Shearing Layers?

Shearing Layers as a name comes from one of those moments in my life when the world pivoted around a couple of extra notches. Stewart Brand wrote and presented a TV show in 1994 called How Buildings Learn and one episode in particular was called Shearing Layers. Hmm. Chapter 2 of the accompanying book goes into some detail.

British architect Frank Duffy of DEGW is quoted as saying:

“Our basic argument is that there isn’t such a thing as a building. A building properly conceived is several layers of built components,”

all with different life expectancies – the Shell of the building, for instance, lasts the lifetime of the building itself whilst the Set is the use of furniture which may change in as little of a few weeks. Brand develops this idea to include six layers with expected lives ranging from the eternal, for the Site itself, down the daily mobility of what he calls Stuff.

Here’s Duffy again,

“Thinking about buildings in this time-laden way is very practical. As a designer you avoid such classic mistakes as solving a five-minute problem with a fifty-year solution, or vice versa. It legitimizes the existence of different design skills – architects, service engineers, space planners, interior designers – all with their different agendas defined by this time scale. It means you invent building forms which are very adaptive.”

And I thought – he’s talking about organisations!

Of course, I now realise that whenever anybody speaks about pretty much anything I do a quick head-fake and bring it back to being about organisations, but that’s what you get for being obsessive.

Back to How Buildings Learn – Brand goes on to quote Robert V O’Neill’s A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems – not quite the page turner.

“The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components, with the rapid components simply following along.”

which Brand explains,

“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick.”

And I thought – he’s talking about organisations! Again.

So this site is designed to help me answer the questions I’ve been wrestling with ever since the summer of 1994.

My first attempt to work with these questions grew into The Trinity Group, a strategy consulting shop that moved increasingly into the slow, more fundamental layers. Trinity took a stakeholder approach to consulting, considering the interests of the three primary groups that sit around every meeting room table in every organisation: customers, staff and owners. We did good work but the world kept turning.

I now spend most of my working time in the lower, slower layers and the pursuit of skippiness.

The Pursuit of Skippiness sets a high bar. Instead of simply considering the interests of stakeholders, let’s organise, from the most fundamental (slow) layers up, explicitly to deliver success to each stakeholder.