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Managing as designing?

Article  in  Building Research and Information · March 2008

DOI: 10.1080/09613210701859824

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 BUILDING RESEARCH & INFORMATION (2008) 36(2), 203 –205

Managing as designing?

Graham M.Winch

Managing as Designing
Edited by Richard J. Boland Jr and Fred Collopy
Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2004; ISBN 0 80474674 5

information systems academics’ interest in architecture

Downloaded by [Graham M. Winch] at 08:54 23 April 2012

is, perhaps, a subconscious reflection of Brooks’s

(1995, ch. 4) contention that the principal problem
with current practice in software engineering is that
the process lacks the equivalent of the architect in
construction.

The book is structured into four sections. The first

Frank Gehry is one of the world’s leading architects,
responsible for many iconic buildings around the
world and noted for his distinctive combination of
organic forms and high-technology structures. For
this reason, he was commissioned by Case Western
Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, to design the
new building for the Weatherhead School of Manage-
ment in the late 1990s. This book reports on the work-
shop that was held to celebrate the opening of the Peter
B. Lewis Building in June 2002 to reflect on the theme
of ‘managing as designing’. Stimulated by keynote
speeches from Gehry himself, and from Karl Weick,
the book contains a large number of short reflections
upon the theme from academics and practitioners
from a wide variety of backgrounds.
The contributors come, in roughly equal parts, from
the Weatherhead School, elsewhere in the US, and
from Europe, spiced by a lone Australian. Most are
business school academics, with a bias towards infor-
mation systems management, but they also include
those with academic interests in music, the fine arts,
design studies, and a variety of practitioners. The
Building Research & Information ISSN 0961-3218 print ⁄ISSN 1466-4321 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis
http: ⁄ ⁄www.tandf.co.uk ⁄journals
DOI: 10.1080/09613210701859824
introduces the issues and contains the keynote
speeches, and argues, in essence, that conceiving mana-
ging as designing would have enormous benefits
because it would give an integrity to management prac-
tice that had recently become tarnished by recent US
corporate scandals. It also identifies the importance
of Herbert Simon’s work for underpinning the ideas
present in the book. The second presents a wide
variety of conceptual responses to the propositions
contained in the first section, with perspectives
ranging from music and design studies, through inno-
vation to accounting. The third section covers the
applied side with contributions from organizations as
varied as IDEO and Media Lab, on the one hand,
and DHL and the Australian Taxation Office, on the
other. The final section attempts to pull some of
the themes together and identify the implications for
the practice of management, management teaching,
and management research.
This is a fascinating and provocative book, and the fol-
lowing comments are made in the spirit of continuing
the debate that the editors and their contributors
have started. The first, and perhaps obvious, point to
make is that there is a real danger here of developing
a whole perspective based on a case study of one
project. Gehry is a very particular sort of designer –
one of a very small number of international stars that
set the trend in architectural fashion, and shape our
built environment. The work of most designers is
much more mundane, and architectural designers are
also involved in the design of drab office buildings,
socially disastrous housing projects, and yet another
 Book Review
identical shopping mall that bears no relationship to its
surroundings. Many of these international stars have
reputations for enormous arrogance and determination
to have their own way. The role of the arrogant archi-
tect Howard Roark in King Vidor’s film The Fountain-
head (1949), allegedly based on Frank Lloyd Wright,
still resonates today. Architectural design does not
have to be like that, and clearly, the project sponsors
at the Weatherhead School had a very different experi-
ence from Howard Roark’s clients. However, many
clients are not so happy. The Scottish Parliament
project with Enric Miralles (Bain, 2005) and the
Sydney Opera House (Murray, 2004) with Jørn
Utzon are two high-profile examples – even if client
behaviour can generate some of the problems.
A second issue is that design is seen – at least by the
editors of this book – as something inherently positive.
They argue that:
Downloaded by [Graham M. Winch] at 08:54 23 April 2012
if managers adopted a design attitude, the world
of business would be different and better. Man-
agers would approach problems with a sensibil-
ity that swept in the broadest array of
influences to shape inspiring and energizing
designs for products, services and processes that
are both profitable and humanly satisfying.
(p. 3)
This is, to say the least, naı̈ve. Designers need clients, as
Gehry himself makes clear, and if the client’s ends are
evil, then can the design process really be cast as inher-
ently ‘humanly satisfying’? Albert Speer was an archi-
tectural designer with grand ideas for the
transformation of Berlin, but he worked for Adolf
Hitler. Can Speer’s work really be evaluated in ignor-
ance of the intent of its sponsor?
This point raises the further question of who is the
client for the organization design process outlined by
Weick? Is it the shareholders as specified by the con-
ventional theory of the firm, the Chief Executive
Officer as specified by the leadership literature, or a
wider group of stakeholders as advocated by the pro-
ponents of a wider corporate social responsibility?
Each of these three would probably commission a
very different kind of organizational design, and if
their interests were not aligned, then the resulting
design would probably be closer to a camel than a
horse as a result of the trade-offs required to keep
them all satisfied. Most designers would say that they
need a clear brief and lines of authority from their
client to produce good work, and it would have been
very interesting to know more about how the Weather-
head School organized itself as a client to allow Gehry
to produce excellent work.
That said, this reviewer is convinced that the editors
and their contributors are on to something, and the
204
intellectual links between designing and managing are
probably closer than they realize. Leon Battista
Alberti, writing in Renaissance Florence, and who
probably has the claim to be one of the earliest manage-
ment theorists (Landes, 1983), is best known for his
treatise on architecture – De re aedificatoria (1452/
85) – which profoundly shaped architectural thinking,
and hence our built environment, in the Western
world. Therefore, the following comments are
designed to identify some of the tensions in the mana-
ging as designing perspective with a view to furthering
the debate and, perhaps, stimulating some research.
The first tension within the book is that between
designing and making, identified most clearly by
Orlikowski who argues for a perspective on designing
as enactment. Architectural design is only a small part
of the process of adding value for clients by creating
an asset in the form of building that enables its occu-
pants to do their jobs effectively and efficiently
(Winch, 2002). Yet, there is no mention anywhere in
the book, except by Gehry himself, of all the other
contributors to the construction process that delivered
the Peter B. Lewis Building – the engineers who
ensured that it stands up, the project managers who
ensured that the project kept to budget and schedule,
and the operatives who poured concrete, erected steel,
and installed furniture. Just as an architect cannot
work without a client, an architect cannot work
without those who turn their ideas into a physical
artefact. While it is undoubtedly the case that the
job of senior management is designing rather than
making, the purpose of designing is to enable
making (if one can stretch that term to include services
for the moment), so effective designing cannot take
place without understanding its relationship to
making. If one inference from Brooks’s work is that
software engineering has been too obsessed with
making rather than with designing, some would
argue that the problem in construction is that too
many are obsessed with designing at the expense of
making (Woudhuysen and Abley, 2004). Orlikowski
argues that the two are fundamentally interrelated
and management as designing cannot be disconnected
from management as making, while most of the con-
tributors appear happy to consider designing
without considering making.
A second tension developed in the book is between
Weick’s conception of design as ‘throwness’ derived
from the work of Martin Heidegger, which sees
design as an intense, immediate experience of full
engagement in the present which is essentially reactive,
and the conception of design presented by the design
theorists such as Buchanan, Tzonis, and Liedtka as a
process of detachment from the immediate to look
forward proactively to an alternative future state.
Interestingly, this alternative view can be derived
from Schutz’s (1967, ch. 2) discussion of Heidegger

and Husserl around the concept of future perfect think-
ing. While future perfect thinking implies that one’s
future actions are conceived as if they had already hap-
pened, by linking Husserl’s concept of ‘protention’
with a pun on the words ‘future perfect’, one can
think of design as the preconception of a perfect
future state through a reflective process. For some,
such as Karl Marx, this proactive aspect of design is
what makes one human:
A spider conducts operations which resemble
those of the weaver, and a bee would put many
a human architect to shame by the construction
of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes
the worst architect from the best of bees is that
the architect builds the cell in his mind before
he constructs it in wax.
(Marx, 1976, p. 284)
Downloaded by [Graham M. Winch] at 08:54 23 April 2012
A third set of tensions revolves around the organization
of the design process. Many contributors, such as
Jönsson, explore the dynamics of product development
teams, looking for ways of generating further inter-
action to enhance quality. However, Kaiser, a digital
artist working at the highest level, argues that the
most effective way of generating collaboration is to
keep the members of the team apart so that their egos
do not interact destructively, and then to coordinate
the creative process through clear allocation of respon-
sibilities rather than the interactive generation of possi-
bilities, a point of view which many a project manager
would endorse. This point, of course, relates to the dis-
cussion of the first tension. If the designers are closer to
Roark than Gehry – and this is sometimes the case –
how can conventional approaches to managing crea-
tive teams which attempt to reduce barriers to
dynamic interaction work?
In the context of a workshop where designers appear
by many of the contributors to be cast as founts of
unbounded creativity, Vandenbosch and Gallagher
discuss the role of constraints in the design process.
Most designers, in practice, work in highly con-
strained worlds – be they technical, regulatory, bud-
getary, or simply due to the need to appease key
stakeholders. If this is the case, then an important
research agenda for the managing as designing per-
spective would be the constraints on organization
design. Posing the question this way takes one back
to the earlier tradition of managing as designing rep-
resented by the contingency theorists of the 1960s
and 1970s, perhaps best represented in this context
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Book Review
by Galbraith (1977). Does the managing as designing
perspective suggest a return to the determinism of the
contingency theorists, or does the metaphor of the
musical score with its inherent ‘symbolic poverty’,
discussed by Cook and Yoo, suggest a non-determinis-
tic way forward? If so, what is the role of the compo-
ser/designer in the context of the self-governing
chamber quartet compared with their role in the
context of the symphony orchestra with its conduc-
tor/project manager?
I could go on, because this book contains so many sti-
mulating ideas, but I will finish on a positive note.
Vitruvius, in the well-known translation by Henry
Wotton (1624), argued that, ‘Well Building hath
three conditions; Commoditie, Firmness, and
Delight’. This book meets all three criteria, and I
hope it will stimulate a continuing debate on the rel-
evance of a managing as designing perspective on the
theory and practice of managing. Such a perspective
could provides an alternative model for strategy and
management that places more of an emphasis on pro-
cesses of sense-making and less on a priori plans and
decisions. I also hope it will stimulate other leading
business schools, including my own, to follow the
bold example of the Weatherhead School, the Judge
Business School at Cambridge (by John Outram
Associates), and a few others and commission exciting
buildings from leading architects.
Graham M. Winch
Manchester Business School, UK
graham.winch@mbs.ac.uk
References
Bain, S. (2005) Holyrood: The Inside Story, Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh.
Brooks, F.P. (1995) The Mythical Man-Month, 2nd edn,
Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Galbraith, J.R. (1977) Organization Design, Addison-Wesley,
Reading, MA.
Landes, D. (1983) Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of
the Modern World, Belknap, Cambridge, MA.
Marx, K. (1976) Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Fowkes, B. and Intro.
Mandel, E., Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Murray, P. (2004) The Saga of the Sydney Opera House, E&FN
Spon, London.
Schutz, A. (1967) The Phenomenology of the Social World,
Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL.
Winch, G.M. (2002) Managing Construction Projects: An Infor-
mation Processing Approach, Blackwell, Oxford.
Woudhuysen, J. and Abley, I. (2004) Why is Construction so
Backward?, Wiley-Academy, Chichester.
205