Truth Is Golden ep. 305 - Good Fucking Design Podcast w/ Jason Bacher

One founding half of GFDA and certified foulmouth, Jason Bacher is a talented designer, dedicated teacher and all-around decent human being. We talked about his humble beginnings selling wallpaper and how that eventually led him to found Good Fucking Design Advice with his long-time friend Brian Buirge. We also talked about failure, the strangeness of moving to new cities, firing your mother twice and the value of standing out using unbridled profanities.

About the podcast: The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

The second greatest drummer of all time

At the risk of sounding insensitive, I usually don't get too interested when celebrities die. Part of the reason, it seems, is that unless it's someone whose work I appreciate and am familiar with, I just don't feel any connection with them, even though it's always sad when someone dies. However, I am really not interested in the celebrity fame game. Plus, for every one of them that dies, how many complete strangers have died in absolute anonymity? Instead, I like to think nice thoughts for all the people who die whom we will never know about.

There are a few exceptions. As you may know, Neil Peart recently died of cancer and I felt pretty sad when I learned the news. Not only was he an essential part of the greatest Canadian band of all time, but he was also a fellow motorcyclist who travelled the world on two wheels.

A few years ago, I read his memoir "Ghost Rider" which is the story of how he healed his broken heart after losing his only teenage daughter in a car accident and then his wife 10 months later, whom he claimed "let herself die of sorrow". The story of his grief and eventual newfound appreciation for life was one of the most touching non-fiction books I have ever read and shaped how I was to deal with my own grief after my mother passed away a few years later.

I'm not sad so much because he passed away, as I had no personal connection to the man, but I am certainly sad to see such a raw, creative powerhouse disappear, because we lost someone who genuinely brought something honest and valuable to the world, and that's a great loss.

In times where all we hear on the news (even for someone who doesn't watch the news like me) is doomsday scenarios, crises and petty politics, it is refreshing to come across someone who loved life so much that he was able to pass down something positive to the world, and for that, I am sad.

RIP Neil.

Single Serves ep. 105 - Johnson on Creativity and Innovation

Beck Johnson is our guest on the latest Single Serves podcast. Our conversation on creativity and innovation is one of my favourites to date as she is an engaging speaker and a wealth of knowledge. Enjoy!

Check it out below.

On Not Taking Rejection Personally

Reading time ~19 minutes

For anyone selling anything, being rejected on a regular basis is par for the course. It is going to happen and it’s gonna hurt. We’ll explore below why that is and how we can deal with this. Ideally, business is just business and we wouldn’t react to rejection when it happens. We’d just take it for what it is: a signal that a prospect is not interested and move on. But in reality, we often pour so much of ourselves in our work, that being rejected feels more like a personal insult where we take the rejection of our offering, be it products or services as a personal affront. It’s especially true for us, creative people, who are trying to sell our thinking.

If you’re particularly sensitive to what other people say about your work, perhaps the selling part is not for you and better left to seasoned salespeople. Some people have thicker skin than others and can take rejection all day, every day and never think twice about it. For others, including yours truly, there is a small part of us that cannot help but take it personally. When that happens, we can train ourselves to handle the situation swiftly in order to avoid being taken out of commission because we can’t handle it on a personal level.

How to reject people with grace and class

Not all rejections are made equal, some people are really good at being direct and open about their choices while being gentle at the same time. These people have mastered the art of being empathetic and by putting themselves in someone else’s shoes are able to say no while being very gracious about it. I once received a rejection letter from a Simon Sinek’s press team that actually made me feel good about being rejected. I had requested a podcast interview and Sinek was too busy to appear on my podcast. 

Below is an excerpt from the letter. That level of people skills is the gold standard that we should all strive for:

“I'm Jen on Simon's press team. Thank you for taking the time to reach out with your request to spread Simon’s message. We love it when people choose to share the WHY in their own right to inspire others. That is what makes the movement to inspire strong. So, thank you.

Simon is only one person. While we wish we could say ‘yes!’ to every worthwhile request that comes in, we are simply unable. Simon is knee-deep in writing his next book, The Infinite Game. We are doing our best to give him the space to keep charging ahead with the writing process and his significant commitments to grow the WHY movement. For this reason, we are going to graciously pass on your request.

Thank you again for what you are doing to make the world around you a better place. Your WHY (and HOW-- the podcast is great) is an inspired way to help the professional creative community!”

Reading the text carefully, we notice that a few elements stand out:

1. She responds by acknowledging the time and effort it took to reach out and says thank you. At no point, there is a hint of “We’re too cool for school and you should be happy that we deign to give you the time of day”. Her answer is positive, polite and empathetic.

2. She acknowledges the validity of the request and the purpose of it.

3. Then she proceeds to explain in detail why he is too busy to take on this request. Which is another way to say “your podcast isn’t significant enough for us to consider”, but without being hurtful.

4. She closes the letter by acknowledging once more what I am trying to accomplish and encouraging it.

I am aware that it may look like a shit sandwich on the surface. A shit sandwich is a way to give feedback that sugarcoats bad news or negative commentary with meaningless niceties and is completely ineffective. There is one major difference, in this case, is that the letter reads authentic. For anyone familiar with Sinek’s work, the response is completely consistent with his message, purpose and everyone working with him will communicate in a similar fashion, a sign that he has mastered the cultural foundation of his business. The authenticity and empathy are what make this missive stand out from the rest. I remember when I first received it, it actually felt good to read it because it wasn’t a rejection of myself or my work, but merely based on his inability to fulfill every request he gets, and Jen was a master at getting this point across.

How to deal with painful rejection:

Unfortunately, the majority of people don’t have nearly that level of skill and their rejections will be clumsy, merciless and will invariably sting. The degree of pain is directly correlated to their communication skills. Some people might even be total assholes about it and purposely try to hurt you while rejecting you. Perhaps their mommy didn’t love them enough or their spouse drove them crazy that day, but whatever the reason, better be prepared for it. There is nothing we can do about the other party’s actions, but there are things we can do to make that pill a little easier to swallow on our end. 

At a high level, being clear on your business’s purpose, mission and values make it easier to endure rejection. Knowing what you stand for and being clear on how you can help your clients with clearly articulated solutions helps tremendously, because if you consciously know why you do what you do and truly believe in it, then rejection just becomes another hurdle on the way, the true goal being to find your people, that is, the type of clients that believe in what you do and are culturally aligned with your business. If and when you reach that level of mastery no amount of rejection will affect you because you are anchored on a solid foundation. What’s even more amazing is that the stronger your culture is, the less you will be rejected as the people you interact with on a daily basis will become more and more aligned with you.

That enables you to take rejection for what it is: merely the expression of a lack of desire on someone’s part to interact with you or your business, but ultimately that has nothing to do with you. It’s much easier to deal with rejection when one is grounded and clear on their purpose. 

Another thing that helps is Meditation. It teaches us that all things in life are impermanent and in a constant state of flux. Good things come and go, but so do the bad. If we learn to accept the impermanent nature of life and stop craving for things, then we truly learn what’s important and let go of the things of unimportant nature, such as rejection. It is a tremendous practise that helps us stay grounded in tough times.

Some tricks that help.

One trick I’ve learned from a coach I’ve worked with is to constantly remind myself that I can train myself to be completely detached from the outcome when I am selling my services. I do so by repeating a predetermined mantra every day before starting my work. While this is very effective in the short term to overcome minor barriers and a great way to remind myself why it is that I do what I do, it is only a quick fix that if not practiced every day will quickly lose its value.

Perhaps, it’s the way we talk about our work that’s not convincing enough to make prospects see the true value of what we do. While we may think that our work is a gift from God in our heads - and it could very well be - if that fact is not clearly articulated when we try to sell our ideas and we cannot convince a prospect in 30 seconds or less why they should hire us, or at least grant us an audience, then this gift from God is useless. The best thing to do in that case is to educate ourselves and learn how to sell effectively so that we are rejected less often. A common mistake is that we all tend to talk about ourselves when trying to convince prospects to buy our services while failing to look for and address the client’s pain points. It’s a lot easier to persuade someone when the conversation is about them and how what we offer can make their life easier.

Another possible avenue for improvement is to be picky about the people we try to sell to. By trying to connect with just about anyone with a pulse, in order to sell our services, we end up talking to many unqualified prospects and therefore increasing our chances of rejection. By being more choosy, we end up connecting with people who have the greatest potential to become clients and thus reduce our chance of being rejected.

The way we conduct ourselves also says a lot about who we are and the people we speak to always pick-up on non-verbal communication, even on the phone. The first few seconds of interaction can make or break the rest of the conversation. Being polite and grateful, as well as training yourself to become good at small talk, go a long way to get people to open up to what we have to offer more quickly. A quick way to create rapport with a stranger is to ask them questions about themselves, it will make them feel valued and validated and will open the door to further conversation very quickly.

Ultimately, rejection is easier for some of us, but it isn’t easy for most people. Finding ways to cope with it in the short term is useful, but working on your own resilience and that of your business, by striving to develop services that have a lot of value and that people want, will lead you to be more successful in the long term, while facing fewer “nos”. When you become a master at your craft, people will come to you and beg you to work with them, which ultimately makes dealing with rejection irrelevant.

What about you? What are some of the tricks you use to deal with rejection?

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaudrvltr.studio.

How old-school photography techniques are changing the digital game.

Reading time ~7 minutes

In the film days of photography, the possibilities of editing images were bound by the limitations of printing images on paper from a film negative, effectively limiting prints to narrow parameters of correctness. Photographic printing was a skill mastered by a few artisans, whose function was to bring the photographer’s vision to life through a lifetime of accumulated darkroom skills.

While photographers were more deliberate on set and did multiple tests of their envisioned shots, primarily through the use of polaroids to test their views, they had little more than an intuitive idea of what the resulting finished image would look like, as there was no way to instantly review images, the way we are able to now with digital photography. They relied on a combination of skills, accumulated knowledge and a good dose of luck. As film was an expensive commodity, nothing like the nearly free and virtually unlimited storage ability of digital media, the more one took shots, the more expensive a shoot would become, forcing photographers to find the right balance between shooting enough frames to ensure a good ratio of useable images and not going overboard, thus rendering the shoot prohibitively expensive.

While they were limited by the techniques of the day and their associated costs, a good photographer then would have to possess the ability to envision and plan a good shot even without the use of polaroids or cameras. That vision, a combination of the intuition-based “ability to see” and experience acquired through dedicated practice, is still what makes a good architectural photographer today, as the tools of the trade have little influence over one’s skillset. 

With the advent of tools to both shoot and edit images digitally, a whole new world of possibilities has opened to image producers. For people with large film archives, digital tools enabled the re-interpretations of old photographs through the lens of modern technology. 

The late Balthazar Korab, famed 20th century architectural photographer and lifelong collaborator of Eero Saarinen, had the opportunity in his later years to re-appraise portions of his archive, but this time acting as a sort of curator of his work and bring new life to old photographs, only revisiting the images that stood the test of time and emerged as exceptional. He did so with the help of his supremely talented son, Christian Korab. 

During their collaboration, while preparing a definitive edition of his father’s images for a monograph on Cranbrook Academy (one of Korab’s favourite subjects which he repeatedly photographed over many decades) in a new digital medium, Christian was able to execute his father’s vision in a way which was never quite reachable before the digital editing tools we have today came into being. These digitized re-mastered images were described by Korab father as:

 “The precise and nearly-flawless execution that I could never quite realize in darkroom printing.” 

Indeed, his son has parlayed a lifelong working relationship with his father into a set of skills that very few, if anyone else has. It is the ideal blend of technical and aesthetic vision for the finished project. He developed a way to digitize film and master it into digital files that not only allow for the most faithful rendering possible to date but also allow for nearly flawless, unambiguous reproduction and archival conservation.

What is image mastering?

Mastering is a term that’s been widely used in the sound and film industries to describe a process aimed at codifying complex and collaborative artistic efforts that involve a variety of talents. When it comes to photography, it means bringing a similar level of predictability and reproducibility, with a great degree of accuracy to finished images.

In sound engineering, mastering was born from the need to reproduce music with the highest degree of fidelity across many systems of unequal quality, from cheap speakers to hi-fi systems worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the sound mastering process, artists codify their vision of how their music should be rendered to ensure that it renders in the best possible way on any system.

In film, mastering allows filmmakers to coordinate sound and colour to create a coherent finished product, accounting for the varying conditions in which the movie was shot and recorded. It essentially takes disparate pieces of raw material and through the editing process ensures that they are coherent and aesthetically pleasing in the finished product. Once the colour grading process is done, the viewer should not be able to see any differences across the scenes of a movie, even though they may have been shot at different times with varying pieces of equipment (this Instagram account is a great way to learn more about the idea).

Ultimately, the goal of these mastering techniques is to ensure that the artistic intent gets conveyed as accurately as possible. Learning from these other industries, Korab developed this methodology while trying to solve the problem of ensuring the perennial survival of his father’s film-based archive. It turns out that the process is also supremely applicable to digitally-native photography editing and archival, as it enables photographers to produce more consistent images across their entire catalogue and oftentimes, turn decent images into hero shots.

Additionally, mastering allows artists to include in the master files information relevant to using the images in the myriad of possible formats, such as fine art printmaking, publication, electronic display, archiving and art conservation. It is, therefore, a unique kind of artifact that possesses both raw information and the final rendition of an artwork. In other words, a digital photographic master is to photography what an audio master is to the recording industry:  an unambiguous, infinitely reproducible original artifact that is used to produce all subsequent versions of an image.

If properly archived and backed-up accordingly, its stability over time is guaranteed, as digital files do not decay and can be infinitely reproduced, the redundancy making information highly resilient. Another advantage is that the artist’s vision if properly reproduced, cannot be unintentionally modified as the master contains all the information about accurate reproduction in as many types of media as desired. 

A well-produced master is non-destructive, meaning that the work can always be revisited at a later date by the artist and modified to taste. These multiple interpretations are included in the master, thus forming a one-stop-shop history of the multiple versions of the same work

“The negative is the score and the print is the symphony”

Ansel Adams.

If we are to believe Adams' words, a digital master thus includes both the score and the symphony, not only that, but it can also include many symphonic performances, all infinitely reproducible.

Why you should care about it.

Formatting the images that represent your work in a highly-codified, high-fidelity file, enables the representation of your body of work in the most refined of ways. Not only the rendering of your images will be better, but the files themselves can embody a multitude of variations ensuring that your work is always showing up at its best no matter which media it is showcased on.

I have yet to find someone who doesn’t want this level of precision and quality in the public display of their work. Ultimately, your work will not sell itself, but beautiful imagery, well designed and perfectly reproduced will certainly help you convey what your work is about and enable you to find the clients that want what you have to offer.

The work you’re most proud of deserves the best of renditions, don’t you think?

This piece was co-written and edited with/by Christian Korab. If you’d like to know more about how image mastering can work for you, contact us and we’ll walk you through the process.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud@rvltr.studio.

Double Whammy: Single Serves Ep. 104 in Building Magazine and podcast form!

Toon Dreessen

Toon Dreessen, architect has been a relentless advocate for procurement reform in the architecture industry. While there has been some movement in the right direction, it's still not enough according to him and in some cases puts architects in very tricky situations. This is a debate that goes well beyond the scope of this interview, but listen in to learn more about the topic and be inspired to fight the good fight along with Dreesen.

Listen here or check our the interview transcript in Building Magazine.

Walking A Mile In Their Shoes

Reading time ~4 minutes

Every human being living on this planet is looking for something unique to themselves. Self-interested by nature, humans are always trying to fulfill their best interest first. Empathy, the ability to put yourself in one’s shoes, allows us to understand on a deeper level why someone would want to be a certain way. By doing so, it enables us to understand what these people need and want in order to help them achieve their goals.

Being good to someone is little more than that: having the ability to understand their emotional, physical, financial, spiritual and mental needs and being able to cater to those. The opposite would be to not acknowledge this and act regardless of someone else’s needs. We’ve all been in situations where we faced someone completely disregarding our wants, fears and needs. Remember how that made you feel, likely not good at all. Short of being a sociopath, most of us are not looking to be purposely be that way.

In a professional context, most people are situated somewhere on the following pyramid of needs, ranging from basic fears to higher level aspirations, described as follows:

1. “I want to keep my job”

2. “I want to avoid criticism”

3. “I want to avoid headaches”

4. “I want to feel pride in the results I produce”

5. “I want to leave a legacy”

In understanding this, it enables us to adjust the way we deal with people by understanding their need to grow professionally and being able to assess where they stand on the scale. You’re not going to convince a client to get involved in a risky, yet potentially very rewarding project if they fear for their job and need to play it safe. Conversely, a client who is working in a healthy and profitable business may not be interested in playing it safe and will be willing to take on bigger risks in order to fulfill the dream of leaving a legacy.

Because everybody is different and has different needs, dreams and aspirations, empathy is a great tool to help us understand people on a personal level and cater to their aspirations. Since everybody has different needs and aspirations, offering clients a one-size fits all service is likely not going to serve anyone well. For you, the service provider, it means attempting to fit the proverbial square peg in a round hole, struggling to keep clients on board with a solution that at best only partially fulfills their aspirations. For clients, it guarantees an endless suite of frustrated moments where they shake their heads and silently cringe at your inability to understand their needs.

I often get asked “What can you do for me?” before I have a chance to do a proper diagnostic of the prospect’s needs and I have had to train myself to not take the bait and start reciting a list of ready-made solutions to previously-encountered problems. Instead, I firmly but politely explain that I cannot prescribe solution until a proper diagnosis is done, even though I may already have gleaned sufficient information to have a pretty good idea of what it is that they need. Should they continue to press for a specific answer, that’s a telltale sign of them not being a good fit for the kind of work I do and therefore I gracefully bow out by saying “I don’t think I am in a position to help you at this time”.

As a designer, would you start designing solution for your clients without first spending time understanding, defining and re-framing the problems at hand? Clients hire us because they have a problem they don’t know how to solve and if we don’t try and solve this problem the best we can by jumping to conclusions, then we dilute the value of our thinking and undermine the quality of our work and reputations in the process.

As creative service professionals, one challenge we all face is that people who don’t share this mode of creative, non-linear thinking often confuse creativity and innovation with magical powers, where miraculously creative people pull new and innovative ideas out of a hat. As discussed previously, we are all inherently creative, the most creative of us being merely better at harnessing their creative abilities than others.

As a result, it is our duty to do whatever is in our power to “walk a mile in our clients shoes” in order to understand the problems they face from their perspective and being able to start formulating the best solutions to these problems. If that’s something you’ve been struggling with in your client relationships, what’s the first step you can take today to start taking corrective action?

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Single Serves ep. 103 - Sobchak On Media Literacy And Criticism

Peter Sobchak

In episode 103 I interviewed peter sobchak, editor in chief of canadian interiors, building magazine and lover of great design. Peter and I talked about criticism and media literacy or lack thereof in the architecture industry and the challenges that it poses. Listen in to learn more about peter's thinking on the subject.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: Produced by Révélateur Studio, ©2019 / Post-Production: Ryan Aktari

How to break up with shitty clients

Reading time ~10 minutes

For those of us out there who run businesses, we all know how stressful that can be. Ensuring steady revenue, dealing with the taxman, managing employees expectations, satisfying clients, etc., entrepreneurs are always pulled in a million different directions, which can be exhausting and in the worst of cases, very stressful. In the course of running a business, one will inevitably face challenges that need to be resolved. One challenge that I think is worth addressing, because in my opinion, not talked about enough, is how to deal with shitty, dishonest and unreasonable clients.

The first thing that may come to your mind when dealing with this topic is the old adage “the client is always right”. While this may be applicable to transactional businesses, say retail stores, where clients opinions and behaviours don’t really affect the transaction and where it’s beneficial for the retail outlet in the long term to have repeat clients, I think it doesn’t apply at all where professional services are concerned. When what we sell is intellectual capital and exponentially valuable solutions to our clients, where our best thinking will directly contribute to the client’s long term success in impactful ways, treating that provider-client relationship in a transactional fashion is at best wrong-headed. Clients are not always right and when they’re unreasonably giving us hell, we are perfectly justified to put them in their place. More on that below.

My experience tells me that most clients will be reasonable or at least open to exploring mutually satisfying solutions when problems arise. Once in a blue moon, however, a client may appear to exist solely to make our lives difficult and nothing can be done to satisfy them. Similar situations sometimes pop up in our lives. We encounter people for whom a peaceful co-existence is not possible and whose every action is meant to cause grief. I’m not going to expand on the reasons why this is, but simply base my argument on the fact that it is a reality and spell out what can be done to get out of a pickle when it arises.

I written before about the value of good positioning and how vetting clients helps us avoid the bad ones. Sometimes, though, we just get hired to do a job and don’t have the luxury to position ourselves or vet the client properly. Heck, sometimes we just need the cash. It’s a reality that we’ve all faced at one point or another, but I think it’s worth addressing because even though we would all love to operate in ideal conditions 100% of the time, the reality is different and it’s best to be prepared for disasters, even though they may never occur.

A good client is someone who understands what you do, its value and how it’s going to benefit them. These clients require little hand-holding and will largely leave you alone to do your work once enough trust has been established. They might occasionally call you out on a mistake, shortcoming or failure, but will do so by always being open to finding solutions to these problems. They are generally well-balanced individuals, adept at interpersonal relationships who understand that mutual gains are better in the long term than self-centered, selfish behaviours.

Bad clients, conversely, are the ones who complain all the time, blame others blindly and will consider you guilty until proven innocent. They cut you off in the conversation and never even give anyone a chance to rectify whatever it is that they see as a problem. Not to mention that they often act like a hammer in search of a nail, every little thing that doesn’t go their way becomes a problem or worse, they create problems out of thin air. In short, there is no reasonable dialogue possible because no matter what one does, they see others as adversaries who are in the wrong. The worst of them will use deception, dishonest tactics to gain the upper hand, often resorting to threats to get their point across. In other terms, they’ll act like elementary school bullies.

Dealing with bad clients requires that one becomes a bit of a psychologist in order to understand the motivations behind their bad behaviour. In the worst of cases, some clients are just out for blood and will not stop until they cause serious damage or are met with fearless determination, showing them that their behaviour will be met by a worthy opponent that will not back down at the first sight of them showing their teeth.

The best defence against this is to be irreproachable in behaviour. Honouring our word and fulfilling obligations is the best way to cover one’s ass, as it will leave clients with few things to latch on in order to make life miserable. Sometimes, no amount of contracts, written record of all interactions or any other form of accountability is sufficient.  When a mutually agreeable solution is not workable, we have to resort to more radical solutions. Detaching oneself from the outcome and acting like we don’t give a fuck is a powerful tool in our arsenal. When one doesn’t worry about what others will think about them, it allows for an unprecedented amount of freedom as we are now mentally free to tackle the problem with a cool head and think of a solution in terms of doing the right thing, as opposed to bending over backwards in order to try and defuse a time bomb that will go boom no matter what and lose our shirts in the process.

How to not lose sleep.

Doing the right thing will look different for everyone according to our own view of the world and moral compass. But the most important thing to keep in mind when trying to do the right thing is to think of it in terms of what solution will allow us to fix the issue and still be able to sleep at night. I believe it’s more important to find peace of mind than to try and satisfy everyone, which is by definition, simply impossible. For me, doing the right thing is ensuring that I respect and uphold my personal values, as these are extremely important to me and the foundation of my business. That means that sometimes, clients will be pissed off, but that is not really my concern, as I have no control over how people react to a given situation. We can certainly influence how people react in the way we conduct ourselves, but that influence is limited as I mentioned above, some people, no matter how much we try to make it right by them, will never be satisfied.

Understanding that is key to coming out of these interactions unscathed. I’d like to get a little more specific in how to deal with certain clients’ behaviours that you may encounter. Whenever a problem arises, and I am faced with someone who’s not willing to have a reasonable adult conversation, I paint them in my mind as an unruly child who doesn’t know better and still needs to learn how to socialize in a peaceful manner. I don’t look at it from the assumption that I’m better than them, but rather as a reminder that I can choose to lead by example, like a good parent, through my actions and that my actions will both signal to them what my intentions are and with luck, perhaps bring them back to reality.

Here are a few suggestions that often go a long way to resolving issues with bad clients:

• Empathize and sympathize: I always give the other person the opportunity to express themselves, it both gives them space to state the problem and gives me a chance to look at the problem from their perspective. It is also a powerful tool to defuse tense situations. Very few people would respond negatively to someone who’s openly and willingly giving them the opportunity to express themselves. If you’re lucky, it may work in your favour towards finding a solution.

• Never respond in kind: When facing insults and personal attacks, it can be very tempting to respond in kind and escalate the situation. However, a lifetime of interpersonal relationships shows us that it only ever makes things worse. When people launch into personal attacks, it is to get the best out of us and trigger a reaction. No reaction at all is more jarring than a response in kind as most people do not know how to respond to that. If you don’t respond to the abuse, a client escalating insults when there is no reaction on your side only contributes to make them look unhinged.

• Politely call them out on their bad behaviour: without resorting to verbal violence, insults or threats, it is OK to tell people that their behaviour is unacceptable. If they truly misbehave, you are perfectly within you rights to say so and explain why their behaviour is not warranted. It also helps managing expectations, especially if your expectations have not been made clear in the first place.

• Always remember that it’s just business. It’s very difficult to deal with an unreasonable family member, because most of us cannot just walk away from a shitty sibling or in-law. We’re often tied to them for the long haul and have to work towards long-term peace by making small sacrifices today. A client, conversely, is just that and once the relationship ends, we likely will never have to deal with them again. It means that as long as we come up with a satisfactory solution that enables us to sleep peacefully and soundly at night, we can go on with our lives and never think about them again.

• Always offer a way out: By taking the initiative to offer one or multiple alternative solutions that allow the client to save face while providing both parties with a mutually agreeable solution, clients are robbed of the ability to complain about not being satisfied as they will portray themselves as completely hermetic to negotiating.

• Always stay positive: keep your head and learn how to dissociate your personal self from the situation.

• Always have your contractual obligations on paper: Mike Monteiro explained it very clearly. Contracts are most of the time very little use as most client relationships will go without a hitch and contracts never have to be enforced. But the irony is that they become necessary only when problems arise, however without them, we’d be fucked. With them, there are a clear set of expectations from both parties laid out on paper, which can include how to deal with the most common of clients misbehaviours and call them out when they try to back out of their obligations. Don’t be afraid to stand your ground.

• Meditate: When life stresses us out, taking a metaphorical step back and learning to detach ourselves from day to day problems is a very valuable skill to have. I have been meditating for a while and I cannot recommend it enough, particularly to people that are generally stressed out. It definitely takes effort and time, but the return on investment is huge. It helps put things into perspective make us realize that a lot of the things we fret over don’t matter in the long term and that most problems eventually go away on their own. 

• Know when to say goodbye: If the relationship is destined to end, say thank you, wish them well and never look back.

I am fully cognizant of the fact that this may seem like a piece of writing with negative overtones, but I think it’s important to address, as these situations sometimes arise and we have no choice but to deal with them. Like you, I’ve been burnt before by terrible, dishonest clients and it took a lot of energy to get rid of them while ensuring my own well-being. Sharing this knowledge is important as we can all learn from other past experiences, so this is my modest contribution.

Remember to always stay positive!

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaudrvltr.studio.

What is creativity and why it is critically important for your business?

Reading time ~11 minutes

What is creativity?

All it takes for anyone to experience true, unapologetically unbridled creativity is to observe kids, say under the age of 8, in a state of deeply-focused play. The world around them ceases to exist as they build incredibly inventive and intricate narratives in their heads, all the while telling their ideas in great detail to whomever is willing to listen. They have no fear, no shame, even though these ideas, can sometimes be very, very silly. Socializing for the first 18 years of our lives takes care of making us feel ashamed for having crazy ideas, develop self-censorship and worst of all, make us believe that being unendingly creative is at best a waste of good ol’ productive time.

On top of that, 12 years of mandatory, conventional schooling, beats creativity out of many of us. In other words, we’re taught to become uncreative in favour of other so-called more desirable attributes that help us play well with others. Those that are rebellious enough to not let that creativity be sucked out of them, find themselves labeled “creative” later in life, in this instance the epithet carrying a negative connotation, as if creativity was an undesirable quality. 

My opinion is that the people who forgot how to be creative, label those who remained so as idle daydreamers purely and simply out of creative envy, as they were tricked into adopting someone else’s vision of success and achievement, which involved fitting a mould of societal expectations. Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand that, to live in a peaceful and productive society, some social norms are required, as unbridled creativity can become a hindrance if not tempered by a need to live harmoniously. But, the world we currently live in has seen the pendulum swing too far the other way and we are now submerged by a sea of milquetoast, bland sameness, because we are too afraid to stand out. 

Case in point: all the houses in my neighbourhood look the same, I can find the same chain retail outlets coast to coast and most new hospitality projects in  my hometown surf on that popular scandinavian-muted-pastels-simple-geometric-forms aesthetic that makes me want to puke my guts out. When creativity is considered a dispensable luxury, I truly believe that we are missing a tremendous opportunity.

Why is it important?

While some people are able to be more readily creative than others, the truth is that we are all creative at all times, every day of the week. It’s just that a lot of those creative acts go unnoticed and uncelebrated. Finding a way to prevent that pesky raccoon into your trash is a creative act. Negotiating peace for good with your asshole neighbour over who should clear that shared driveway - close to home for many of us - is another. Substituting that missing ingredient for something else in that favourite recipe of yours after the local grocery store has closed, yet another. What happens in the public’s perception is that the celebrated acts of creativity are the big, obvious ones. Just the same way we revere the biggest Hollywood stars without paying attention to the extremely talented local comedian, while forgetting that the big star was once a starving, unknown comedian. 

However, it’s these little creative achievements that we rarely take the time to acknowledge and celebrate, because they don’t appear to be significant in the grand scheme of things, that are the foundation of a truly creative mind. The reality is that a lot of small creative achievements often lead to major breakthroughs over time.

Because of that cultural misperception of creativity - the notion that creativity is a nice luxury better left to artists, us creative professionals can be very easily suckered into embracing that point of view. By letting other people define what we do and how we’re being creative, we relinquish the opportunity to fully express creativity by allowing the inherently messy, convoluted and sometimes lengthy creative process to be whittled down to the idea of a black box, out of which great ideas are thought to magically come out of. In the real world, creative professions have a critical need, to give themselves the time to be creative when facing a new problem that requires an innovative solution. 

I personally battle with this every day. In my role as a photographer of the built environment, people often assume that I can just show up and snap pictures of their latest creation and voila, their desired money shots magically appears. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the reality isn’t that clear-cut or even easy to understand. I can mitigate a lot of the random factors in the process of shooting architecture, by codifying some of the steps I need to take in order to document a project, but I also have to constantly ensure that I make room for serendipity and allow for random disruptions, thoughts, situations and interactions to affect the process so that I can come up with the money shots that my clients have come to expect. 

In other words, I have to make room for creativity by not constraining the process too much, in order to avoid making every single one of my shoots look the same. Invariably, a handful of shots, sometimes the best ones, are the ones that weren’t planned, noticed after I’ve packed all my gear and I am on my way out. Sometimes, what appeared to be a dud during the photoshoot, turns into a money shot with some clever editing.

Ultimately, creativity is important because it is the mechanism by which we solve puzzles and contributes to the progress of mankind. Granted, some creative ideas are literally and figuratively destined for the toilet, but Dude Wipes can’t be faulted for being uncreative, especially if you look into the way they market themselves. I would go as far as  arguing that ass wipes are almost as important to the progress of mankind as the design of the Apollo space program was, as they both require liberal amounts of creativity, in the form of original ideas that were never thought of before. Granted, the impact of these two creative extremes is clearly not going to be the same and history will judge them accordingly, but creativity is the fuel to innovation’s rocket. There is no innovation without creativity and unexploited creativity is wasted potential.

Creativity is a process

The aforementioned little creative acts that we perform everyday and that we often don’t acknowledge are great to practice one’s creative muscle, simply by remembering that we can come up with new ideas to solve old problems pretty much all the time. If one improves their creative output by 1% every day, after a year, it amounts to a 3700% improvement! By building a creative muscle and deliberately practicing a little creativity every day, one can train that muscle to flex on a regular basis. In short order, this skill can be leveraged to solve increasingly complex problems. It certainly requires discipline but the upside of doing this for a significant amount of time can be huge.

The creative discipline can be codified, through empirical experimentation, as it will be different for everyone. As an experiment of one, it needs to be nurtured and improved over time. However, it is challenging to teach it to others and share as everyone has different thinking and learning styles. Therefore, it becomes about finding out what works for oneself while being very aware of what constitutes a creative act in order to train our minds to identify and amplify creative thinking, a positive reinforcement of good behaviour. For example, one of the ways I train my creative muscles, is to answer a question every day and come up with 10 different answers to that question. The question can be anything and the answers don’t have to be good. After doing this for more than 5 years, I can confidently say that my ability to come up with ideas is far ahead of what it used to be before I started this daily practice.

How to make room for creativity?

Often, though not always, the workplace, much like K-12 schooling can be very stifling for creativity, as it aims to conform the workforce to set schedules, spaces and work processes. Some structure is necessary to run a lean, mean business, but one has to be careful to strike a balance between giving workers enough space and freedom to be creative while at the same time keeping the essential structures in place that don’t make a workplace total chaos. I’ve seen very positive improvements in workplace design of the last few years, where the environment is designed to create the space for serendipity and chance encounters, which are fuel for fostering a creative environment.

I recently came up on this quote by Simon Sinek that is the perfect aphorism to describe this issue in the workplace:

“Rule books tell people what to do. Frameworks guide people how to act. Rule books insist on discipline. Frameworks allow for creativity.”

The same way the creative process is unique to each and everyone of us, a workplace culture that makes room for creativity will be different for each business, as a big part of that environment will come from what the company is about and how it operates.

While ultimately each person has a different way of being creative and expressing it, there are some near-universal principles that can get us started on the path to creativity. First of all, a lot of creative ideas come from random connections that our brains make. That’s one of the reasons why more and more people live in cities, all over the world. Cities have the unique ability to create the possibility of random encounters and serendipitous connections that enable us to have creative breakthroughs. By the same token, it is well documented that a lot of major discoveries have been made completely by accident, such as penicillin.

Second, happy accidents being the fertile ground for creative ideas, it is always helpful to make more room for serendipity in our lives. Talking to random strangers at a party, daydreaming while bare feet in the grass (the skin to ground connection is said to enable certain thought patterns to emerge), taking long showers, going on a trip to an unfamiliar location or merely wandering aimlessly around your neighbourhood are all things that contribute to the emergence of creative thoughts.

How that translates in the workplace is both in the physical and cultural realms. In the physical world, it’s important to create literal spaces for random encounters to happen. There is a reason why the water cooler is so well known for facilitating these interactions, as it creates a social space for people to mingle and engage in small talk, which can lead to new and innovative ideas, we’ve all had that eureka moment that happens when someone says something seemingly innocuous.

In the cultural realm, it means that the organizational culture recognizes and encourages employees to experience different work environments that are suited for different tasks and that they be given freedom to play around and find what works best for them. Maybe that local cafe is where your top employee is the most productive. If that’s the case, why stifle them by making this impossible instead of seeing the potential of increased productivity and give them the freedom to work as they see fit, where they see fit?

In practical terms, what you need to do to foster creativity will look very different from what the next guy needs to do, but being aware of those issues and willing to do something is a great first step. As for developing a culture and implementing policies encouraging creativity and innovation, it requires you to take a deep look at the current state of affairs and find out which are the gaps in creativity that need to be filled.

Parting words on trust.

Being creative requires us to be in an environment where we feel safe to unleash our potential. To do so, we need to be able to trust the people around us that our expression of vulnerability, which is what creativity essentially is, isn’t going to come back to bite us in the ass. It’s up to leaders to create a trusting and trustworthy environment where we can fully express ourselves. It also begs the question: why are we still largely operating on a model where employees have to come into work everyday, to sit at a tiny cubicle and punch in the clock, when the work could just as easily be done from a jungle villa in Nicaragua? 

Perhaps it’s time to apply a little creativity in the way we work and develop our own idiosyncratic ways of working that make us more creative and innovative, instead of copying what everybody else is doing?

Special thanks to Pete VonDeLinde for bringing the joy of Dude Wipes into my world.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Why Conversations Are The Best Way To Provide Value To Your Clients

Reading time ~7 minutes

Imagine you’re sick and bed-ridden. It’s the worst time of the year for you to take time off, as the office is really busy and you’re trying to get your projects’ tender packages out the door before everybody goes away on vacation in a few weeks. You feel like crap, but you manage to drag yourself out of bed to see a doctor. You think you have the flu, owing to the symptoms you’ve experienced in the past, which are very similar to what you’re living through right now. You also know that there are a myriad of potentially fatally infectious diseases that produce the same symptoms and therefore defer to a doctor instead of trying to self-diagnose. You enter your doctor’s office and tell him “I think I have the flu” and he proceeds to write down a prescription without further examination.

Flabbergasted, you storm out and go to another doctor, the trust you have in this professional being forever and irreparably destroyed. You take your medical file with you, vowing to never return.

Why we tolerate behaviours in our industry that other professions ban outright

I’m having trouble imagining a professional occupation where the idea of prescribing a solution to a problem without a proper diagnosis is thought of as a good idea. Indeed, you would never expect your physician to prescribe any kind of treatment without a thorough diagnosis of the symptoms. The same goes of your lawyer, plumber, accountant and pretty much any profession whose job is to provide you with a customized solution to your problems. A problem that you’re sometimes not even aware you have.

How do these professionals diagnose your problems? They ask questions and listen intently and carefully to the answers you give them. Given what they’re told, the gathered information is then filtered through the lens of their expertise and can slowly but surely come to a solution to your problem. Sometimes, the solution is pretty evident and easy to find, sometimes it requires further investigation. These people are paid well, because their years of expertise and experience makes them very valuable. If you were to try and come up with a solution by yourself, you wouldn’t know where to start and it would likely take a long time to do so.

Yet, in creative professions, somehow, that logic flies out the window and our clients routinely think that creative people have an instant creative answer to every problem, as if creativity was an innate ability that was gifted to some and not others. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone is creative, to a different degree and in different areas (the subject of an upcoming podcast). Creative professionals are merely likely to be more so than others, or even just better at being consistently creative.

As noted in my recent piece on procurement, asking service providers to do a whole bunch of work, sometimes covertly, in order to get “free” ideas from them is disingenuous, morally questionable and should be publicly denounced. What these procurement people are essentially asking us to do is to skip the diagnosis part and jump right to conclusions, which is counter productive and can be downright dangerous.

Instead, there is a much less time-consuming and costly way to go about finding the right clients, that allows for both parties to determine if they’re mutually a good fit and not waste a ton of resources answering to useless RFPs, that you are very unlikely to win. Since we can’t count on the fact that procurement people will magically change their minds and start acting like ideal clients, it is up to us to take control of the process by changing our own behaviour in a way that will elicit the right ones from our clients.

A very simple alternative

What’s the alternative you ask? Well, it is actually quite simple and perhaps even deceptively so. I’ve found (and I’m not the only one) that starting client relationships with conversations is a lot more productive way to effectively help clients solve the problems they actively need to solve. Often, people I talk to will want to hire external help to put together a social media strategy, when in reality it’s the entire positioning of the firm that needs to be re-thought. Time and time again, I encounter people who want to treat their symptoms when in reality a proper diagnosis would help reveal the cause of the problems, the symptoms either eventually taking care of themselves or being a much lower priority, will be treated down the road.

Conversations, in this context, make room for the clients to freely speak about what ails them and 99.9% of them reveal the cause of the problem in short order. All it takes is a few very pointed questions and the ability to actively listen to what your potential clients tell you. It’s the business equivalent of listening to your chatty friend talk about one of their problems out loud and coming up with their own solution as they talk themselves through it, while you’ve been listening silently, nodding occasionally and asking very occasional pertinent and pointed questions. I’ve been that chatty friend at times and it’s a very empowering position to be in. That’s the kind of trusting space we want to create for our clients.

In order to accomplish this, one has to give up the commodity mindset, thinking that they’re competing against a myriad other providers that are perceived as equivalent in skills and expertise. It requires a strong, specialist positioning, whereby positioning yourself as the top dog in a narrow niche, you increase your chances of being found by your ideal prospects and clients, because you actively work at deepening your expertise in that area. On the other side of the coin, it also requires to ditch the scarcity mindset by clinging to potential clients that are poor fits, just because you are afraid that they might walk away and feel like you need their dollars.

Every prospect should be treated as if we did not need them and have zero expectation of getting them as clients. By going into any meeting telling yourself “I don’t need this client”, you will slowly build your resilience muscle and be able to treat each prospect with professional detachment in service of a greater purpose, which sole focus is to accomplish great things for your clients and yourself. You will also create an atmosphere where clients sense that detachment and as a result will be much more willing to play the game by your rules, because there is no understanding on their part that you want this more than they do.

Ultimately, we can take one of two stances on the matter: 1. We keep bitching and moaning about the unfairness of the current state of affairs and always be mistreated by disingenuous clients who want to take advantage of us at every turn. 2. We can take charge of our destiny and change our behaviour with regards to our potential clients.

I see it time and time again. When I find a prospect who’s willing to make room for play and let me lead the conversation, It can lead to very fruitful and productive engagements in no time, where their business is significantly and deeply transformed because they were willing to take on another perspective on their seemingly intractable problems. Not every client is capable of being a good client and by changing your behaviour, you are making it your mission to find such clients and build deep meaningful relationships with them that will affect them for years to come.

Commodity providers do not effect deep and meaningful change, they patch a band-aid on their clients’ problems and ensure that they have to keep coming back for more. While as a short-term financial strategy, this may make you very successful, in the long term it’s detrimental to your client and your business, because you’re not meaningfully solving their problems, but basically providing a short-term fix. Ultimately, you want to do such a good job that you make yourself redundant. A small, short-term sacrifice for huge long term gains.

It’s up to you to control your destiny.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Why Procurement Sucks And What You Can Do About It

Reading time ~10 minutes

ACME Corp. procurement officer.

Procurement sucks. Having to bend over backwards in order to jump through hoops on fire over a trap lined with spikes while being chased by a hungry tiger is no cakewalk. Yet, many creative professionals put up with it as it is culturally accepted that, working for free and giving away intellectual property is a small price to pay in order to get work. And in certain cases, it may make sense. But in most of them it doesn’t and more often than not both parties end up worse off as a result of doing business in that fashion.

People in charge of procurement with public dollars have to do what they can, to ensure that the money is well-spent and that there is a high level of accountability within public institutions, for taxpayers to be able to transparently see how their money is spent. Whether this is what actually happens in the real world is another touchy debate that I won’t delve into here.

If one is procuring commodities, traditional procurement makes sense. Whether the Toronto police gets their cars from one dealer or another, they’ll basically get the same product. The main thing being negotiated is price, but the cars come from the same factory. Same for stationery, whether your paper pads come from Staples or Grand & Toy, any difference in quality will be too insignificant to notice and even if somehow you ended up with a subpar paper pad, you’ll probably survive the ordeal.

The problem is when professional services are being treated like commodities. If you listen to one of my past podcasts, Toon Dreessen talks about the absurdity of some situations he’s found himself in. One story that stuck with me is the conversation he had with a stationery procurement officer who did not understand why an architect was required for this project and treated it like she treated paper.

As providers of professional services in the design field, architects know very well that a solution cannot be prescribed in good conscience before a proper diagnostic of the client’s challenges has been made. A doctor practicing that way would be stripped of his credentials and likely sent to jail, yet, procurement processes expect architects to do exactly that. This is a maddening proposition that makes no sense and can actually be harmful.

It really begs the question: why are procurement departments acting so shortsightedly? I genuinely don’t have a clear answer so far, but if we look at how they are incentivized, perhaps we can find the beginning of an explanation. Procurement’s job is to procure something at the lowest cost, as their mandate is to save their employer’s money. Which makes sense if we’re talking about stationery. But when it comes to design services, it has been well established by now, that the cost of designing a building has little to do with its total cost over a lifetime both in terms of capital costs (construction) and operational costs (life-cycle and maintenance), as the design cost is a fraction of the capital cost, which can be itself a fraction of the operational cost.

If a building is designed to save 50% in operational costs over its lifetime, isn’t that worth a higher design fee? And the architect who can confidently deliver on that promise should naturally command a higher price, as his services are more valuable than that of the architect whose designs will cost more operationally. Yet, when procuring these services, these facts are often ignored and the lowest bidder wins. I’m not even going to go into how some firms bid at a loss to “stay busy” and keep their employees on the payroll, while counting on charging for extras, a.k.a. playing the “gotcha” game to stay profitable.

Due to their very mandate, keeping costs low at all cost - pun intended - procurement people are not your friends, as they are by nature asked to undermine you and the value of your services at every turn. Put yourself in their shoes, what would you do in their place?

Your mission as a designer is to solve problems and the more complex those problems are, the more you ought to be paid for it, as this is inherently valuable to your clients, until their procurement departments get involved…

What’s the solution? In the case of public money, I’m not sure there is a solution short of legislating on the matter in order to make the procurement process holistic, and incidentally the topic of an upcoming Single Serves podcast, also with Dreessen. As far as the private sector is concerned, this is where I see a great opportunity to break away from the uncompensated pitch, were we too often give ideas away for free in the hope of getting our pittance.

On one hand, professional service providers have to grow a pair and stop grovelling to their clients’ every whim and tell them when they’re being unreasonable with their demands of a 578-page proposal including a fully resolved building design, construction documents, their staff’s full employment history, including their immigration status - as applicable - as well as their grandmother’s birth certificate and their kids weekly school menu, and I’m barely exaggerating. If what they’re asking for has no relevance to the provision of the service, you are perfectly within your right to tell them off, politely but firmly as you now know they’re just dicking you around.

Imagine if you went on a first date with someone and they keep rescheduling, changing the venue, until you finally get to meet them in person after 10 reschedules and then they spend the entire date fucking with you, keeping you guessing and asking a lot of very deep and personal questions without revealing anything about themselve, wouldn’t you walk away? You would, because you intuitively know that it’s not gonna get better over time. The same goes for your clients. If they metaphorically fuck with you by being unreasonable, chances are they won’t suddenly change if they ever hire you and you’re better off leaving them to your competition.

On the other hand, private companies who feel like they “have to” go through a complex and byzantine procurement process to hire professional service providers, really ought to ask themselves how that’s gonna serve them in the long term. This is where there is a shift that needs to happen, from the cost of the service to the value.

A big part of demonstrating that value is, I’m afraid, your responsibility. It’s a tough job, but not impossible, it merely requires a concerted effort and the development of a long term view of your business’ growth. In this age of crazed and insanely fast (too much so in my opinion) startup funding, venture capital and IPOs, in the vein of the “break things and move fast” credo of Facebook, one really has to sit back and ask “What am I really trying to accomplish here?” Maybe “slowing down and mending things” isn’t such a bad idea after all.

From there, it is possible that the answers will start coming to you and with a healthy dose of courage, one can dig oneself out of this hellhole that is procurement. The alternative is to remain a commodity who’s being mistreated at every turn by clients who are total dicks and are not even apologetic about it.

Which do you want to be?

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Truth Is Golden ep. 303 - Adults Are Not All They’re Cracked Up To Be w/ Liam Gadsby

Liam Gadsby is a veteran comic and all around creative force living and performing in Toronto. I met Liam one day at the local café and his larger-than-life personality is what drew me to him. Upon befriending him, I learned that he was an unstoppable creative force and came to appreciate being around him for a good laugh. He’s comfortable with things that most people would shiver at the mere mention of and goes through life doing his thing, regardless of what other people think. Listen here.

Check out some of his Fat Man Fit trailer work here.

About the podcast: 
The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at (future) renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

Credits:
Produced by Revelateur Studio
Post-Production: Ryan Aktari
Music: Bounce Trio, Star Animal, 2014.
Organ & Keys : Matthieu Marthouret
Ténor Sax : Toine Thys
Drums : Gautier Garrigue
Composed by Toine Thys (copyrights SABAM).

Buy it on BandCamp :
weseemusicstore.bandcamp.com/album/smal…big-rivers

More info and music here :
www.youtube.com/user/weseemusic
www.matthieumarthouret.com
www.facebook.com/MatthieuMarthouret.Music/

Launching Single Serves Podcast... Important Conversations About Design!

I’m launching this podcast in order to bring the world’s foremost experts on specific topics relating to architecture and design. These are the important conversations that I think we’re not having enough of within the industry. It’s meant to be educational, sometimes funny and above all, get us to talk about serious topics without taking ourselves too seriously.

Single Serves Ep. 101 - Sharp On Social Media For Architects

Dave Sharp may be a youngster, but in a short time he's built a respectable business around helping architects navigate the world of social media and marketing. Dave and I talked about social media for designers, its pitfalls and untapped opportunities. Listen in to learn more about the topic.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Listen here.

How To Present Your Ideas Without Boring Your Audience To Death

Reading time ~15 minutes

I’m not breaking new ground by saying that public speaking is a critical tool of the professional. It is how new and innovative ideas are presented, exchanged and an excellent way to share these ideas with peers, while getting immediate feedback in the process. It also something that terrifies pretty much every single one of us.

The most seasoned public speakers, of the kind who speak for a living are very often adept at giving talks that appear effortless and easy to understand. What people often don’t realize is how much work goes into preparing a high-stakes talk, like you would do for TED. TED is the pinnacle of public speaking, so it makes sense that the people who are asked to talk at these events work really hard at making sure that their talk is the best it can be.

What of lower-stake public presentations? Like a local industry conference or a university? Should you prepare as much for those? Yes, without question, one should prepare as much, if not more for these. I’ve witnessed too many otherwise respected professionals turn a promising talk into a nap-inducing snoozefest. They wax technical, stumble through their disorganized notes or worse, crime of all crimes, read verbatim off of a script. Needless to say that it’s not good for their image or their prospect of being invited again to speak in front of that audience.

Being a poor speaker will limit your chances of being invited to future speaking gigs, while practicing a bit to become a better speaking can have a dramatic upside. It can help you make your next deal, find your next client or graduate to being a paid speaker. This is why you cannot afford to mess up your next talk. I’ve put together a list of things to consider when putting together a talk in order to help you navigate through the process.

If we break down public speaking to its essence, it is nothing more than storytelling. That story might be highly technical, but it is a story nonetheless. I would even argue that the more technical it is, the more you have a duty to make palatable and easy to digest. No one, ever, has been interested in sitting through a two-hour long presentation detailing the engineering of mass-timber structures, described via a series of graphs and diagrams. Not even the most nerdy of structural engineers would make it out of such a talk unscathed. An engaging speaker taking on the same topic would find ways to weave all these data into a storyline that would take the audience on a journey, a fascinating trip into the history of mass timber, why it is making a timely come-back right now and how it’s going to save the environment.

Take a second to think about the best public presentations you’ve ever witnessed. What were the attributes displayed by the speaker? Did they present their ideas in a way that made you understand them right away, as if they understood intuitively how you thought? Did they announce clearly what they were going to talk about and what you could expect to get out of the presentation? Did they present their ideas in such a way that you were able to relate to it on a personal level, being emotionally involved, as it were? Was their presentation tailored to the audience, talk time and topic? Did they give the right amount of information for it to be understood? Was their presentation well put together and feel natural?

Let’s break down the attributes of great talk and see what’s at play here:

1.Announce it loud and clear

The best presentations always start with the spoken equivalent of a table of contents. The speaker starts by announcing what he’s going to talk about, why it is important and what the audience can expect to get out of it. While this may seem obvious, more often than not, it is missing. The reason it is important is because it sets expectations for the audience. They don’t have written material to refer to, so giving them a mental breakdown of the presentation helps them navigate what is being said down the road.

It is also a mark of respect for people’s time as they often don’t know what is being talked about in detail and allows for the few out-of-place laggards who randomly stumbled into the lecture hall to leave if somehow this topic isn’t interesting to them. It’s better to have a few engaged audience members than twice the amount of people with half of them asleep.

By knowing what to expect, they are not distracted trying to figure out what is being presented and therefore can focus on the subject of conversation.

2. Put yourself in their shoes

In order to give an effective talk, one has to cater to their audience. While a given talk topic may be presented many times over, each occurrence should take into account the audience’s specific needs. Empathizing will allow you to gain a deeper understanding of what it of interest to them and therefore enable them to feel more connected to what is being presented, as it appears more personal.

Designers are hopelessly notorious for using archispeak to describe their ideas, with no consideration for who the recipients of these ideas are. The problem with this one-size-fits all approach is that only a very narrow segment of the population is equipped to understand you. Nevermind the fact that using an obfuscating and jargon-laden language makes you sound pompous and instantly chips away at your credibility. Heck, I studied architecture and half the time I don’t understand what architects are blathering about when they are in full archispeak mode. It’s telling that books have to be written on the topic to help people understand. Forget the Archispeak-English dictionary and just use plain english instead.

Real people (a.k.a normal people outside of your industry) want nothing but to be spoken to in a human, authentic and intelligible language. The best litmus test is to try and make your presentation intelligible to your 10 year-old kid or your 90 year-old grandmother. It will force you to distill your ideas down to their essence and in the process not leave anyone behind.

Short of having access to your audience and get direct feedback on your topic of presentation, spending a little time thinking about what these people may want to hear should be enough to give you an insight as to what might be of interest to them. You can infer a way to present your ideas that is likely to make sense to your audience.

With some practice, you’ll be able in no time to adapt your public presentations to each audience and have success every time by giving audience members an easy way to enter the world of your ideas.

3. Appeal to the audience’s emotions

In order to make a point and persuade people that your ideas are the best since sliced bread, it is important to appeal to your audience’s emotional side. As Simon Sinek explained in Start With Why we all have a tendency to describe the benefits of our ideas with rational arguments, facts and figures, but it’s our deep purposeful commitment to a purpose that is the most effective at enrolling people to your cause.

With that in mind, it is imperative to relate your talk to a broader purpose that gives them some context as to where you’re coming from. In other terms, if you very factually and accurately describe your latest building, you run the risk of sounding boring. Conversely, if you describe its genesis and why you designed it the way it is, while relating to how it serves its users the best, you have the potential to build a narrative that will make your building sound much more interesting.

I remember attending a talk by Joshua Prince-Ramus 10+ years ago, while I was studying architecture. It was shortly after he broke away from OMA and renamed his practice REX. He came to my school to give a lecture on his work, but much to my surprise, he ended up talking more about his take on the architectural profession, how he came up with a different business model for his practice.

The way he described in great detail how that business model would impact all the stakeholders, was the most compelling argument as we could now relate to how his work would impact its environment in a positive manner. The projects he talked about were simply the demonstration of that philosophy. Not surprisingly, the REX name means “re-appraisal of architecture”, what a brilliant way to walk the walk.

Bjarke Ingels is known to do the same when talking about his projects. He always starts with the main design challenges that were identified during the analysis phase and then breaks down how his designs solve each of those challenges. Watch him here tell a very brief story of his most innovative projects and explain very plainly and simply why these projects make sense. In every case, the arguments appeal to our emotions, not our rational brains. In these examples, both Ingels and Prince-Ramus show how masterful they are at taking complex ideas into easily understandable concepts that are both appealing and engaging. They put us in the shoes of the users and make us want to be part of whatever it is that they are up to.

I will knock a few points off though, due to their inability to shake off the bad habit of using archispeak. Again, if your 8 year-old nephew cannot understand what you’re talking about, you’ve failed.

4. Just the right amount of detail

You’re given a certain amount of time to present your ideas. Would you just go and present in the way you want to and hope that it fits the format? I hope not, because you’d be running the risk of presenting only half of your ideas, and not necessarily the best half.

A presentation should always be tailored to the time given and the audience in order to ensure that you deliver the right message. I would go as far as saying that each presentation on the same topic always has to be different, not unlike two buildings with similar programmatic requirements would always be different based on the site and its users.

By doing so, you will show your audience that you respect their time and particular needs, which in turn will make them a lot more engaged with your presentation. Having the right amount and kind of detail in your talk is essentially building on principle #1 above and ensuring that it is carried through the whole presentation. It’s perfectly OK, encouraged even, to regularly go back to your verbal table of content when jumping to a new section, as a way to keep your audience on board and make it real easy for them to keep track of where you are in your talk.

Oh and please, please, please, make sure to time your presentation during the rehearsal, until you can nail 100% of the time your target length. Which leads me to the next point:

5. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse… Then rehearse some more.

I think the most effective presentations are those that look and feel like a natural conversation. It might be a one-sided conversation, but the flow of speech and ideas should feel natural. Well rehearsed, definitely, but I would caution against striving for perfection as it will make you sound like a robot and most people don’t like robots.

There is really no substitute for preparation. The best speakers prepare to death, until they know their material in and out, at which point they can ditch their notes altogether and just present without a safety net. Watch any TED talk to see how it’s done.

The best way to prepare is to work off of a bullet-point-style set of notes, with abbreviated annotations that serve as a reminder of the key points you want to talk about, without getting you stuck with an inflexible script. The reason for that it to prevent any possibility to get lazy and start reading off of your notes. Reading a script is the worst kind of presenting one can ever do and should be avoided at all cost, unless your goal to put your audience to sleep.

With enough preparation, you should know your talk in and out and be able to deliver it on command. You can go as far as ditching the notes altogether if you’re feeling adventurous, but keeping them nearby to act as a loose reminder of what you need to say is perfectly OK and can save your bacon in case of a brainfart. A good sign that you’ve rehearsed enough is when you can give your presentation without looking at your notes. At minimum, you’ll want to rehearse a handful of times to have a good working knowledge of your talk. If this presentation is really important, I would rehearse as much as is humanly possible in the weeks leading up to it, with and without a test audience in order to iron out the kinks.

I would also recommend against just writing out bullet-points and not rehearsing, a.k.a. going freestyle, as if you were to run into a disruptive element, you will not be familiar enough with your material to roll with the punches. Make no mistake, you will be disrupted at one point or another, and having the ability to handle it while getting back into the groove quick, is paramount to keep your presentation flowing and interesting.

You may ask, when do I know I’m ready? Well, a good indication of your preparedness is to be able to deliver your presentation comfortably and confidently while keeping your audience on the edge of their seats. As you do more talks, you’ll be able to fine-tune your preparation and determine how much of it you need to do, as it will vary according to one’s varying degrees of ability. A little apprehension is perfectly normal, and I doubt even the most seasoned public speakers never have a little knot in their stomach before going on stage.

Bonus tip #1:

Breathe. For those of you who practice yoga and meditation, you will naturally understand the benefits of mindful breathing before going on stage. If you know what to do, just set aside some time a few minutes before the big stage to breathe and calm yourself down. If you’ve never breathed intentionally, you can just sit down for a few minutes and breathe deeply and intentionally. This will calm your nerves and help you relax, while boosting your confidence.

You may get a little dizzy if breathe particularly deeply and that’s perfectly normal, it just means that your brain is getting high on oxygen. This will help with the stress and will disappear as soon as you get back to normal breathing.

Bonus tip #2:

Work your voice. A well warmed-up and trained voice will project far more than an untrained one. Preparing for a talk by doing basic vocal warmups is a great preparation. For the more dedicated of you, learning how to sing and use breath to project your voice is a fantastic long-term way to improve your speaking skills. The more casual speaker would also benefit from simple things like singing along in the shower and going to the local karaoke bar with friends. I’m serious.

Bonus tip #3:

Look at your audience in the eyes. There is nothing more unsettling than a speaker who is not engaging visually with the audience. While you don’t want to stare at the same person for 2 minutes, as it would get awkward very quickly, it’s always a good idea to randomly look around the room and make eye contact with a variety of people for a second or two.

A neat trick I’ve learned is to visualize an imaginary triangle pointed down, where each point of the triangle would correspond to an audience member’s face and go back and forth between each of the triangle's points. Do that a couple of times and then imagine another triangle and repeat. The key is to make sure that you cover the entire audience and make eye contact with a large portion of it.

Bonus tip #4:

Use your body. Too many times, I’ve seen people standing behind a lectern and stay there for the whole presentation. This is as much the fault of the organizers as it is that of the speaker. The stage setup is far too often designed to be static and presenters often are not even given a wireless mic that would give them the ability to move about.

That’s a shame because body language is one of the easiest and most overlooked ways to make your talk come to life. It’s OK and highly encouraged to use your hands, move about the stage and exaggerate your gestures. There is no magic trick for this one as everyone moves differently and we all have varying degrees of comfort with being metaphorically naked in front of an audience. There is no doubt, however, that a little movement is better than none. Practice will also help you get better at this.

Conclusion

There is a lot more to it than public speaking that the few distilled ideas I’ve just covered, as this is a fascinating topic that can be discussed for days without ever getting boring. I will say that if you practice and apply what was discussed in this article, you will almost certainly dramatically improve your public speaking skills, and who knows, perhaps unleash the Ken Robinson within you. Good luck and send me a note if you were able to successfully implement some of these ideas!

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Why Aldens Are Better Than Air Jordans

Reading time ~7 minutes

Dealing with a growing portion of their workforce composed of demanding millennials, often leads companies to take seemingly easy shortcuts in order to attract the best and brightest talent with lazy corporate gimmicks. But these pale in comparison to what a great organizational culture can do for your business in the long term, namely create a more loyal, engaged workforce that feels their thirst for a meaningful workplace has been quenched.

Yes, free lunches, nap rooms and foosball tables are great benefits and fun to play with, but thinking that these alone are sufficient to retain people in the long term is a dangerous mistake. Once people get past the novelty of having access to those things, they’ll get frustrated and complain that they’re still unfulfilled and unhappy, the same way they were at their previous job, the one before that, all the way back to their first job. That’s because these jobs did not bring more meaning and fulfillment to their lives. The same way they’ll get bored of that once-shiny pair of flashy Air Jordans, that they grossly overpaid for, they’ll get bored with a company that does nothing to help them find meaning in their work but to provide temporarily exciting distractions, while ignoring the deeper issues that are the root causes of a disengaged workforce.

More Alden, Less Nike

To continue with the shoe metaphor, a company with a great culture is more like a quality pair of Alden dress shoes than Nikes: When well taken care of, the leather will age gracefully and even acquire a nice patina that only time can provide, while taking care of your aching feet for decades on end. When put through difficult situations, they may temporarily lose their luster, but with some TLC, can always be brought back to life. Small blemishes will give character and make for some interesting stories. Only serious, long-term neglect has the potential to damage it irreparably, as they can be damaged with scratches and cuts which no amount of care will fix. Its sole may eventually wear out, but a good cobbler can always re-sole them and give them a second lease on life. It will never look cutting edge or worse, fashionable, but it’s not meant to. It has a timeless quality that will make it relevant at any time and acceptable in any situation. It is built to last and will outlast any pair of sneakers by decades.

Conversely, a new and shiny pair of the latest Air Jordans, looks fresh as hell out of the box, but loses all its value as soon as you start wearing them. Because they’re white, the slightest trace of dust or mud, will make them look terrible and to keep them looking good you have to neurotically clean them to try and bring them back to their former glory. But no amount of care will do so as they are not built with materials that can be easily mended and replaced. If worn with any regularity, one can hope for a year or two before they start looking terrible and you’d be ashamed to be seen wearing them in public. They’ll soon be replaced by another new and shiny pair that will give you a short burst of satisfaction before they’re discarded because they don’t look good enough anymore.

Like dress shoes, a great organizational culture is a big undertaking that takes a lot of work to build, and a constant effort to maintain, but it will lead your employees, customers, suppliers and stakeholders to a more fulfilling life. While too many employees dread showing up at work every day, wouldn’t you want to have employees who are happy to show up and have fun every day?

How to foster a great culture.

I wish I could put a red pill in your hand and tell you that taking it will magically make a great culture spring into existence. Unfortunately, there is no such solution. A great culture is an expression of your company’s purpose and as such, what works for another company will not necessarily work for yours. Therefore it will take great effort and time to determine what it could be for you and your team. Not an easy task by any means, but in my opinion a risk worth taking as the potential upside is tremendous on many levels.

At a basic level, a great organizational culture is a set of rules, behaviours and etiquette that represent the character of that entity. It should make it easier for  the company’s stakeholders to lead happy and fulfilled lives. I believe there are a couple of metrics that embody the success of an organizational culture:

1. Are people fulfilled as a result of taking part in the business?

2. Is the business more profitable as a result of positive organizational changes?

This is where the greatest opportunities to make a difference lie. The culture-savvy people that I’ve had the pleasure to talk to over the years all see their leadership role in a very-specific way: They are acutely aware that the people working for them are not just employees working for a paycheque. Rather, employees are people with responsibilities, families and obligations. How they are being treated impacts them and a shitty workplace will make them miserable at work, but also at home and could negatively impact their family, friends, spouses and kids.

When we pay attention to our employees needs, we are not in a transactional relationship anymore, where employees earn money in exchange for getting something done, but a transformational one, in which the better the employees are doing on a personal level, the more they are likely to feel happy, fulfilled and perform better at work, leading to a more profitable business as well as happy customers and suppliers. I’m sure the shareholders would eventually get their due as well.

The first step is always the same: recognize that change is necessary. It may be because the company is struggling financially, or that the dictatorial leadership and its historical “my way or the highway” approach to leadership is no longer working or, for a myriad of other possible reasons. When the need to change has been established, this is where leaders have an opportunity to change themselves, their way of leading and be willing to involve all relevant stakeholders in taking part of the process. If you envisioned what your ideal business looks like, a good way to go about it would be to reverse-engineer that vision into existence.

Here’s a fun challenge for you: You can try it. Yes, right now. Pick one of your employees randomly. Think about what you know of their personal life. Where did they grow up? Do they have a family? What are their hobbies? Do they have pets? What kind of personality they have? What are their biggest challenges outside the workplace? Are their parents still around?

Keep digging. You can’t think of anything? Now you know where to start. Relationships are the foundation of a great organizational culture. Only by learning to listen to people’s needs, wants and aspirations we can empower them to achieve those. Get to know one (or several) of them. Take them out to lunch and listen to what they say, what you’ll hear may surprise you.

Congratulations, you planted the seed of a better culture. What will you do next to make it a reality? There is no way you can lose if you truly believe in a better future for yourself and your business.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

How To Find The Right Hire In A Seller's Market

Reading time ~14 minutes

Introduction

In the course of my work, I get to learn about particular aspects of our industry. I’ve recently had the opportunity spent a lot of time talking to people about hiring practices in the AEC industry as part of a research project. The overwhelming conclusion I’ve come to is that hiring is a very challenging process for employers. It takes a lot of time, costs money and there is never a guarantee that your newest employee is the right fit for your company. A lot of company founders and principals sing the same tune: the challenges they all face are all very similar. Every step of the process is a challenge, especially in a seller’s market where there is more jobs than candidates (more on that later). Don’t believe for a second that you are alone facing these issues.

Big or small, most firms go through the same process and employ very similar tactics to hire people. Bigger firms will tend to have more budget and being more willing to spend money to find the right employees, even when it comes to junior positions. By and large the way architecture and design firms hire are very similar across the board.

One distinction across all firms is the difference in hiring processes for Junior vs. Senior employees. More money and effort is understandably spent on filling more senior positions, as these employees have a greater impact on the health of the company.

The Challenges:

Finding the right people: from finding the right fit for your company’s culture, to simply finding people who actually have the qualifications they claim to have, recruiters have to do an incredible amount of legwork when it comes to doing their due diligence. This is not helped by the fact that we are currently in a seller’s market, where there is more job offers than qualified candidates. This makes the search for that unicorn, the candidate with the trifecta of qualifications, cultural fit and availability, all the more complex. It is not rare for recruiters to receive applications from people who do not have the desired qualifications, whether it be from a skillset perspective (juniors claiming to have more experience than they do) or even things like the lack of immigration status (people applying from overseas). Most recruiters waste a lot of time sorting the good from the bad.

Then there is the budget issue. How much money should one allocate to recruiting efforts? How much of that budget do you allocate to different tools and resources? Things like job boards, the interview process and legal fees all cost money, but how do you know how to allocate proper resources to each item? Do you not spend any money at all and dedicate only time (which is also costly by the way)?

Recruiters are expensive but also effective as they put their money where their mouth is, because they don’t get paid if you don’t hire their candidates. Therefore, they have an incentive to do a good job. Since they cost about 20% of your hire’s first year salary, it can be a tough pill to swallow, but they tend to make more sense for more senior positions.  

Job boards are great and free (or very cheap), but the main challenge is that they advertise your opening to the world, attracting all kinds of poor fits and forcing you to go through a long and painful curating process. The problem with job boards is that the a large portion of candidates are the bottom of the barrel. Most good employees never have to look for a job and more often than not they get recruited through their network and therefore never peruse the classifieds.

In his classic book, “What Color Is Your Parachute”, Richard Bolles claims that most companies recruit internally or within their network, only using more public means of advertising a position when they have no other option left. That’s because we tend to trust people in our networks much more than strangers so it makes sense that we tap into familiarity before we look for employees more widely.

If a colleague you know and trust recommended someone warmly, would you not make them your primary candidates? I know I would. When I look for people to work with, I always tend to naturally reach out to my network before advertising and when I do advertise it’s with very specific resources. There is a local college that I particularly like because they are known to produced skilled grads, namely people who have skills in demand in the marketplace. Every year I reach out to them to get a co-op student for summer, keeping in mind that these co-op students will eventually look for a job. When they do, we will be in each other’s network and will naturally tend to gravitate towards one another.

I never advertise on standard job boards, because I don’t want the aggravation of dealing with substandard candidates who don’t even take the time to research the company they are applying to and send generic cover letters. I once received an unsolicited application from an overseas candidate who CC’d about a hundred other people on his generic - gasp! - cover letter letter. Needless to say I had a little fun replying to that one, as I took inspiration from these guys to write a spirited response.

Industry-specific job board tend to be a little better than general recruiting sites (Monster and the like), as they attract a smaller subset of candidates, usually of higher quality than generalist boards.

One of the most common complaint is that people really struggle to find a good fit in terms of skill set but even more importantly, from a cultural standpoint. The most qualified of employees will not be comfortable working for a firm espousing values too different from their own. Worse yet, working for a firm who has no established values. In my opinion too many firms spend too much time focusing on skills and experience, as opposed to ensuring that a candidate will fit right into the office culture. Skills can be learned, knowledge can be acquired, but the right attitude, mindset and work ethic is a given we all have to work with. Better find the right candidate with respect to those soft social skills.

Opportunities to do things differently

Now that we’ve laid out some of the biggest challenges recruiters face, I’m going to expand on some ideas that will give you an edge when looking for employees.

Find juniors before they get out of school and keep your network alive:

Since we’ve already established that networks play a huge part in recruiting effort, it pays off in the long term to maintain and expand that network on an ongoing basis. Keep tabs on current and future cohorts of new grads and identify the best of them as much as you can. By the same token, an ongoing internal internship program is a great way to test people out in the wild and see how they mesh with your culture. Other tactics that will help you in that regard are as follows, in no particular order: attending design crits at local school, job fairs, attending industry events, etc.

Outside of the post-secondary education system, it’s good to identify promising prospects and keep tabs on them. Stay in touch once in a while and ask them what they’re up to. You’d be surprised how much a quick check-in once in a while can help you find the right candidate when time is of the essence. That graduate you’ve kept in touch with for years may very well be your next hire if the stars are aligned. A friend of mine maintains a list of people she would like to work with and has coffee with them once in a while, when a position opens at her firm, they are the first ones to get a call.

In a similar fashion, don’t hesitate to have meaningful conversation with your peers on your challenges, successes and good candidates that have showed up on your radar. The sharing of knowledge contributes to everybody’s efforts and makes it a little easier for everyone. It’s also a good idea to sift through the mass of unsolicited applications to keep the interesting ones for later reference. Bonus points if you can have mini pre-screening interview with the candidates that showed interest and look promising. It will give you a good idea of what they’re about. You can always purge that pile of applications more than 6 months old as these tend get out of date quickly. A quick coffee date with a candidate can go a long way and make the interaction a little more human and personal, which never hurts.

Outsource it:

Sometimes it makes sense to hire a seasoned professional to help you with your recruiting. They have the network, resources, expertise and experience that you don’t and can really make a difference when it comes to narrowing down the field of candidates. Some people mistrust recruiters as they are sometimes seen as ruthless mercenaries that will poach people from their current jobs with little or no scruples.

While I can see that being an issue, and I am sure you’d find unscrupulous people out there doing unsavory things in just about every industry. Let’s not forget that these guys have a whole lot of skin in the game as they don’t get paid if you don’t make a hire through them. As far as incentive alignment is concerned, it’s difficult to make it more favourable than that for you. When it comes to ruthlessly poaching people, I would argue that this is the hard law of the marketplace. But if you’re experiencing people routinely leaving your office for greener pastures, I would highly recommend looking past the financial and emotional aspects of such transactions and take a long, hard-look at your culture. The best way to prevent people leaving your firm as soon as something better presents itself is to define, refine and constantly strive to improve your office culture. A great culture creates loyal, fulfilled employees to whom a job is much more than just a salary. I know first hand of such companies: their staff routinely decline other better paying jobs because they’re having way too much fun. Which leads me to my next point:

Work on your company’s culture and constantly refine it:

As a keen observer of the marketing industry, Terry O’Reilly likes to observe and analyze a company’s touch points to see how they interact with their stakeholders (employees, suppliers and clients). O’Reilly says that there are innumerable untapped opportunities for improving any of these touch points: from the way you sign-off your emails to your on-hold phone recordings, via your website and your social media presence, to name a few. The same goes for recruiting: how would you like your potential employees to perceive you and how would you go about them going “I want to work nowhere but there” upon leaving their first interview.

If you don’t know your company culture well enough to explain it in 1-2 sentences, on the spot, you probably have what I call a “by default” culture. A strong culture is your best bet to attract the right talent as it helps in creating an environment where everybody is valued and treated well. Every single company with a strong cultural foundation that I have observed first hand, has happier, engaged, loyal employees, often that wouldn’t leave their job for a salary substantially higher than their current one.

A great culture, as my friend Stephen Shedletzky puts it, equals values x behaviour. In other words, it means that you have to be clear on your why (purpose) and have well-established values. Not only that, but you need to live those values on a daily basis. Values that are not constantly used as a framework for decision making are useless.

GREAT CULTURE = VALUES x BEHAVIOUR

Don’t recruit solely based on skills and experience, and make the hiring process a family affair:

By the same token, a strong cultural foundation will help you focus on what matters most in prospective candidates: their personality, work ethic and ability to integrate an unfamiliar environment. Vitsoe has become a master at hiring slow and firing fast. They are so keenly aware of the need for new recruits to fit in with the culture that they notoriously dismiss candidates that would be perfectly fine for most of the rest of us, mere mortals. A story that stuck with me over the years is that of a technician that they were trying out on the job. On paper, the candidate was a great fit, but on day one, at the end of the work schedule, he tossed his tools in the toolbox and left. The fact that he did not carefully place his tools back in the order they belonged was a deal breaker for them. Needless to say that they collectively decided against hiring him.

I recently got wind that the email address “iwanttokickfearinthenuts@rvltr.studio” I have listed in a summer internship posting that I put up at a local photography school, turned off a potential co-op student who was apparently offended by its attempt at humour. Instead of feeling bad about it, I realized that I had probably dodged a bullet by avoiding someone who would not understand our company’s culture and values. Better to have no fit than a poor fit.

While this kind of pickiness may seem extreme to some, I believe it shows that a company who knows what they stand for to such a degree, will not hesitate to make such decisions because they know the weight that a wrong decision can carry down the road. And being so picky is another way to turn off people that wouldn’t be a natural fit, so the people you’re left with at the end are the best fits for your company. Which doesn’t mean they’re a good fit for anyone else either, by the way.

On a side note, fire fast doesn’t mean rudely dismissing people without empathy. It just means letting go of the bad fits quickly. It’s certainly not a free pass to be an asshole about it. We still all have a duty to be humane, even in the most uncomfortable of situations.

Additionally, the hiring process shouldn’t be just a HR process. People you hire will work with others and most company with a great culture make hiring decision while involving all concerned parties from the Janitor to the CEO. It does make perfect sense to ensure that one’s coworkers can get along with or your run the risk of mutiny.

Ultimately, a resume and cover letter are a quick and efficient way to separate the good from the bad, but to determine fit, you have spend the time with the candidate and test their mettle, better yet: do it under pressure, as it’s when everything goes to shit that problems arise. Try them out in the real work environment and see how they respond to challenges, big and small and more importantly how they treat other people. You probably want to avoid the person who’s going to think that the janitor doesn’t deserve even the smallest of acknowledgement.

Once you’ve made that hire, keep watching them during the honeymoon period and at the first sign of trouble, address it immediately.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, recruiting is a lengthy, challenging process, in which we all tend to be be way too emotionally involved with. While a great culture will help with making interactions more human and personal and ultimately, hire people that feel at home in your company, it is important to remove as much emotional attachment to the decision making process. In other words, trust your gut but don’t become emotionally attached to the outcome.

In Vipassana meditation practice, this is called “Anicca”: the ability to not have any aversion for negative situations, feelings and sensations as well as for the positive ones. Meditation is a great tool to be able to reach that level of zen master self-control, I highly recommend it.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Archinect + Rvltr = Power

Still from the Fountainhead (Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal).

I’m very proud and humbled to announce that I’ve started contributing editorial features for Archinect as a regular contributor. The first article is a revisit of a past article that was posted here a while back on the importance of vetting your clients. Check out it here and leave us a comment!

Stay tuned for our next feature on one of the world’s oldest internet architecture platform.

Spaces, The Final Frontier. These are the...

Image via Pexels.

Reading time ~10 minutes

I’ve recently dived into the world of commercial interior design, both out of sheer curiosity and also as a form of informal research to understand better some of the challenges my clients are experiencing when tackling complex, large interiors projects. This writing is the result of multiple interviews and conversations with interior designers, both from large and small firms in order to see where commercial interiors are headed in the near future.

I’m going to present the most inspiring of these ideas and expand a little bit on them to give them some context around three main themes:

1. The importance of human to human interaction and human-centric design.

While we constantly hear about the impending doom of the approaching singularity and the resulting rise of our AI overlords, for the time being, people still don’t like to interact with machines, mainly on account of the fact that we haven’t been able to design machines that convincingly replicate a human to human experience. The uncanny valley makes our interactions with machines mostly weird and uncomfortable. In other words, it’s not anytime soon that the majority of workers will be replaced by machines, especially to replace human-to-human interactions.

This is why designing workplaces that foster face to face, wholesome relationships is critically important for our well-being. There is increasing evidence that a holistic approach to life where we don’t spend all our waking hours working, but rather strive to live fulfilled, balanced lives with a healthy dose of play is beneficial both inside and outside the office. There is more to creating such spaces than bean bags and foosball tables, as the best spaces are the ones that truly reflect a given company’s culture while accommodating the latest findings in workplace health. So bean bags and foosball may be a fit for one company and not another and should not be used as a formula just because they’re cool.

In her article about workplace design, Lois Wellwood further defines the idea of human-centric workplace design, where innovation and productivity come not from prescriptive work environments and scheduled interactions, but rather from visual and physical access to other people (Gensler’s research tells us that levels of  interaction decrease exponentially as workers are further removed from one another), which in turns allows for unplanned and casual interactions. In other terms, there is an increasing body of research out there that has identified some universal principles that can help us design better workplaces.

However, these principles are not prescriptive of how a space should be designed, but rather act as a sort of guideline for which attributes will make the space better for its users. On top of that, it is a designer’s duty to to deep-dive into their clients culture in order to come up with a design that reflects said culture and contribute to make a workplace that embodies the organizational values of the client.

This is where a skilled designer will be able to artfully blend a scientifically-sound approach, backed by research, with a creative ability to design spaces that actually improves the worker’s experience and therefore their productivity.

2. Loose fit, long life.

This is a really interesting idea, in an age where we see a lot of custom work being done for companies so that they can have a cool office with all sorts of gizmos integrated in complicated millwork. Companies such as Gensler understand that technology is rendered obsolete in less time than it takes to say it, and therefore design their spaces to accommodate technology, without making its upgrading overly complicated e.g., having to rip out an entire wall just to replace a projector. This makes office spaces somewhat future proof, and easy to upgrade or retrofit for a new tenant.

The main idea behind this is to design for the common denominator and not the exception. Take for example someone who loves camping in the wilderness and goes on average camping once a month for 3-4 days. When looking to buy their next car, they are naturally inclined to buy a big, off-road capable SUV, because the trunk space and the ground clearance will come handy once a month. At the same time, they spend 90% of their time driving around the city, routinely parking in garages or squeezing in between a hydrant and another car that’s taking 50% more space than it needs to. They essentially buy their car for the once-a-month exception, when they should really consider a small, hybrid or electric car that will get them easily around the city, save them a lot on gas and maintenance and be much easier to park in tight spots. Then, when that person needs a big truck to go play in the mud they can always rent one for the weekend (not to mention that if it gets destroyed you only have to cover the deductible - I speak from experience, ask me about the time I destroyed an SUV in Costa Rica).

The same goes for designing workspaces. If 40% percent of an office’s desks are empty at all times, why not implement a hot desk system where people settle with their networked laptop for the day wherever is most convenient to them at that moment in time? I discovered such a set-up on a recent visit to a large Toronto architecture firm that recently significantly downsized their office when they realized that out of their 70+ employees, they only ever had 50 to 55 of them in the office at any given point in time.

Taking the idea further, we can imagine many a set-up for how an office should work for its employees. That’s where design comes in to determine solutions that are tailored to each situation. The aforementioned hot-desking policy is not a solution for every company, but it made sense for that one when they were looking for efficiency gains, which allowed them to move from an office that was somewhat tricky to access by transit to a downtown core office near practically every major transit option in the city. This, in turn, allowed them to retain employees that were increasingly moving out to the suburbs as a result of being priced out of the downtown area.

3. Experiences.

Designing great looking spaces used to be enough to get people in the door. You’d dazzle them with spiffy finishes and thick carpet and the novelty alone would be enough to make them walk out the door with a smoking credit card and a bunch of stuff in their hands. Nowadays, people can find stuff cheaper and faster on Amazon and have it delivered the same day for practically nothing (thanks amazon prime). Consequently, retail spaces have to provide amazing experiences where people come for more than just shopping. Whether it’s a hands-on experience, coupled with unparalleled customer service (Apple stores), or a local café where the space is designed to cheer you up in the morning on your way to work (Milky’s), the spaces we frequent every day affect us. Working extra hard at making those experiences positive is a great way to differentiate oneself from the competition in markets where the product/service is commoditized. Even a notoriously commoditized brand like Samsung has started to recognize that with their latest Canadian flagship store. It is not a place where people go to buy stuff (they can do that from anywhere), rather a place where people get to experience the products and learn more about them, which is not a bad thing when you’re going to blow 5K + on a kitchen appliance.

However, experiences are increasingly becoming continuous, multi-channel experiences, where one may go to the flagship store to touch and feel the product and then go to the manufacturer’s website to read more, look at specs and make a final decision, before engaging with the brand on social media only to finally buy it from a reseller. This is where brands like Apple, Tesla and IKEA demonstrate the value of being in control of all steps of the experience. Samsung may control some of these steps such as the flagship store and their website, but since their products are sold by many different retailers, that’s where the experience breaks down, because they are not in control of what the experience is like at many of these retailers. Conversely, Apple controls 99.9% of its users’ experiences, from the website, to the Apple Store, to the customer and product service. The only time they relinquish control is for small, local, third-party retailers, but you can bet that they put a lot of contractual conditions on authorized resellers for them to retain their status and ensure a great experience. That’s also one of the reasons why Tesla doesn’t rely on conventional dealer networks to sell their wares. They are smart enough to know that car dealers variable geometry ethics would not serve them in the long term.

It is the companies who master all aspects of a customer’s experience, are willing to look beyond the obvious and tackle the most seemingly insignificant touch points with their customers who will come out ahead in the future, even Terry O’Reilly says so.

Conclusion:

We’ve covered 3 interesting ideas that are currently shaping commercial design and architecture: the human need for connection, designing adaptable spaces and providing users with unparalleled experiences. In my opinion, they are all deeply related to organizational culture and a reflection of how businesses think about about and present themselves to the world. They all challenge our preconceived notions about design, but are also essential to achieve the highest caliber of design. In such an uber-competitive landscape, firms who want to attract and retain the best talent not only need a solid cultural foundation, but also work out of spaces that embody that culture.

Firms who do not pay heed to the latest development in corporate design are destined to remain second-rate players, because the smart ones will continue to work really hard at improving themselves in every area.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Truth is Golden - 301 | In Praise Of Craft w/ Fraser Greenberg

Fraser Greenberg and I spoke at length about his Toronto upbringing, how he stumbled into family business and transformed it to thrive an ever-changing market as well as his latest endeavour, the coffee shop Milky’s in Toronto’s West End. What struck me about Fraser is the consistency with which he bring passion, purpose and an amazing sense of craft to everything he touches. A fascinating guest with great ideas, check out Fraser’s interview to learn more about him.

Hello, World!

About the podcast: The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

Credits:

Post-Production: Ryan Aktari

Music: Bounce Trio, Star Animal, 2014.

Organ & Keys : Matthieu Marthouret

Ténor Sax : Toine Thys

Drums : Gautier Garrigue

Composed by Toine Thys (copyrights SABAM).

Buy it on BandCamp :

https://weseemusicstore.bandcamp.com/album/small-streams-big-rivers

More info and music here :

http://www.youtube.com/user/weseemusic

http://www.matthieumarthouret.com

https://www.facebook.com/MatthieuMarthouret.Music/