Thinking Edge Interview with Amanda Levesque, Designer & Strategist with a “Thinking Edge” in Architecture
Welcome to Thinking Edge with Ed Boudrot.
Ed
So we couldn’t be more grateful to be with you today, Amanda, and she’s a senior strategist with Lens Strategy, you have an amazing background. I’d love to dig into that and hand it over to you.
Amanda
Sure. Thanks, Ed, I really appreciate you guys having me here. This is going to be a really great conversation. Yeah. So as you mentioned, my name is Amanda Levesque. And I’m practicing at Lens Strategy, which is a strategy and innovation arm of an architecture firm. And I got there through architecture. So my training is an architecture, I’m a licensed architect. And at the time, I thought that would be a really great career path for me. I was really interested in problem solving in helping people in making things. And I really wanted to always be working on projects that were new.
And I had that feeling about architecture that you know, and it’s proven to be true, that even if you specialize in one kind of building, I have a good friend whose firm works on aquariums, for example, even every aquarium is different, you have to learn the different marine biology behind the fish. And it just seemed like a field that I could always be learning about others and using my skills to help them do their best work. So all of those things are still things I hold dear and things I’m able to do in strategy and innovation. Instead of how I made that pivot in place, really, at the firm I started at was by starting to get to know a few industries.
So Shepley Bulfinch is the name of the architecture firm that launched Lens Strategy that I work at. And they do a ton of work in higher ed and healthcare. So I consider myself so lucky that that’s kind of the workplace education I received on top of an architecture education, which is pretty general. Just because it was wonderful to be working with such purpose driven organizations, that’s sort of the commonality across higher ed and healthcare, everyone’s there to make a difference in someone’s lives in one way or another. And we got to interact with all the different stakeholders, you know, everyone is implicated when there’s a new building to be designed. And it was actually really wonderful. It was one of the only times when all the different silos of the organization come together.
From surgery to billing to talk about patient experience in the discussion with architects to design a new building. Not only you know, is that how we felt we could do our jobs, it was something that people actually got kind of excited about that it was a moment where you could kind of step away from your day to day job and kind of see the forest instead of the trees, so to speak. That seems like the piece of architecture that always captured my interest, sort of the why of this building, you know, what is this going to accomplish for this organization? How are they going to be able to grow in this new physical space? And at the same time, we were sort of seeing that that was a real client value that we weren’t fully capturing, you know, we were delivering architectural services at the end of the day, not visioning or change management, or any of these other things that we would touch on in the course of trying to understand how you’re going to be working for the next 25 years in order to put a responsible building together that’s going to grow with you that should be around for that long for doing our jobs right.
That was sort of an un-captured piece. And then on top of that there, there’s some industry pressure right now, where technology is really disrupting how we’ve traditionally made our revenue. So in architecture, you can kind of imagine the historical way that buildings were made. Real is hiring, you know, 60 people to draw every brick in the building five times. And it was a fee for time kind of relationship as we go through all the different phases of an architectural process, including construction documents, and administering the construction process itself.
So as technology has changed how we draw how we design, it’s all happening in 3d. And then the drawings are almost automated. There’s some work you have to do to edit and clean up, but the entire process start to finish, it’s happening so much faster. So the leadership at my firm, we’re interested in exploring, how can we use the capabilities that we have to get a little bit more front end and get a little bit more aligned to the idea that there’s value in ideas different from the traditional business models of fee for time. That was the ask of folks who were interested in exploring this area. And I thought this was fascinating. I thought this was everything that I wanted architecture to be able to be, like I mentioned, I love the why and getting people together and getting people excited about a vision.
But buildings are slow, buildings- especially the scale of what I was working on at the time. 300,000 square feet, three to five year process, and I wanted to be able to do things that were more immediate. And more cost effective in a lot of cases. So I signed up, I said, “I will be the first intern of this group, I will do this in my spare time.” And you know, when you’ve hit on something that makes you that excited that it’s something that you have to follow.
So between those two sort of forces that I mentioned, it certainly wasn’t a straight line. We’ve looked into, “okay, maybe we should be industrial designers and come up with the products that are on the wall in our architectural design, maybe we should explore digital physical experiences. So when you are about to be a patient at a hospital, and you go on their website, the web experience, or the app experience is really similar to the physical experience you’re about to engage in.” But eventually, you know, like I mentioned really getting into what our clients found valuable about our architectural process and things that we could carry forward in a more deliberate way with a business unit and a service model around was really the visioning and strategic planning work.
That’s sort of what we were doing at the end of the day, bringing all these different stakeholders together, using different design methodologies to help them think together about the future of work. And a big piece we borrowed from architecture is implementation, we envision these big things, but we we make them real, at the end of the day, there’s a building that ends up in the ground. And I think that’s really what’s made our strategic planning and consulting work different as it’s not think tank work, it’s very much we are here to roll up sleeves and continue this with you, sort of in the mold of how we were trained through architecture. So that’s how I pivoted by sort of attaching myself to this ambiguous idea of something that was sort of in our strategic plan, but really needed some characterization and some TLC, and that was about four years ago. And we’ve been one strategy ever since.
So we are a strategy and innovation business unit within an architecture firm. As I mentioned, sometimes we work together, sometimes, we’re able to kind of connect the dots all the way from a strategic plan into how that informs that architectural design. And sometimes we work apart from times, it’s sort of very much in the front end strategic planning, where we might talk about facilities as a key resource in a strategic plan, but it doesn’t really touch architecture. And I’ve really enjoyed it, I actually just enrolled in an MBA program to kind of shore up my knowledge base in the business side of this work. And I’m really excited to see where it continues to go.
Ed
That’s, that’s an amazing journey that you’ve been through. I love the fact that from an architectural perspective, the migration around you know, business transformation, and then resulting in a new business unit within your company. What would you say the architectural, or if there are any architectural principles that apply directly to strategy formation?
Amanda
That’s a fantastic question. I love that question. If I think back to architectural principles that we’re taught in school, there’s some key things that really do translate over pretty directly to strategic planning. So in architecture, we’re taught kind of akin to a lot of this human centered design work that is out there, and I’m sure you’ve heard, and practice in. That it’s all about the user of the building at the end of the day, and we’re trained to study and observe their experience and their pain points, and how to deliver something that will really be a wonderful building experience at the end of the day. So I think absolutely, bringing in a dedication to stakeholders from an architecture process is something that makes us successful in strategy.
I think another piece is, architecture is so much about a part to whole relationship. If you think about like a multi family housing project, you know, anywhere in the city, it’s the relationship between the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom, and then that creates a unit layout. And then you play with a few different units and those kind of arrange and create a form that then has an urban quality to it from the sidewalk that you start to massage.
And then it’s sort of an outside in inside out, continual trade off that helps you arrive at the final product. So we are always thinking at multiple scales, we are always thinking in those modular relationships. And I think that’s something that also translates to strategic planning. As far as you know, we talk a lot about a vision and then objectives and then initiatives under those objectives and sort of how everything builds up. And how it’s a two way street, you start with a vision, work it down. But then there’s sometimes there’s things you can find out about doing the work of the initiatives that might actually re-inform the vision. So I think that’s been an important piece too.
And like I mentioned implementation, so architecture is very much about sort of blue sky visioning and, you know, sketches and getting those to be at a level of such technical precision, that they can be built in the world to a tee when everything goes right. So I think our work is better by the way we’re always thinking about how this will hit the ground as opposed to kind of a vision or strategy in isolation.
Ed
That’s amazing. So everything from vision to implementation and having that cycle or feedback loop, that while you’re implementing you’re learning and adapting to the vision potentially.
Amanda
Absolutely.
Ed
Great. And I’m way out of my league here. But one of the terms that still, you know, stood out to me from architecture is this idea of affordance. And design affordance, whereby you need to take into account the actual user, and what they’re looking to achieve. The classic example is, you know, a sidewalk, but the fastest path is through the grass. And, you know, you see that kind of, you know, path through the grass, and that’s affordance. Right? What is the user behaviors? And what are they doing? You know, taking that concept? How do you think about creating a vision or implementation around that idea around affordance? If it fits.
Amanda
*Laughs* no, that’s a great question. I think of it the most, when it comes to implementation, we’ll talk a lot about user research and Human Centered Design in a customer sense, because business model innovation is very much about you know, making sure that you have this unique customer value, and being obsessed about that value is what’s going to make you successful. But the other user that is very much a part of our process, because we don’t do a lot of product or a lot of tech, we do a lot of service design, experience design and organizational design. So it’s so abstract, and it’s so much about the staff, the doctors, the faculty that are bringing this service into reality, those frontline folks that it’s really their affordance. And their belief in the vision that is going to make implementation successful.
We are always thinking about how big of an ask is this is this layering on additional work to a nine to five day is this something that’s actually going to make the other side of the coin user, the employees, really excited that this is really meaningfully connected to their work and allows them to really kind of just focus on the things that are going to matter to the customer and get rid of a lot of other stuff, let it go and really kind of make their work feel more purposeful at the end of the day. And we find that in addition to making sure that we’re involving them early on in the design process, like I mentioned, sort of building on the architectural design process where those folks are key people in the room, we can feed sort of insight, some key ideas about a vision, and be a little bit more hold hold loosely, what that implementation will look like. And really help them be the ultimate deciders in the character, what the implementation looks like.
It’s interesting in talking about this, I’m kind of realizing that we have a little bit of a history in lean as well, I would say that what we do borrows from several different methodologies. So I talked about human centered design, as the architecture, talked about business model innovation. But another thing that we really kind of base ourselves in early on and learn from our healthcare clients is lean. And the idea of asking those who do the work, how to best improve the work, and also sort of getting rid of waste as you bring in new ideas, I think are actually pretty important there. Thank you for helping me work through this kind of on the spot. But it harkens back to the history of the name Lens, and why we’re named that is because we bring different methodologies to the table. But I think it’s interesting, you kind of forget in your origin story a little bit where all these pieces come from, and I really appreciate that you reminded me of that.
Ed
Well, it’s you just use incredible words there around, you know, belief or believing. Making sure that everything is purposeful, that you’re highly inclusive, and really understanding, you know, what has meaning for people in their work, but making their work easier as well eliminating waste. And you know, by all those kind of facets, you gain the momentum behind not only the vision of their strategy, but also the implementation because it’s theirs. And that’s kind of the affordance piece is you’ve afforded them the ability to contribute to a vision or strategy and then they’re part of the implementation and to your point around lean, that constant learning to make it even better than the original vision. That’s That’s amazing.
Love for you to bring us through the Lens development. So it’s been four years. And what were some of the I would say barriers or accelerators that or aha moments that really kind of accelerated the entrepreneurship that you were able to go through to develop a new concept new strategy that you were so passionate about that resulted in where it is today.
Amanda
Yeah, thank you for asking. Back in 2014 there were some seeds around this idea of extended services. How do we take the services and capabilities that we have and extend them further and at that point, we were really talking about the question of, do we take the services deeper, or we take the services laterally to serve a different client body and that was sort of a question that was posed and the open-endedness of that piece of the strategic plan. I think it showed that there was sponsorship from leadership, but absolutely room for people to write in what that meant. And we put Lauren Janney, my mentor, and myself sort of directly in roles that we could explore that question all the time, as people who were incredibly passionate about how this would play out, I think that was another smart thing.
So open-endedness of the direction, putting folks in charge of that direction that had a ton of passion for this concept. And then finally, I think giving that a proper incubator startup attitude, because the organization as a whole is about 200 people. That’s a long decision making process just by nature of the amount of event- the height of the flagpole, so to speak. So we were given a runway of you know, this is up to you what you need, you need to be the experts in what this sounds like what this feels like you are directly engaging with clients, and can immediately be applying that back into the day to day offerings.
We were given a lot of trust and run away, to not necessarily have to ask for forgiveness or permission to just go. And I think we were able to do that for about six months, then a year and then two years and all those learnings that we picked up along the way that might not have happened if we had been a little bit more restricted or if our time had been split. So for example, we were able to be fully staffed to this incubated piece that would become lens as opposed to working on architecture projects as well, to make sure that the concept of lens the project of lens was from burner as opposed to back burner.
So I think that level of protection that went in to properly incubate this in the middle of a corporate entity that hasn’t really done this before, I think that was a really incredible instinct by leadership. And it allowed us to explore and learn so many things that we might have not been able to get as far upstream as strategic planning, if we had maybe only been directed to focus on lean, for example, and we would have sort of been in that cycle of operations and facilities, as opposed to the addition of strategy.
Ed
That’s amazing in when I think of even even startups, what you’re held accountable to as well, and I loved some of the things that you said around it was open ended, we were given the right to explore it was something we were passionate about. So you know that the folks you’re investing in essentially, as you would a startup have that level of drive that’s going to break through, you know, potential barriers.
What were some of the value points along the way. So, you know, an example startups they look for, you know, have you gone in the early stages? Have you gone beyond three customers? And are they not your friends out of college type of thing, it means you’re gaining that product market fit? So how did you kind of think about the value along the way over the four years? And how did you pitch that to senior executives to say, “hey, we’re on the right track because of X, Y, or Z?”
Amanda
That’s a good question. I think I would say, I think I would say repeat work, we were hired back by a few folks to continue on sort of related projects, or do more detail in existing projects. And that showed that we had really made good on the value that we propose, you can propose anything *laughs*.
Ed
Right.
Amanda
So the fact that even though we were pretty new at this, we were able to master it to a level of client satisfaction. I think we also were able to work with clients that the architecture firm had never worked with before. So we got our start, called an additional service, you know, through an architectural process saying, “hey, we actually have a team that can explore the side strategy question over here.” And the relationship came through the architecture door. And then we added a strategy piece to it. So that when we were starting to get work from brand new clients, that we weren’t relying on the reputation of our fantastic architecture colleagues, to really kind of make a warm handoff that we were we our pitch from sort of cold was accepted and exciting.
I think another important metric is once we started not only doing repeat work for the same client, but repeat work for the same project types, where we had a prototype to go on, we knew what staff we needed, we knew the schedule, it would take. That created a stronger financial performance, I think for the team. And I think we were given a little bit of leeway early on to just go do getting back to that kind of permission. You use a really incredible phrase I want to be able to quote but I can’t have to watch this back. So that’s been the journey of the four years as we tried to kind of go after as much as we could in the sense of where, you know, we could reasonably find work and then based on the successes we had there start to narrow into very specific project types and strategic planning has really been one of those ones that we’re we’re looking at now to continue to focus on.
Ed
That’s great. So many so many models come to mind. One is horizon, so h1, h2, h3, that, you know, horizon one is incremental product, or adjacent products. It sounds like you were in h2, which means you have a new product offering. But beyond that you were a little bit in h3 as well, because you were expanding market of clients that you hadn’t been able to target for for different reasons. But it sounds like you were really playing on the edge strategy using horizon. So that’s amazing.
Amanda
That’s really helpful. Thank you for putting it that way.
Ed
Sure. And, you know, I would love-
Amanda
I love trading tools and frameworks with folks thats a new one for me.
Ed
Absolutely. And I would love to ask you, what three pieces of advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur, startup person or someone who’s looking to really extend a current business model and create a whole new business model? What kind of advice would you give to, to someone that’s at that precipice of change.
Amanda
I would say, be hyper focused on problem framing, and be a little bit more solution agnostic than you might traditionally lean to. So I think it’s important to kind of, if you’re in this pivot moment, where maybe you’ve come from Tech, and you’re getting into consulting, or you’ve come from, in my case, space, and are getting into consulting or, you know, there’s all sorts of different hybrids that this industry creates. And I think we need, I think we need more of them. So I encourage people to go down this path, first and foremost, but I think the common skill, no matter what medium you practice in at the end of the day, is that problem framing piece. And that’s going to guide you as you are maybe developing a new kind of project that you’ve never really done before, to keep you on target, those guiding principles of that user experience you’re trying to create the problem you’re trying to solve.
And then I think this is the more interdisciplinary we can get the better in the sense that I will always maybe be a little bit biased towards space, I’m really trying to shed that. But you know, it’s not as fast as a technology solution. Say we’re working on a project where health outcomes is a is what we’re trying to affect, by the time we can solve it spatially, maybe a year will have gone by, but the benefit of space over maybe tech is that there’s 100% adoption rate of space, because everyone has to walk through the front door of a clinic, you know, so I think the more you can focus on problem framing, the looser you may be hold what that ultimate medium or ultimate deliverable is.
And you don’t have to wear all those hats yourself, I think you can find collaborators that really are excited about the problems that you’re framing. And then you can combine skillsets, to be able to deliver hybrid solutions across a whole different set of mediums that would be more effective than a deep dive into any one of them.
Ed
I love that, frame the problem, make sure you’re solving the right problem by framing it. And I loved your inter-disciplinarian approach, I thought of polymaths, actually. So people who have you know, broad and in deep thinking in different areas and bringing them together as in a collaboration to really come up with, you know, the problems framed right, the potential solutions that can be brought to bear.
Amanda
I think my second recommendation or piece of advice would be when we came out of the gate, I think there was an instinct to kind of be buttoned up and be experts in this. And I think the more you can actually let go of that, and leverage the fact that creativity is so tied to a beginner’s mindset. And that you see problems differently because you haven’t done this 400 times can actually be to your benefit. And as far as practicing that, I absolutely recommend being a teacher of some kind, either formally or informally through you know, mentorship with folks in your firm, because it keeps you from being able to hide behind jargon as you explain something. So, working in settings, with beginners with beginner’s mindset, I think it’s kind of contagious. And the more exposure to that, the more you can stay there, and it will translate into client environments, where you really need to be able to explain the why really, really clearly. And if you can’t explain why that that’s okay to that you’ll figure it out together.
Ed
I love that the beginner’s mindset, you know, always as you’re approaching opportunity or issue, and then teaching because teaching requires you to understand but then articulate around what you’re solving for and iterating on that to make sure that clarity is there. And then I always think about teaching and doing as well. So it’s almost like as you’re doing your client work, you have the beginner’s mindset, you have some things to teach, it might be you know, strategy strategy frameworks, but you’re engaging with them. And then really understanding the why that you’re going after to solve. That’s great.
Amanda
I think the last piece that I would recommend to folks that are trying to pivot a little bit, especially in place would be to really diversify your network. So my LinkedIn feed used to be entirely other architecture firms, other architects, you know, we have a reputation for actually, you know, kind of sticking to ourselves being kind of a hermetically sealed group. And the more you can kind of expand who you’re receiving information from the resources, you follow the people that you follow, I think it helps- getting back to that first point of being focused on problem framing and holding more loosely, the actual solution format, by surrounding yourself with practitioners from other industries, it just is steep in it, and it helps you think differently. And, you know, you might be able to suggest different ways of doing the traditional work at your firm that would suggest something that should be incubated. So I think diversifying your network, both from an industry standpoint, and also, of course, the sort of cultural moment we’re in now, that the more perspective and life experiences you can be exposed to and are absorbing on a day to day basis, you know, those ideas are only going to become more meaningful and more valid at the end of the day. So I mean, I mean, that in both senses of the word to diversify.
Ed
That’s great, amazing advice for entrepreneurs or startup folks around, you know, frame the problem, right to start really have a an interdisciplinary approach to problems. And then, you know, having that beginner’s mindset approaching any problem, because that’s going to really bring out curiosity and, and questioning and you know, really helping frame that problem correctly. And then as you look to pivot, leaning on and diversifying not only your network, but you know, being inclusive as well.
So that’s, that’s an amazing set of advice for for folks. So, Amanda, we couldn’t appreciate more you being on Thinking Edge today. And what a brilliant minds entrepreneur. You’re an architect, you’re a designer, you’re a strategist, really kind of that really polymath that is able to go deep, right? Because- and develop, you know, broad, broad solutions. So we couldn’t appreciate you taking the time with us today.
Amanda
Thank you so much for having me. This has been really fun. And you’ve prompted me to think differently in the past conversation. Absolutely brought some fresh thinking to me just having this time with you. So thank you very much.
Ed
Awesome. Thank you.
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