Architects, Show Your Working
Architects will often end up with immense piles of butter paper, in their design work. It’s a record of the process and history of the design. They may use these process drawings when presenting the design to a colleague and, on occasion, to their client. It helps explain, or indeed justify, the current proposition. Yet they’re not inclined to do the same for other decisions they make or anything else that they do.
When I was at school, I had a reasonable head for maths. In earlier years, I had a pretty intuitive grasp of what the right answer might be before working through the problem. I could often do it in my head, jot down the answer and move on to the next problem. Of course that wasn’t how you’re meant to do it.
You’re meant to show your working.
It’s for good reason. Instead of right or wrong, it allows credit for work done. It allows others to understand if you’re approach to the problem and identify if a wrong answer came through a silly working error. It assists you in thinking through the problem carefully. The clarity of thought revealed in the working. Importantly, it also discourages guessing & stabs in the dark.
That’s some pretty sound advice for work and life too.
What if architects started to show their working in their decisions, in and around their business and what they do? In a previous post, I challenged architects to move outside their self-imposed definition, to question what exactly it is that they do and could be doing. The problem here is assumptions. Assumptions that are being made by not showing their working. What would it look like to write down what an architect actually does, how they do it, and what might the outcome of that exercise be?
It goes beyond the assumptions we make as a profession about what we do. It’s sound business advice too. There’s nothing like seeing the working written in front of you, bringing into stark focus the work that you’re doing and the decisions that you’re making. You can’t hide from what’s on the page. Are you thinking through everything properly? Is there due consideration to your process and decisions, or are you just taking a stab in the dark? Are you being accountable or are you hiding by concealing the working?
As a leader, it is also important to show your working. Trust, a central tenet of leadership, is built upon your working. One of the most effective ways for a leader to build trust is to make the intentions behind decisions or actions clear. As effective leaders, we must show our working in order to further build trust.
What if architects all started showing their working?
What if architects all had a blog (or log) explaining how their design came to be? Why they do the work they do? How they do the work they do? How they arrived at some of these critical decisions?
Of course it’s not necessary to make all working public, but what might architects see once they started to undertake this exercise? What might the public start to see when architects started regularly showing their working?
Perhaps a better question to ask is,
How might architects get better at showing their working?
It’s not a maths test, but I’d be fascinated to see if the profession’s “marks” started improving after showing their working.
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