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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.

Hi reader

we've just had the Labour Day long weekend in NSW. It started with torrential storms, ended in glorious sun. Reminding me of a quote from Pema Chödrön, “You are the sky. Everything else – it's just the weather.” My simple hope is that you've had more than a moment to enjoy the sun over the last fortnight, since we last met. Making time for self-care and oxygen, keeping your sun shining and the clouds away.

I've been thinking. Spending part of the last fortnight thinking about thinking. Thinking in service of honing and building new things for unmeasured. More importantly thinking about what is the meaningful thinking the architecture profession might need to be doing in service of the profession, clients and better practice.

I've been contemplating cognitive biases, a concept coined by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman almost 50 years ago. I'm interested in Status Quo Bias and Loss Aversion, in the context of the profession. I'm curious about whether architects take time to rethink practice before starting one or whether practice has become a default design. A status quo that's the result of other people's thinking.

I got you

Michael

rethinking the status quo

I'm sure you already have a pretty good understanding of the cognitive bias, status quo bias, I'll try not to labour the point. The thing about a cognitive bias is that in decision making it can be a useful cognitive short cut (for faster decisions), whilst also prohibiting curiosity and masking the reality of circumstance. There are pros and cons.

Consider James Dyson and his cyclone technology bagless vacuum cleaner, for example. He approached all the major vacuum cleaner manufacturers with it. Not one was interested. They couldn't see that consumers might be interested, nor any reason to move away from removable dust bags. By challenging the domestic status quo - not just vacuum cleaners, but washing machines, hair dryers, fans, room heaters, etc - James Dyson has built a billion dollar company.

I'm interested in how status quo bias might be holding back architectural practice by prohibiting change. By architects focussing on what they've always done and how they do it, failing to consider were the new possibilities may lie. The bemoaning of the profession's loss of scope to Project Managers, for example, is status quo thinking. It's the consequence perhaps of another related cognitive bias, Loss Aversion. Loss aversion is the preference to focus on a loss at the expense of discovering any possible gain - the feeling of any loss is twice as powerful as the feeling from the equivalent gain. In my experience the profession tends towards bolstering the profession and practice against losses rather than using their energy on exploring what the profession might gain from doing something new.

As James Dyson demonstrated there are opportunities in rethinking how things are done. I'm curious about what other things architects need to let go of, where they might need to rethink. Maintaining the status quo is a way of avoiding making the decision to do something differently. This has value, but what might be lost in not making a decision to try something different?

I'm curious if you've thought about how you might be working with the results of someone else's thinking on architectural practice?

To help you challenge your own status quo thinking, here's a few questions to consider:

What do I need to rethink?
How might I do this differently? Is it better?
Where are the other opportunities for my skills and work?
What is the opportunity cost of not doing this thinking and change?

You got this.

“The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable.
Activists take that discomfort w/ the status quo & advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small & grows.

To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable... that’s the point.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (via Twitter)