Day 5: Friday 13 January
To be done today
- Build out social media posts that test my thinking around unmeasured’s offer. Use them to craft the language and concepts.
- Meet with Mary Kirsty and Pete
- Program Buffer.
- Research and list out some publications to drop a line to.
- Week’s review.
Clear is kind
The nice thing about writing for social media is that it needs to be succinct. The idea needs to be clear in order for it to stop the scroll and have someone take a moment and consider what you’ve posted. It’s a good discipline to develop. I’ve been guilty in the past of writing to be clever rather than clear. My acknowledgment is that clear is kind and I plan on adopting that as a motto for all my work this year.
Today I’ve posted more than a week’s worth of tweets and LinkedIn posts into Buffer. Hopefully they’ll elicit some response so that I might refine and adjust my thinking or they’ll resonate and be useful to someone else.
My plan is to edit, distil and find analogies for all my writing about unmeasured.
Unmeasured was my very first analogy and I haven’t used it much at all. Crazy! Going to lean into the analogy behind unmeasured more this year.
Too generous
It’s such a joy to meet with Mary, Kirsty and Pete. They never fail to bring joy. Joy in hearing what they’re all up to, making extraordinary things and bringing generous work into the world.
pitch or tone?
AI will never replace the human side of architectural practice. I’m here for the humans.
That feels like a pretty good pitch right now. As we get more and more enamoured of what AI can do, it can never replace relationships. It helps us escape some of the time consuming work we face. Helping us do the messy first draft, but we still need to add ourselves into that mix. It doesn’t help us with all the messiness that comes with humans.
Spruiking
Also crafted an email to send to publishers:
The machines are coming! Their headlights are dazzling! And I’d like to avert archi-road kill.
So while architects distractedly request Frank Gehry haikus from Chat GPT, or DALL-E renders of a Rococo Rogers, I’m spruiking instead the value of human (or soft) skills.
Architects know practice is part creativity and part business. On occasion forgetting it’s also part relationships, connection, community, communication and so on. Neglecting the worth of developing better human skills at their peril. Skills that can be learnt, practised and improved.
It’s what I do. I run workshops and coach architects in these skills.
More to the point I write about them.
You can get a taste in my Journal (ie blog) on my website. Typically my posts are a sketch to test an idea and thinking, or an opportunity for research and learning. They often need more work and editing. Published is better than perfect. Ultimately I trust they’re still helpful to architects.
Would you be interested in publishing my writing about human skills in architectural practice? I’d love to discuss how I might contribute.
hmmm… I probably overthought it. Might need to come back to it and review, edit or rewrite it. I dunno. Let me sleep for a weekend on it. As an experiment, I did send it out to ArchDaily.
A weekly review
As I started doing my review for the week, I realise I entirely failed to write out my Goals for the month or the quarter.
How fascinating!
Goes to the top of the list for next week.
I have no substantial baseline from which to assess the week, but it’s still been an objectively good week. I have writing to reference about what the fuck I’m doing. There has been greater clarity in it all. The key is to stay on the path I’ve set for now and give it the time to grow and develop. It’s the only way I can assess whether it’s working or not. I think I veered to many times last year, I didn’t really test things properly. I don’t feel I was ever on the right path, I was right in that, but I could have learnt more through persistence.
