Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1373

After yesterday’s post about speed, price, and quality , a friend of mine from Rotman emailed me and said: but what about integrative thinking?

When I was doing my MBA at Rotman and Roger Martin was the dean, integrative thinking was a significant part of the curriculum and the messaging for the school. 

Here’s how Roger explains it :

Over the past six years, I have interviewed more than 50 such leaders, some for as long as eight hours, and found that most of them share a somewhat unusual trait: They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both. This process of consideration and synthesis can be termed integrative thinking. It is this discipline—not superior strategy or faultless execution—that is a defining characteristic of most exceptional businesses and the people who run them.

So what my friend was getting at is why – when it comes to speed, price, and quality – do you only get to “pick any two?” Doesn’t that go against the rules of integrative thinking? Isn’t that a failure to look for a more holistic and integrated solution?

It’s a great point. And it’s a thought that crossed my mind while I was writing yesterday’s post. The fact that “something had to give” made me second guess myself.

In general, I’m a believer in integrative thinking. I think there are lots of opportunities to create new hybrid solutions and models that are superior to what might exist today.

But what I was getting at yesterday was perhaps a bit more low level in thinking.

Let’s say for instance you’re a developer constructing a new building and you and your construction manager are in the process of tendering for curtain wall . You receive 3 bids back and 2 of them are roughly the same, but one them is $5 million cheaper.

My immediate thoughts would be: Why is that one bid so much lower? Did they bid on the same scope? Are they missing something? Will the curtain wall arrive on-site on time? And if it does, is it going to leak like a sieve?

I’ll be the first to admit that the construction process is fraught with inefficiencies and ready for integrated solutions. I’m certain that the trade-offs between speed, price, and quality could be better managed.

But more often than not, a rock bottom price usually means that something did in fact give. After all, great integrative thinking is a pretty rare trait.

“ Project-triangle ” by Cosmocatalano - Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons .

When I was in business school, one of my friends – who runs his own agency – explained to me the Project Triangle  and the “pick any two” philosophy. 

Whether you’re building a building or building a mobile app, projects can be typically broken down in terms of 3 constraints: speed, price, and quality. The “pick any two” philosophy is that – because these dimensions are interrelated – you can only really get 2 of these dimensions at any one time.

So for example:

• If you want a project done really quickly and you want it to be high quality, then it’s not going to be cheap. It’s going to be expensive.
  

• If you want something done really quickly and you want it at the lowest price possible, then it’s not going to be high quality. It’s going to be low quality.
  

• Finally, if you want something high quality and you want it done cheaply, then it’s not going to be done quickly. You might get it done, but it will be deprioritized by whoever is doing it.
  

Few things in life are truly black and white, but I really like this framework. It acknowledges the fact that something has to give. It’s unsustainable to think you can always get super fast, high quality work at rock bottom prices.

One of the things I noticed this past weekend when I was on my Porter Escape in Quebec City was that there’s still evidence of the seigneurial land use system. I saw it on île d'Orléans .

Established in 1627 in New France , the seigneurial system was a feudal way of distributing land and creating subsistence farming for those who occupied it. It was ultimately abolished in 1854, but you can still see vestiges of it.

With the seigneurial system, a typical farming lot was a long and narrow strip of land emanating from the water, which in this particular case was the St. Lawrence River. Here’s a map from 1641 showing what that looks like:

The reasoning behind this spatial arrangement was rather simple. By having long narrow lots, it meant that you could maximize the number of farmers who had direct access to water. This was needed for navigation, but also for many other obvious reasons. This was an efficient layout.

At the same time, the long strips meant that each farmer had access to a broad cross section of different kinds of land. They had fertile land for growing, land for their home, and frequently land with trees so that they had material to build, fuel to burn, and so on. It also meant that, despite the overall lot sizes, people actually lived fairly close to each other. It created communities.

Of course, there’s a lot more to the seigneurial system than just its physical form and there are reasons it was eventually abolished. But today I just want to focus on spatial layout. Because I think there are parallels to how we continue to plan our communities.

If you live in a city you’ve probably come across a narrow rowhouse, a narrow townhouse, and/or a long and narrow condominium – which many people like to pejoratively refer to as a “bowling alley” plan. In these cases, the width of the home could be somewhere between 10 and 13 feet.

If you stop and think about this, it’s exactly the same spatial principles as the seigneurial land use system. But instead of maximizing the number of people with access to the St. Lawrence River, it’s about maximizing the number of people who front onto the street and who have access to natural light.

In tight urban conditions, it’s not uncommon to have no “side yard windows.” In my case, I live in a condominium with 20′ feet of windows on one side only. The other 3 sides of my box have none. And that’s a fairly common urban condition.

I find this interesting because as much as the world is rapidly changing, some things don’t actually change all that much.

Image: Wikipedia