We find ourselves operating in two domains here.

One is the physical world of getting a project done, which involves commitments to budgets, schedules, collaborators, governments and institutions. This is a typical and familiar domain.

The other is a very fascinating emergent state of scientific research in which the language of our client and our client’s endeavor is shifting from things to people, from the language of lab standards and specifications to the language of activities, behaviors, and cultures.

That is, the domain of interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and translational research is new. We are in a transitional territory that my eventually turn out to be a transformational condition, an evolving practice that may become a new approach to scientific discovery and application.

We are in a very privileged context, one that we’ve been in many times before but not in this field of work. The context is one in which there is the trust and belief that a new building will be a primary actor in the transformation of the institution and the way it works, and in which the processes and disciplines of defining and designing that facility will be the catalytic agent in the transformation of the people currently in the organization and in the way that they work.

We kicked off the process of developing the design program, then, with a meeting of about 30 PhDs and institutional administrators. We provided a background on the project, outlined a process we’d use to engage them and learn from them, and then opened the meeting to discussion.

Reviewing the visual listening notes from that meeting is fascinating. They revealed a group of people fully ready to engage and unfolded a significant number of subjects indicating a need for a deep dive into exploration, learning, and organizational and operational conceptualizing and testing before ever getting to a programmatic definition and design concepts.

Our design team, however,  is already in the stream of the work of this phase. This is their responsibility to the client and to the firm, to move directly on a path to decisions that will define a physical facility and get it built. But we also carry the responsibility of calibrating a $100 million investment with a yet-to-be-determined organizational design, operating profile, professional culture, inter-organizational relationships and other considerations and characteristics typical of transformational states, and a facility that is expected to be the place where discovery and development will transform a major institution and the community that it serves.

How, then will we reconciling these competing demands? That’s the next task, next week.

Somewhat beneficially serendipitous, we had also recently received an RFQ from a wise client who asked certain, perhaps expected, questions about philosophy, vision and approach.

The RFQ informed the planning process by providing us with a platform that influenced a move from a more typical framework of “targets” – revenue we wanted to capture, clients we wanted to work with – to “offerings.”

We began to move, in other words, toward an approach that clarified, first for ourselves, what it is that we do differently in the world and what we do that has value to others, and then for the world we work in, why we exist, what we think of the world we work in, and why you might want to work with us.

For example, one of the concepts or principles that we reaffirmed for ourselves is to energize what we call the “in-between,” or the “white space” I’ve referenced in other places. That is, I think we are typically engaged by clients to plan and design for conventional descriptors of people and place. And, over the past several years, the demand for density, a key contributor to a metric of real estate performance and productivity, means that the places in between are suppressed or neglected.

I believe that we are in, or are about to be in, one of the more exciting, and threatening, periods in history. Accelerating technological momentum has the potential to rapidly create a few hugely successful winners, and a large body of lagging and declining losers. How people come to work in this period will define the success of their participation in change and advancement and, in turn, define the quality and character our society and culture.

I think that the purpose of interactions, socialization, and collaboration at work is to find the potential and capture the benefits from a combinatorial explosion of innovation and productivity. I’ve come to believe that the success of those we work with will be dependent on our ability to make places and spaces, real and virtual, that connect people to each other and in ways that they have not connected before. I believe, in other words, that the emerging purpose, value and power of the workplace is captured not in assigned spaces but in agile, adaptable and self-defined spaces for collective and combinatorial work.

This is the purpose of the principle to energize the in-between.

We’ll reflect more on this as we move to complete our thinking over the next week or two.

He posted the expected graph of the potential tensions on this very complex and yet very short project (an approximately $100 million project, to be programmed and designed in 5 weeks). Against this, we’ve been tracking the actual developments in the studio. It is a very jagged line in both cases.

Although the project has a long history in other places and although the goals had been well-articulated before we entered its trajectory, we’ve found that our peripheral vision was not well-developed. Our design and development activity has been affected by an almost daily interjection of unexpected issues arising from a confrontation with reality that had not been present in the previous five years of this project’s development as it made its way through vision, politics, projections and other background stuff.

Part of the complexity is that we are designing for an organization not yet developed, with representation from current departmental rather than future thematic avatars, with a titular CEO but without a designated COO who could help develop a hierarchy of values, without the commitment and engagement of an essential translational partner, and in a domain of funding that will engage both public (governmental) and private (yet to be identified) sponsors.

We’ve tried hard to stay on a straight line but, in addition to the external surprises, we, ourselves, bring matters into the mix that shift our movement. Every day we uncover data, special interests, individual interpretations, operational scenarios, discipline challenges, differential development, and other (logical) vibrations that shake (or build) the confidence, spirit, or energy of the team.

It was an odd delight to have ended the week with a meeting that should have been comfortable and collegial but became competitive and challenging. A delight because its emotion placed it on the stress graph much higher than we’d predicted for Friday but, as we look to next Monday’s predicted very high stress level (because we’d confront the reality of the final push), we think the week could be much more relaxed now that we’ve surfaced a bunch of the underlying clutter.

A primary ingredient of the week was therefore the continual testing, calibration and adjustment necessary to assure that the design program and the design are in metrical alignment. That is, the program of space requirements (not the full and robust design brief) will be the defining tool for the evaluation and approval of the developed design in later phases of the project, and the guiding metrics must be set now.

A key struggle for us, and everyone who does these things, is the net-to-gross ratio – the relationship of the area of the building assignable to uses like labs and offices, and the areas of the building that are essential to its functioning but not occupied by the “users” like mechanical rooms, custodial spaces and the like.

The state limits this ratio. Appropriately, it attempts to assure that its money will be used for the direct purposes of, in this case, research and not for other purposes of the institution and nor for what might be considered luxuries. This is where a significant misalignment occurs.

At the forefront of the national agenda Is the reduction in the cost of healthcare and the increase in access to it. A key strategy in this quest is the reduction of time it takes to get an idea developed in the lab to actually benefit the patient. To facilitate the velocity of developments, the National Institute of Health has developed programs and incentives to promote “translational” research – to develop facilities in which research, development, and application come together. These are multidisciplinary and multi-use facilities.

Through research into the processes of innovation and observations of the earlier facilities of this type, we’ve come to understand how all innovation in social. That is, almost al new ideas in science take place outside of the lab, in conversation and collaboration between researcher colleagues and others from other disciplines who may have something to offer to invention and innovation.

These collaborations take place only after there is an atmosphere of trust. This is derived primarily from social interactions in which people get to know each other’s values, come to find mutual interests, and open up to working together. And these social interactions take place where you would expect them to take place – outside of the conventionally dedicated and focused activities of labs and offices, and in places where refreshment, casual contexts and open conversations normally take place.

And there’s the rub. The wider hallways, open atria, coffee bars, casual living rooms, and similarly effective spaces lie in the “gross” side of the net:gross ratio. However, the conventional demands of research buildings like mechanical rooms, shafts for piping and air ducts, and similar spaces are also on the “gross” side of the space ledger and, with a limitation on the net:gross ratio, these essential functions crowd out the potential for the social spaces of innovation.

The state, seeking to incentivize greater economic performance and promote research that will contribute to the health and welfare of its citizens, offers funds to catalyze development yet must use a control on the use of its funds that directly contradicts or limits the development of the types of facilities that will help it achieve its goals.

I’ve frequently said that design is subversive. I mean that so frequently we design in ways that our clients are unaware of or even intolerant of in order to actually deliver the places and spaces that will help them achieve what it is that they are trying to do. Maybe that’s next week.

Jim Meredith

These experiences are initially delightful, exquisite. As we settle into the experience of these products and have them as part of our daily lives, we also come to expect similarly delight from others.

These objects and environments are perhaps so good because they are also embedded with the great experiences of those who made them. Even in our touch of those objects or environments that seem to be the simplest (or perhaps because they are), we realize that everyone who was part of their making “got” it. That is, everybody in the chain of imagination, technologies, crafts, processes, and application found their place, imagined their contribution, and acted to deliver on something great.

What must have been a great experience for them in the making must also be a truly great experience as they witness the pleasure that everybody else has in the experience of the product or environment that they had a role in delivering to the world. That reward must then inspire and shape in them an even more generous quest for the next great experience of others.

I am frustrated, then, in why those truly rewarding experiences of making, borne of a great generosity of spirit and energy, do not influence and motivate all of us. Perhaps these experiences that I assume to be almost universal are not.

A project that I have been associated with is nearing the completion of its construction. We toured it this week, and there is yet a lot of adjustment to make.

While I am sure that, eventually, it will be a transformative workplace for the client organization, getting there has been affected by changing roles and responsibilities, shifting values, a descent into the politics of finance, and other diversions from the purpose, mission and program that guided its design.

Each of us in the extraordinarily diverse team responsible for a building has clutter in our life that diverts our attention and energy from our achievement of great things and the rewarding experiences that come from their making and from the experiences of those who follow us in those spaces.

To get us there, we all need a team member with vision and deep appreciation of the future experiences of others. Someone who will, despite the clutter in the path to getting there, finds every means to understand every player in the process and to motivate him or her to a performance that they will be proud of, and thus to a performance that unselfishly imagines, appreciates and prizes not only their own experiences but also the experiences of those, yet unknown, who will move through the places we make.

The catalyst for today’s note was an interview with Michael Raynor in Inc. magazine. The interview focused on Raynor’s claim that it might very well be possible to predict which innovations might be “disruptive” and thus deliciously valuable. While I am very interested in the subject of innovation, what caught my attention here was his comment on the frequently referenced adage of innovation, to “fail fast.”

Raynor retorted that it was instead much more important to learn fast, to ask the question, “what are we trying to learn here?”

This resonated with me because earlier this week I had sat with a couple of colleagues in a session updating our thinking on how to find more success in this economy which seem uniquely unfriendly to our core practice. There was the natural step of looking to the list of those with whom we’d done business in the recent past. In reviewing the list, several waves of dread washed over me. This was a list that had no relevant information as part of it, only contact names and numbers, and most of these were woefully out of date. Then, I realized that, if making tracks in new territory was of interest to us, almost nobody on this list represented people or organizations who were interested in or capable of catalyzing innovative action. That critical observation, however, brought the realization that my assumption was not valid because we had not had recent conversations with any of these entities.

The entire effort was a “fail” in the sense that we had not developed and sustained a disciplined practice of “learning.” We had not engaged our friends from the past in a continuing conversation about what concerned or interested them, and we had not taken to them the learnings and thinking we’d been doing in our own context that might have relevance to them in their own context.

I challenged my partners on the concept of the adequacy of our CRM system. What really matters, however, is the importance of respecting and appreciating every contact we’ve had, and being generous with valuable information for them that could keep the trust high and the conversation open and robust.

It is time, now with summer past, to get out and restart those conversations…to learn fast!

The week began on Monday with a breakfast meeting of the building “team” – the Owner, the Architect, and the Contractor, as well as the chief executives of each firm. The Owner had begun to express in words what the others had been expressing in demeanor: The relationship had become adversarial and the Owner targeted the Contractor as the source of the issue. The Owner/CEO had called the breakfast meeting as a way of getting the entire team together to address the matter, clear the air and reset the relationship.

Remember that this building is probably the only office building of scale under construction in this very depressed region. Remember that the Contractor was invited to the project because of the strength of relationship with the Architect and after having done preliminary estimating and other consulting for the Owner.

After the CEO made opening remarks to the intention of resetting the relationship, the Contractor responded with a long list of grievances. By the time the breakfast had ended, the executive member of the Contractor’s team had informed the Owner that because he chose a bid-build approach the relationship was inherently adversarial. All of the value of the opportunity initially given to the Contractor, and despite the opportunity to redress his team’s management style, the Contractor concluded the meeting with the arrogance of advising the Owner that, in his view of the world, because he had to bid for the work, his team’s management would sustain an adversarial approach to the work.

I ended the week in a lunch meeting with a former member of the Owner’s Board. He had been, clearly because of the context the CEO was concerned about, invited to look into the project. We had now had several meetings, and my assumption was that the lunch agenda would provide an opportunity to mutually reflect and calibrate. He was new to the project this week, and yet the project was months old.

Remember that my role is as “owner’s representative.” The Architect had proposed to the Owner that she should have someone who could manage the project on her behalf, and recommended me. An atypical part of the relationship was that I was engaged by the Architect in this role, rather than directly by the Owner. This Architect, as many in this time, had come to see the erosion of their role in architecture and relationship with owners by construction managers, program manager, real estate consultants, other consultants, and others. The Architect was progressively expanding his portfolio of services to rebuild his strength of practice, robustness of engagement and richness of relationship with his clients. Taking on the Owner’s Representative services at the invitation of this Owner was part of that strategy.

Over the past few weeks I had generally caused a bit of a flurry in the Architect’s office. They had come to recognize certain issues of project responsiveness that I had identified, and had brought the matter to executive attention, had assigned a new project manager, had instituted a set of workshops to bring all construction phase matters up to date, and had instituted a series of regular meeting to assure that they had top attention on the project and were responding to the Contractor’s needs and the Owner’s interests.

I had also, during this period, defended the Owner in a number of matters arising on site related to interpretations of the contract for construction. Cumulatively, these decisions and directions had the influence of deflecting emerging claims for a few hundred thousands of dollars.

Our lunch was cordial, and conversation ranged from unfolding a bit of our individual backgrounds, to stories of common interest, and to discussion of specific matters relating to the project. The final question he had of me, ending the lunch and ending this week of disappointments was, “Now, you’re employed by the Architect, right? Isn’t that something of a conflict?”

I have a project that is now under construction. The team is organized around the comparatively conventional configuration of owner, architect and contractor.

Design of portions of the project is continuing. The project budget has certain resources allocated to certain portions of the project still under design and the construction contract has certain allowances allocated for others of those elements.

I felt that the time had come to make decisions on the items still in design in order to assure that they would be completed without affecting the project schedule. Since we also needed to update estimates on those portions of the project, I thought it would also be a good time to reflect on the allocations for all outstanding portions of the project in order to assure that the project contingency would be adequate. This also then meant it would be a good idea to get the contractor’s perception of items that he was seeing in the course of construction that might impact cost.

Rather than take a sequential approach, working with each party in the project individually and then coming to my own summary of the implications, I decided to invite each party to a meeting to discuss these items together. Certainly, transparency would be in everybody’s interests – The owner would get a good context to understand the context for necessary decisions, the architect would get good information affecting the final documentation for construction, and the contractor would get good information on emerging matters and be better prepared for those items in the sequencing and management of construction.

The meeting went very well. I acted as a “scribe” and elicited from each party the items that they were working on that needed further definition, and the contractor and an independent estimator offered perceptions of ballpark costs to enter into the project budget to help shape decisions. Each member of the team talked with each other, asked and answered questions, and assisted in the identification and scoping of the items.

As soon as the meeting ended, however, I was contacted individually by each member of the team. Each had something to say about the meeting that was not expressed either before or during the meeting. I was surprised by one of the voices who felt that this transparency was not a good thing because it gave ammunition to other parties for manipulation of the context. I was surprised by another voice who, instead of feeling good about having better information, used a tone that indicated a future aggressive posture against other members as their items became further developed.

Even though there have been significant moves and well-developed practices over the past half century to remove self-interest from the individual members of project teams, it is clear that the transparency that each party advocates and would benefit from is still something that is feared, or worst, manipulated for the individual gain that will, inevitably, result in lower satisfaction for all members of the team.

Others have pointed to the inevitability of this development. As American and European manufacturers moved more of their manufacturing to China, they also moved the ideas, means and methods of concept generation and development. Indeed, as the interest in Chinese and other Asian markets grew, so too did the interest of American manufacturers in the development of both market-specific products as well as the development of less costly products for global markets. Chinese design institutes, in effect, forced the transfer of knowledge with manufacturing, engineering and architecture. Then, American companies began to open offices, develop engineering and R&D centers, and train Chinese staff in innovation processes.

The Chinese policy, beyond the scale of its metrics, demonstrates the power of focus. It is a policy, it seems, that illuminates for the entire country the importance of innovation in general, the importance of innovation leadership, and the importance of moving from imitation to initiation. Along the way, this policy may also change entirely the perception of the Chinese as consumers only and into one of potentially dominant competitors in product ideation and development.

Does this development mean that American innovation, stagnated by the western economic collapse and otherwise passively offshored, will be awakened? Does a Chinese innovation policy suppress the anxiety in the US around “industrial policy” and provide a catalyst for similar attention here? Can Obama channel Kennedy and awaken the country to a new race to the moon of innovation?

INFLUENCERS FULL VERSION from R+I creative on Vimeo.

From Vimeo –

INFLUENCERS is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment.

The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.

Written and Directed by Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, the film is a Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives (advertising, design, fashion and entertainment) who are shaping today’s pop culture.

“Influencers” belongs to the new generation of short films, webdocs, which combine the documentary style and the online experience.