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I pay my respects and acknowledge all Traditional Custodians of Country and on whose land I live and work. I recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. I pay my respects to their Elders past and present.
Always was, always will be.

Hi, it's Michael and welcome to this week's useletter.

It's the newsletter that's useful. Focussing on your future not my past.

It’s been a confounding week or two.

A week that has me wondering if architects are worried about the important things.

The things that are going to impact their practice now and into the future.

It started with a smaller than usual open rate for my last useletter: The challenges of practice. It was still healthy - so not a biggy and grateful to all who engage. The thing was, to my mind it was important and of great interest. Maybe people were super busy, it happens, and I didn’t think too much of it...

Then last week,

I posted to LinkedIn something I considered more curiosity than import.

That post had the biggest number of 'impressions' on LinkedIn I’d ever had.

By a considerable margin.

It began:

“Does anyone else feel uneasy when architects talk about ‘our building’?”

That was mostly all there was to it. You can read it here.

I think acknowledging authorship is important, but not the greatest issue of our times. Yet it stirred up the LinkedIn archi community.

Let’s face it, it’s not one of the big challenges architects face in practice.

It’s not something that will help them level up their practice.

Like. Say. Leadership!

In any case...

rant over.

This fortnight, I persist with the important.

Part 2! On the practice challenges architects identified in my recent survey.

I got you

Michael

PS: I'm offering 30% off my Practice of Leadership Workshops if you book in for a free (cost and obligation free) consultation call by the end of March 2024.

It’s not just you

It’s easy to fall into a hole thinking we’re alone in the challenges we face. The previous useletter may have resonated in this vein. This fortnight’s identifies what might be identified as challenges the profession faces as a whole.

Wearing Many Hats

Keeping up with broad range of knowledge needed from planning to sustainability to documentation
For small practices, being across all tasks from design to site visits to accounting

Enabling Good Design

Finding time for design quality instead of rushed schedules
Overcoming outdated business models that constrain architecture

Valuing Architectural Expertise

Fighting under-appreciation for skills and talents of architects
Lack of respect for advice and role in cultural/social fabric

My thoughts

I don’t think it matters whether an architect is in small or large practice, the expectation is they’re across many many things, wearing many hats. The challenge doesn’t come so much from this as much as from taking on things that they’re not good at, either because they’ve never learnt it, or it’s simply not in their skill sweet-spot. When faced with this skill deficit a key question to ask is:

“Who? Not How?”

There’s a whole book dedicated to it. Its homepage says all you really need to know.

Let’s face it there’s never enough time. Many architects preface design over everything else, and it takes as much time as they have. That's Parkinson’s Law. So what would it take to enable good design? Clearly when good design is more universally valued, more space is given to it within a project timeline. But maybe there also needs to be a rethinking of what practice looks like. How it’s done, what it offers and prioritises. Adjusting to change across the industry.

Valuing architectural experience is two-pronged. It’s both a matter of communication and of delivery. They each attract their own questions.

How are architects communicating their value?
What do people value? And are architects meeting that need?
How are architects underperforming and devaluing their reputation?

These might be boiled down to an alternative line of questing.

How might architects show leadership within the community?

How might they generously use their skills to support others?

This would begin to address the challenges architects face around good design and the valuing of their expertise.

How might you begin to answer these questions?

You got this.

PS: Whenever you’re ready,

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