Almost 50 years ago. In 1975. Kodak engineer Steve Sasson invented the first digital camera. Kodak failed to take the camera into production. As far as Kodak was concerned, they weren’t in the camera business, they were the physical film business. That was their first mistake.
30 years or so later, in 2007, Sasson’s Kodak digital camera patent expired. And a mere 5 years on from that, in 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.
What if they’d done things differently?
What if Kodak had instead chosen to be in the image business? The business of recording memories. Kodak moments. That’s the crazy thing, they knew what business they were in: Kodak moments. But they’d failed to recognise it.
By contrast, in the late twentieth century Fujifilm saw disruption coming and adopted a philosophy of diversification and thrived.
As you might have anticipated, this is all by way of analogy. Because Architects might think they’re in the building design, documentation and delivery business. But as Cedric Price observed:
“The best solution to an architectural problem may not necessarily be a building.”
What if architects aren’t in the business of delivering buildings?
What if architectural problems aren’t just related to buildings?
What if the profession’s own perception of what they do is the equivalent of Kodak’s physical film?
You might be thinking, architecture and photographics aren’t the same, but there’s similarities. Both Kodak, in the late 20th century, and the architecture profession right now, were and are, competing for sales in evolving markets. Facing competitors that are maybe equivalent, but not the same. And digital technology is increasingly representing a disruptive risk. There is common ground.
I don’t write this as a cautionary tale around change (although it is). I write this as a tale of leadership and culture. Neither of which are adequately addressed in architectural education or in practice. Which I’ll come to shortly, but I’ll first give you my definition of a leader:
A leader is someone who supports others in doing their best work and being their best selves.
Where ‘others’ includes: individuals, teams, organisations and the like.
With this in mind, we can reframe that whole Kodak disaster, not just as failure to embrace change and a willingness to adapt, but as a failure of leadership. Where they failed to do “their best work or be their best selves”.
Fujifilm’s leadership aggressively pursued diversification. Embracing change, expanding and leveraging its core assets to enter new industries. On the other hand, Kodak’s leadership clung to its past. Overly focused on protecting its core business, unwilling to embrace digital and pursue diversification aggressively. Sealing their fate.
I’m therefore curious, how architects might be like Kodak? Is our profession embracing change, adapting and doing their best to demonstrate their value beyond design? Or are they overly focussed on protecting they’re core business?
Presenting Exhibit A:
The current kerfuffle around the proposed NSW Building Bill. It’s a commotion that raises questions about practice, our reliance on regulation, and what that means to the profession and its leadership. Seemingly as an existential challenge to numerous architects
I regularly see and hear complaints from the profession that professional bodies like the AIA (in particular, but not only), are not doing enough for the profession. Frankly, this as a failure of leadership in the profession. And that’s not leadership by the AIA and the other professional bodies. It’s a failure of professionals to recognise their own agency. Understanding they can choose to lead, rather than waiting for others to do so, in an abdication of their responsibility and leadership.
It has me wondering, Why is that? Why don’t more architects choose to lead? My theory is it’s because the profession hasn’t been taught how to lead, been shown how they can choose leadership, or recognise there’s many ways to do so. It’s problematic for the culture of the profession, as it’s leaders that support, develop and define the culture. And make no mistake there’s substantial cultural challenges facing the profession.
The apparent absolving of leadership responsibility by architects, leaving it to others, has me speculating that there’s a culture of complacency in architecture. At the Wellbeing of Architects Symposium, Jonathan Robberts from Monash University, posed a question that might be the most insightful provocation of the profession for quite some time:
“Would architecture look different in the way it’s practiced if the name wasn’t protected?”
You’d be hard pressed to answer ‘no’, but, depending upon your perspective, a lifting of the protection might lead to an improvement or a degradation of the profession. Most notably, however, it would require architects to rethink what they do, how they do it, and to embrace the change it’d unleash.
Just to be clear, I’m not advocating stopping the protection of the ‘architect’ title. Architects are highly highly skilled, deliver many valuable services to their clients beyond design, but they don’t always do such a good job of marketing and selling what they do.
And so my question on the back of all this, is…
Are architects too beholden to their protected identity and the perceived status it affords?
That is,
Are they relying on their architect title as shorthand for their skillset, instead of actually marketing their value? This obsession of the profession, with their title, their identity, and on maintaining the status quo, is a cultural failing. Because if they’re more focussed on a name, or the muscling in of other professions on their work, they’re not focussed on doing the work that will make them stand out and demonstrate their greater value. A value that seemingly currently relies alone on a title.
To quote Socrates,
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but building the new.”
My sense is that architects are focussing too much of their energy on ‘fighting the old’. Which will become an increasingly fraught position as noted by Flora Samuels:
“We need to get more specialised to get more useful, because the world is so complex now. I’m not sure the term architect really describes what we do any more.”
In closing this loop around change, leadership and culture, it’s worthwhile pondering three drivers of change. Status, affiliation, and convenience.
Status: It’s not a stretch to recognise the profession’s status has been somewhat diminished over the past 50 years. The profession’s desire to regain their status is one way we might deliver change. Leveraging a collective want for renewed status might motivate a rethinking of what we do as architects, how we do it.
Affiliation: That’s community, connection and culture, and that’s who we want to be associated with. People rarely want to stand out, to be different, or do something different. But a good leader is unafraid to stand out by thinking differently, so they might make change happen. Success engenders followers, driven by a collective desire to affiliate with success.
Convenience: Can often be the highest hurdle to change. People don’t change until the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same. And right now there’s three pain points impacting the convenience of practice: legislation, climate change, and digital disruption. All represent opportunities for constructive change, should the profession so choose.
Yet despite how it might sound, I want to be optimistic.
Change happens when people fall in love with a different idea of the future.
And I’d like to think love is in the air!
We all have the opportunity to create that different idea of the future.
To be leading that future.
If we choose to do so.
To end, as I started, on something seemingly random. A poetic paragraph or so from an article written by Sari Azout on Every. Which I hope makes for the perfect ending.
“In a world where we can outsource productivity to technology, the people who reap the biggest rewards aren’t those who work the fastest.
They’re the people who make things that are wonderful, original, weird, emotionally resonant, and authentic. As our feeds become flooded with instant, AI-generated content, the most dangerous thing you can do is play it safe.”
The most dangerous thing you can do is play it safe!
How good is that as a call to action?
Addendum
We had a Q&A Session at the end of my session, where I was asked
What would I suggest to emerging leaders?
Whilst my answer was OK, immediately after the session (of course) I realised I had a much better answer, and that’s:
Choose yourself.
Simple!
And if you want to know how, I wrote a post about it not so long ago!
What choosing yourself looks like
Architectural Practice Educators Network: Practice Matters Symposium 21-22 November 2024
AI image generated in Canva
