Flexibility and fragility

Case study

Harvard Business School’s campus is an extreme outlier, even when compared to those of peer institutions with similar histories. Situated on the Charles River across from the main buildings of its parent university, the self-contained layout was originally conceived in the 1920s.1 At the time of construction funding constraints scuttled plans for a dedicated classroom building. Burgeoning enrollments plus the favorable economics of the post-World War II years brought this need back to the foreground.

HBS was a pioneer of the case method of teaching, which involves continuous interaction between faculty and students, so the traditional classroom design with a grid of desks would not suffice. Architects tasked with creating an alternative experimented with a tiered seating arrangement curving around a central space, from which the professor could guide the discussion as a conductor directing a symphony. This allowed students to more easily see and engage with both their teacher and each other.

The new configuration was piloted with a full-scale working mockup before blueprints were finalized. Nevertheless, builders realized their approach was somewhat experimental and might need modification as pedagogy changed. They found an unusual way to accommodate this. When assembling the steel framing they employed I-beams that were longer than usual, minimizing the number of internal load-bearing walls. Although it was more expensive and difficult to install up front, this choice meant that if teaching requirements or student needs changed, classrooms could be torn down or reconfigured without the expense of knocking down the main structure.

Taking spaces tailored for one use case and repurposing them for another has suddenly become the norm in a world blindsided by coronavirus and the new patterns of living left in its wake. Bedrooms have become office spaces and studios for videoconferencing. Regular hospital wards have become intensive care units. Restaurant dining rooms are now staging areas for walk-in customers or delivery services. As many are learning the hard way, none of these physical spaces were designed to meet the demands newly placed on them.

Critical error

Airports were originally designed like bus or train stations, with terminals designed for quick and unfettered access to planes. Anyone could accompany passengers to the gate and watch as their plane departed. This changed slowly over the decades as safety become more of a concern, ending with finality with the tragic security failures of September 11. Open terminals with easy access were now a liability, and strict screening protocols were needed. Airports had to retrofit their spaces with cumbersome scanning equipment, shoehorning it into spaces that clearly were not suited for it. Passenger flow suffered, as spaces designed for unimpeded access now had to accomplish the opposite.

Anyone who has worked on large software projects knows that recoding core infrastructure brings a high risk of blown budgets and missed deadlines. Many systems evolve in piecemeal fashion over years, adapting to meet specific needs using the idiosyncratic technologies available at the time. When the demands of their users change, or the organizations that created them get acquired, or accumulating inefficiencies threaten to grind operations to a halt, IT contractors are at the ready with major proposals that have price tags to match.

As CIOs often discover, their systems were not built with flexibility or future-proofing in mind. Investing in regular upgrades or making design choices that allow a code base to be repurposed is expensive, and often invisible, like the internal skeleton of a building. Compounding the pain, fixing this requires tearing up programs while they are still in use.

One of the most high-profile failures of the technology sector arose when Britain’s National Health Service attempted a comprehensive overhaul of diverse systems across numerous areas of operations. The initiative ended up burning billions of pounds over many years, with limited results that hardly matched the promises in the original scope of work. Flexibility and foresight are expensive and so are often ignored. Their costs show up later when the whole thing crumbles.

Design for tomorrow

The alternate approach can be very powerful. Amazon has quietly become tremendously successful in the business of providing technology infrastructure for other businesses, an activity that actually generates more profits than its original model of retailing an expanding set of products to consumers. Part of the reason for this success was an early choice to build its code base in a way that facilitated interactions with external users, even if there was no specific demand for it. Coders had to think and build in ways that allowed their work to be easily used by others, even if they had little understanding of how this might happen. This established Amazon as a platform with several new business lines emerging organically.

Organizations need the equivalent of extra-long I-beams, so that when the inevitable disruption occurs they can tear away the old and adapt without the whole structure collapsing. Similarly individuals who commit to a particular discipline or one way of looking at the world can be very successful, until the world shifts and that skill is no longer needed. When it’s difficult to know exactly what you’re building for, include those features that can bridge to a range of potential futures.

As for Harvard Business School’s main classroom building, it turns out the architects did a pretty good job the first time. Aside from some general refreshing and technical upgrades there have been no major changes to the basic design, and major renovations have not been needed in the 65 years since opening. However, in the era of social distancing the nature of in-person business education may change in unpredictable ways, so building in that flexibility may yet turn out to be a wise investment.

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References

Harvard Business School’s website has a brief history of Aldrich Hall, its main classroom building.

A computer scientist posted a long rant on the cultures of Amazon and Google in a viral blog post that explored the reasons for the former’s success.