comes next.
This is really an important aspect of disruptive models. Adria didn't just sit around and cleverly brainstorm how to make his restaurant unique- he let the intent drive the model not the other way around. In doing that he really had to ask the fundamental questions of himself: "What do I really want to do? What does it mean to be a chef? If I had the choice, how would I design the food and what do I have to do in order to realize this idea?"
I think its really time we started to think about design practice in this way. Most Architectural firms, no matter how innovative or forward thinking, differ in structure very very little. Even Snohetta- just featured in Metropolis as a progressive firm of the future- differs only in degree from many 'typical' firms across the country. They have an open plan, they have a 'more democratic' internal structure, but still run all year round, they still have principals and associates, interns and so on.
Isn't it time we really re-thought the practice model, the way Adria re-thought the restaurant experience? What if we could re-structure practice so that it was innovation centric? What if we really did get serious about Research and Development as a cornerstone of architectural innovation? What would we have to do to develop that? What if our clients didn't have to choose between lower fees and better service- what if we restructured practice so that they could have both? What if lower fees meant that we made more money, not less? Sounds preposterous right?
Our whole industry is in collapse and only now beginning to rebuild. We have had stagnant productivity growth for the last 40 years. Our brightest young people are leaving the architecture profession in droves. We have a hard time delivering innovation and world class design to our clients, even though we live in the most advanced society on earth.
Disruptive change is already here. Architectural practice has a choice. We can embrace it or be overrun by it.
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