Eiffel Over

Tag: masterplan

  • Taking time to find the right fit

    In yesterday’s post, I explored the difference between kinetic and thermodynamic products in chemistry. The analogy was about allowing change to unfold more slowly, giving the system a chance to find a state of greater harmony.

    The “system” can be anything—a masterplan, an organisation, or even a supply chain. But the principle holds true: quick change might give us rapid results, but finding the best fit for the system takes time. What’s key here is iteration—testing and adjusting to discover if a better solution can emerge, whatever “better” might mean.

    So why should we care about the best fit? If the goal is just to get the job done, then a fast solution might seem sufficient. But if the goal is long-term success and the thriving of all the system’s parts, finding the best fit helps avoid hidden cracks that could lead to failure, and it reduces built-in stresses that could cause damage over time. Fixing those issues later costs time, energy, and money.

    Best-fit design, enabled by iterative processes and informed by local feedback, takes time—but the reward is a more harmonious, lower-energy system.

  • Changing the key system to generate new ideas

    Changing the key system is a technique I teach to help people develop new ideas when their thinking has become stuck. It’s one of my techniques for ‘turning the Kalideascope’. In other words, it’s a way to find new creative connections between all the inputs we have gathered.

    What is the key system?

    Design is creating something new. If it already exists, it isn’t design: it’s shopping (for more on this see my post on the Designer’s Paradox). I usually find that the overall shape of that new thing is defined by the answer to a few key questions.

    For example, the overall shape of a city master plan might be defined by the answer to the question: how do we manage surface water. In a tall building, the key question is how do we manage lateral loads. For a song, it might be the rhyming structure or the chord progression.

    In each of these situations, the key system, then, is the flood water system, the lateral stability system, the rhyming structure or the chord sequence.

    The answer to these big questions has such a dominant effect on the solution space that, once they are set, the rest of the ideas develop within these parameters.

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