David Koren

Everything you know is already out of date

(written for submission for the Spring Newsletter of the IIDA-NY Chapter)

The Internet has brought unprecedented changes to the way we work and live—email, Googling, Ebay, Amazon, instantaneous access to the news. We are now at a point where we are beginning to achieve critical mass (there are, as of January 2006, a billion people on the Internet) and the changes that the Internet is bringing to our lives are, if anything, coming at an increasingly faster rate.

We are now in the era of “Web 2.0.”  Web 1.0 was when every site was like an ad, flat and static, updated by one person or a limited team. Now, in the era of “Web 2.0,” things are becoming more dynamic. We’re seeing a lot more interactivity, and a lot more many-to-many communications. Everyone is a potential web publisher; everyone is a potential contributor to the dialogue that is happening online. This massive interactivity, in real time, around the clock, has real implications for the way we communicate with our clients and market our services. How does the immediacy of an emailed proposal change the client relationship? How does the fact that your client is reading your blog change how you relate as professionals?

Here are four ideas about how the facts of life, work, and professional communications are changing:

1.         You can find out anything about your clients—and your clients can find out anything about you.

Everybody Googles. There’s a well-known cartoon by Peter Steiner that appeared in the New Yorker (July 5, 1993)  with two dogs sitting at a computer. One dog says to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Today, using the Internet, anybody can find out if you’re a dog, or if you’re the leader in your profession, or if you’ve ever been arrested, or if you bought a house recently. The Internet has moved from an anonymous communications medium to a venue that is hyper-public, and recorded in perpetuity. A recent BusinessWeek article reported on prospective employers Googling job applicants, and finding quite a bit revealed on sites like MySpace.com. We all have a lot more information about each other at our fingertips than we used to, but what we do with it, and how it changes how we relate as professionals, is an open question.

2.         People are talking—about everything—including you.

There is an incredible amount of chatter on the Internet. On blogs and in forums, users post on every topic imaginable—reviewing their new digital camera, sharing advice or personal anecdotes, complaining about an employer or a service provider. There’s an old adage in marketing that if a customer is happy, they'll tell two people about you, but if they're not happy, they'll tell nine people about you. Today, if you provide service that a client is not happy with, the client could easily tell thousands of people. It's more important than ever to manage all of your relationships carefully—with clients, employees, partners, consultants. To check out the kinds of chatter that are happening online in our industry check out the Gutter, the design-gossip page of the Curbed real estate blog. The forums in Archinect can get a little saucy, too.

3.         People are sharing—a lot.

One of the most positive things about the Internet is the amount of collaboration and knowledge-sharing that is taking place. Wikipedia  is quickly becoming the best source in the world for information on anything; however, since the articles are written by an army of volunteers, you sometimes need to provide your own reality-check to the information you find there. Programmers utilize the Internet to work collaboratively on open source software—such as Linux or OpenOffice, a free, open source Microsoft Office clone. People want to participate, be a part of building something, and be recognized for it. All companies would be served by learning to harness the passion of their customers (think about the way that Amazon allows any customer to write a review of any product in its catalog) or their employees (Google gives every employee one day a week to work on innovative personal projects) to support the success of the company.

4.         How soon is ASAP? How fast is too fast?

Wherever you are, your client can reach you. You’ve got a mobile phone. You can check your email. You can respond to a request by emailing a PDF file of a plan or a rendering or a contract. In this entirely digital, mobile-enabled, always-on world, what’s to stop you from responding instantly to any communication, any request from any client, at any hour, from any location? Well, you just can’t work like that, right? Sometimes you need to turn the computer off, let the phone go to voice mail, and leave the Blackberry in the next room. But determining the parameters of when you are on and when you are off is getting harder all the time.

There’s so much change underway in the way we communicate, it’s tempting to make overbroad statements like, “It’s all changing!” But, in fact, it isn’t. We are riding an accelerating parabola of change, but what this means is that essentials are as important as ever. People do still hire people, so building personal relationships with clients based on trust and mutual respect is still the most important thing to do to build business. The Internet doesn’t change that—it just provides a new landscape in which to do it, with new rules and new challenges.

Why Things Go Wrong

There's a famous quote (and the only attribution I can find right now is from Robert Fothergill's play Public Lies, written in 1993, but I doubt that's the original appearance) that says something like: "There's only one way to get it right, but there are an infinite number of ways to get it wrong." While I've always believed this was basically true, it's occurred to me this week that, in fact, when things go wrong, there are actually only a few areas in which the problems can occur.

Part of my thinking on this is influenced by reading Marshall McLuhan lately. McLuhan posits that everything is basically media, that "media" is any extension of the human form. If this is, in fact, true, then we can look at building a building and writing this article as both actions to create media. In other words, they're both part of a very similar creative process.

So what is this process, and where do things break down? Well, I've noticed at work that I'm often blaming either strategy, or communications, or leadership for basically anything that goes wrong. For example, the Enron and Arthur Andersen collapses were both failures of leadership, because leadership is responsible for injecting a vision, a mission, ethics, and style into any creative process. And in the case of those two companies, clearly, who ever was keeping their eye on the ethics was clearly out to lunch.

Communications are at fault a lot of the time--we've all seen that. One of my favorite communications snafus is when somebody uses a pronoun in a sentence (such as "It is really important to me.") and the person listening to the message things the pronoun ("it") is referring to something totally different, like say, getting home at a decent hour, when actually the person is talking about keeping Roe v. Wade from getting overturned or something.

When strategy breaks down, it's usually because somebody hasn't thought things through, or there isn't agreement among decision makers. A great example here is the AOL-Time Warner merger. Did anybody have a plan there? Or, of course, more topically, the Iraq War. Did anybody who actually knew anything about Iraq actually think this would be easy? Was anybody who knew anything about Iraq actually consulted? If they were consulted, did the decision-makers actually listen to them, or did they just barrel ahead, following their mission, without regard for reality.

So, generally, things go wrong when either leadership is absent to provide vision, mission, ethics, and style, or when a strategy is based on incorrect assumptions, or when the strategy is not communicated clearly. But there's one other place where things can get messed up: knowledge. A leader needs to look around and see the world as it is, and gather information. Then, that information must be viewed with perspective to transform it into knowledge. One of the great failings of any leader is not acknowledging that which you do not know. If you don't know what you don't know, you have a serious blind spot, and you are doomed to fail. This is certainly part of what happened in Iraq (but I believe the strategic failure was far greater than the failure due to lack of knowledge).

I created a little sketch to illustrate what I'm talking about here--that any process is driven by perspective and information, and follows a process of gathering knowledge, creating strategy, and developing communication--all informed by leadership. Here it is:

I've got an 11x17 of this hanging above my desk, and I'm thinking about it and trying to continue to develop it as a model for thinking about leadership and action.  (PDF File here.)  Let me know what you think!

A Political Exhibition at the Center for Architecture

The new exhibit at the Center for Architecture on Barcelona, "Barcelona in Progress," is the most political thing that the Center has done since it opened in Fall 2003. What better way to point out the failings of New York's public and private development community than with an exhibit that features a city that seems to be able to get it right, creating great public buildings and spaces that are well designed and that work for the people of Barcelona?

For example, just look at Torre Agbar, the building that was just completed in Barcelona for Agbar, the water company in Barcelona. Whether it's your taste or not, you've gotta admit that the design is certainly more ambitious than anything proposed for Ground Zero.

There was a great article on Bloomberg News yesterday about the exhibit at the Center, and what it says about the lack of a cohesive design-oriented plan for Ground Zero. Read it here:

What Ground Zero Planners Could Learn From Barcelona (Bloomberg News, 4/12/2006)