To achieve a creative resolution of the tension in cases like these, it’s important to think deeply about the problem itself, working to parse it so that each model can be applied in full to discrete and distinct parts of the problem. The process is still an integration and not a compromise, so it’s critical that this new model create more value than comes from simply saying, “Let’s do both” and hoping for the best.
We call this third pathway a decomposition, because you seek to decompose, or break apart, the problem space in a new way that lets you apply the existing opposing models separately, to discrete parts of the problem, without diminishing their impact or compromising between them.
Decomposing a Wicked Problem
Decomposition is the way architect Bruce Kuwabara, together with his colleagues at KPMB Architects and a larger integrated design team, tackled a wicked problem presented by Manitoba Hydro.
Manitoba Hydro is a power utility in the central Canadian province of Manitoba. The company provides electricity and natural gas to nearly a million customers. In 2002, Manitoba Hydro purchased Winnipeg Hydro (the utility that provided electric power to the province’s capital city) and, as a part of the deal, agreed to build a new head office in downtown Winnipeg. The plan was to consolidate nine suburban offices into a single headquarters for more than two thousand employees.
Rather than stick to standard operating procedures for designing a new building, the folks at Manitoba Hydro took a huge leap: inspired by a fact-finding trip to Europe, they began a formal integrated design process to explore how to create a building that would set a new standard for energy efficiency in North America. The goal was to reduce energy consumption by more than 60 percent while also achieving architectural excellence in design.
Normally, in any given design process, the architect is the lead. In this case, a multifunctional team was formed: the design architects (KPMB), the architects of record (Smith Carter Architects and Engineers, now known as Architecture49), energy engineers (Transsolar KlimaEngineering), building system engineers, cost estimators, and project construction manager (PCL Constructors Inc.). The group spent a year framing and reframing the problem through a formal, facilitated integrated design process.
The challenge was considerable. Kuwabara acknowledges that he was daunted when pitching for the project. He even admitted to the selection committee that he knew how to achieve a 50 percent energy reduction but had no idea how to reach the 60 percent target. “We went for the interviews and, frankly, we were outgunned by a lot of the European firms,” the architect says. “They just have deeper experience in sustainability, in high-performance, low-energy buildings.”6
Kuwabara needed to change the game if he hoped to win it. His idea? “I kind of shifted the terms of the discussion to a healthy workplace.” In shifting the discussion, Kuwabara (with his associate Luigi LaRocca) won his firm the job but created a complex integrative challenge. The project now had multiple goals, including these two:
To be a super-energy-efficient building
To be a healthy and supportive workplace
Unfortunately, as those of us who have worked in typical urban office buildings know, these two goals are often traded off against each other. Kuwabara explains the typical tension between energy efficiency and livability in urban office environments: “Class A office buildings, as we know them—like the buildings in downtown Toronto—are the dinosaurs of the future. Why are we designing buildings we know aren’t that responsive to climate? The North American standard is that you go into a Class A office building, it’s 72 degrees, no matter what’s happening outside. Meanwhile, people wear sweaters in the summer, and they wear t-shirts in the winter. Buildings are either overheated or too cold.” He goes on to highlight an office dweller’s central complaint: “Why is it that in high-rise buildings, if they’re residential, you can have a window that opens, but in an office building you can’t? It has to do with controlling that set point of 72-degree temperature.”
In the traditional paradigm, every step toward greater energy efficiency represents a trade-off against livability, and that can lead architects to create hermetically sealed, utilitarian environments that prioritize energy goals over the comfort of human beings. And if the integrated Manitoba Hydro building design team accepted that paradigm, no better answer was possible. But the team was resolute; it wanted a building that was at once brilliantly efficient and remarkably livable. To create such a building, the team had to question core assumptions about how buildings relate to their environment.
Efficiency and Livability
In many cases, we think of a building as providing shelter from the environment, as fighting against the outside when it is too hot or too cold. This is a particularly strong impulse in a place like Winnipeg. Temperatures in the prairie city range broadly between 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter months and 79 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime.7 Of course, those are averages, and it wouldn’t be strange for the city to see days colder than minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit in winter and hotter than 85 degrees Fahrenheit in summer. In such conditions, the obvious impulse is to aggressively control a building’s climate through sophisticated heating and air-conditioning systems that seal it off from the outside environment. The underlying assumption? You need to shut out the outside world in order to make the inside world energy efficient.
Kuwabara wondered whether there was another way. Working closely with climate engineers Transsolar and the rest of the integrated design team, he found one. The leverage point was the city’s own climate. Winnipeg’s northern prairie location means that the city has an abundance of two things: sun and wind. In total, Winnipeg gets 2,300 hours of sunlight annually, and as much as 16 hours of sunlight each day during the summer. The winds sweep in, sometimes from the Arctic but also often from the south. Instead of thinking about how to control the climate of the building, the integrated design team asked how it might make the city’s climate work for the building, in turn producing both efficiency and liveability.
The integrative insight was to decompose elements of the building’s environment normally considered to be part of a single “building climate control” problem: HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning). Kuwabara and the team asked themselves, What if we separated the heating/cooling systems and the ventilation systems, driving efficiency hard in the heating and cooling, and liveability aggressively through ventilation?
Go with the Flow
Typically, 45 percent of the energy load in a building in this climate is tied to heating and air-conditioning (and another 25 percent to lighting). So it makes sense to focus on these dimensions when you’re seeking energy efficiency. Accordingly, the Manitoba Hydro building features a massive geothermic field: hundreds of holes drilled to a depth of four hundred feet below the building. Radiant water-based heating and cooling reside in the concrete slabs that support the building. The building has double walls and an outer envelope, a thermal-glazed glass exterior that produces a greenhouse effect to warm the building with the sun’s rays.
All these measures drive down the energy demands. But they could create a stifling environment without a new approach to ventilation—one that leverages the windiness of downtown Winnipeg (Kuwabara muses, “This is like a coastal city where the wind is always coming in from the ocean”). Rather than build traditional systems that would recycle forced air through a closed building, the team created a building that could breathe: “The tower has got three stacks of six floors, and each stack has a south-facing atrium,” Kuwabara says. “The atriums are very large and very wide; they take all the prevailing winds that come [through each base] . . . and they effectively become the lungs of the building. All the fresh air comes from outside to inside. It gets drawn naturally into the underfloor system and then rises as fresh air into the workplace, into every loft. It is drawn slowly, almost unnoticeably, to the north, where we have smaller atriums that pick up all this air and exhaust it into what we call a solar chimney.”
The building has a temperature range (rather than a firm set point) around 65 degrees Fahrenheit. It is designed to respond to the weather outside and to the people inside. “We said, ‘Listen, people aren’t stupid,’” Kuwabara explains. “‘They know how to control their own environment’ . . . [so] we created this living organism that individuals actually control on a daily basis.” The building allows users to open windows and control lighting.
The result? “Every system that we have is quite unconventional, so it ended up that we surpassed the sixty percent [goal]. Our total energy consumption is in the vicinity of ninety kilowatt hours per square meter per year. By comparison, many buildings are four hundred kilowatt hours per square meter per year, and even so-called energy-efficient buildings are two-eighty or two-seventy.”
And livability? The design of the spaces helped Manitoba Hydro build a more collaborative culture and a happier, healthier workforce than it had in its former quarters. “We reduced sick days 1.2 days per person, per year, over two thousand people,” Kuwabara says. “It’s not just productivity, but health.” Moreover, the building has won major international awards, has been called the most important building in Canada, and was even dubbed the “best office tower in North America.”8
This was a decomposition integration. Instead of accepting the existing problem frame—climate control—Kuwabara and the integrated design team questioned a fundamental assumption: the natural pairing of heating/cooling with ventilation. In doing so, the team broke the problem apart in a new way. This decomposition let the team create a new answer, producing a building that was at once more efficient and more livable than other buildings. The team was able to artfully combine two models that once seemed to be in strict conflict with one another.
Distinct Model Elements
A decomposition integration rests on your knowing when and how to apply each model to its best advantage. Rather than choose model A or model B to apply to the entire situation or at all times, you base a decomposition on applying the models together by carefully distinguishing when and how each can be applied to distinct elements of the problem space (see figure 7-5). Typically, this means seeing the problem space in a new way—breaking apart elements that are traditionally considered to be part of a whole (see figure 7-6).
Try This
Go back to your own challenge. Take a step back to ask, How might I break my initial problem apart, along a meaningful dividing line, so that I could apply one of my models to one part of the problem, and the other model to the other part of the problem? What might a new answer look like under these conditions?
Figure 7-5. Starting Point for a Decomposition
Figure 7-6. Visualizing a Decomposition
Coming to a decomposition integration demands a deep understanding of the context at hand. For a decomposition to work, there must be a meaningful dividing line in the problem—a way of breaking the problem space into two distinct parts, each of which responds well to one of the opposing models. Changing the understanding of the problem requires the team to delve into assumptions to identify the meaningful dividing line. Without a new understanding of the problem, if you try to simply “do both,” you are likely to find yourself struggling, constantly trying (and often failing) to balance opposing models in real time. You want to set a higher aspiration to create a new, great answer.
THINK CREATIVELY
The three types of integrations we have described (the hidden gem, the double down, and the decomposition) represent proven pathways to creative resolution. When you’re faced with an integrative challenge, instead of hoping for inspiration while staring at a blank piece of paper, start to generate ideas and envision prototypes by asking the three questions: How might a new model be created from one building block from each opposing model, throwing away the rest of each model? Under what conditions could a more intense version of one model actually generate one vital benefit of the other? How might the problem be broken apart in a new way so that each model could be applied in whole to distinct parts of the problem? These three questions can be applied, in turn, to any integrative challenge, helping you expand the set of possible solutions to be considered.
In the end, integrative thinking isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. Contexts differ greatly, and so do the answers appropriate to those contexts. The aim is to make sense of the opposing models in front of you and to apply the kind of integration best suited to those models, along with a dash of imagination. Our three pathways to integration represent a place to start; they are search mechanisms that can help you frame a discussion of possible creative resolutions to a given problem.
But any creative process also demands some ground rules. Otherwise, it is easy to get bogged down in minutia or spin off in unhelpful, random directions. To have a productive session around these three pathways, remember these core principles.
Use all three pathways as thought starters. Regardless of your initial conditions, don’t get too focused on one vector or one idea; keep going until you have generated multiple possibilities that could resolve the tension between the models and solve your problem. By all means, start with the pathway that is most closely aligned to your initial conditions. If you really do love one model more than the other, try finding a double down solution first. But then try out the others as well. If one of the pathways doesn’t yield an answer, that’s fine. The point is to ask the question and see what comes of it.
Defer judgment. At this stage, all ideas are good ideas. You can’t know where an idea might lead. And in integrative thinking, the creative solution is a productive combination of multiple ideas, each of which would be inadequate on its own. So turn off your natural instinct to judge ideas. Instead, capture all the ideas that are generated, and encourage individuals to share all the ideas that occur to them, even those that seem silly or off the point. You never know where those ideas might lead.
Build on the ideas of others. Simply put, more and better ideas will come out if the participants actually listen to one another. Often, group members have different levels of enthusiasm for the existing models, and different benefits they value from each. Listening to one another can help bridge these gaps. Our advice is to leverage individual, paired, and group brainstorming approaches to ensure you get a diverse set of ideas, and make clear that building on the ideas of others is an explicit goal of the process.
Following these basic principles can help individuals collaborate and make connections—two activities that are crucial to generating creative ideas in any context but especially in the integrative thinking process. Because you’re beginning with opposing models, some groups wind up with different factions in love with different models. The danger is that these factions will shut down the ideas that come from the other side. Using the pathways, deferring judgment, and building on the ideas of others can help teams avoid this trap.
Once you have potential integrative solutions on the table, the next stage is to think about how the ideas might be built out, explored, and tested. You are not yet ready to choose a single possibility and move on. Instead, you’ll take several possibilities to the next stage and assess these prototypes via testing and experimentation. Only after that will you feel confident enough to move ahead with an integrative answer.
TEMPLATES
We have created templates to help you organize your work as you follow the three pathways discussed in this chapter. Figure 7-7 guides you along the hidden gem pathway; figure 7-8, the doubl
e down pathway; and figure 7-9, the decomposition pathway.
Figure 7-7. Template: Hidden Gem Pathway
Figure 7-8. Template: Double Down Pathway
Figure 7-9. Template: Decomposition Pathway
Chapter 8
Assessing the Prototypes
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
In 2001, when Apple launched the iPod, the reviews were mixed. Said one tech analyst, “Clearly Apple is following Sony’s lead by integrating consumer electronics devices into its marketing strategy, but Apple lacks the richness of Sony’s product offering. And introducing new consumer products right now is risky, especially if they cannot be priced attractively.”1
In 2007 similar grumblings greeted the iPhone. Said one Engadget commenter, “Apparently none of you guys realize how bad of an idea a touch-screen is on a phone. I foresee some pretty obvious and pretty major problems here . . . Color me massively disappointed.”2 And the iPad, in 2010? It was called a glorified and overgrown iPod Touch, with no serious market potential.
For the record, Apple has sold an estimated 100 million iPods, 500 million iPhones, and 300 million iPads since these early withering reviews.
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