Eighty years of dust

The story of Donkey Wheel House is on our About page, so let me tell the part it leaves out. In 2010 the building was an empty shell: peeling paint, broken windows, eighty years of dust. Seeing what it could become was easy. Getting it there was the lesson.

The vision was the cheap part. Anyone could stand in that building and imagine people in it. The hard part was everything a vision leaves out: the structure that would let a community form there, and keep forming after the people who imagined it had moved on.

Buildings make structure visible.

A building is honest in a way an organisation chart never is. Put the stairs in the wrong place and people stop using the top floor. Leave nowhere to sit and nobody lingers. You cannot talk a building into working. You design the conditions and then watch what people actually do.

Organisations are the same, only the stairs are harder to see. Who can decide what. Where information pools and where it dries up. Which meetings exist, and which conversations have nowhere to happen. People adapt to those conditions faster than they adapt to any strategy, and they adapt without being asked.

Vision without grounding is fantasy. The grounding is the part nobody photographs.

The unglamorous work.

A heritage redevelopment is mostly patience and small decisions made carefully. So was turning a private foundation into a national social innovation hub. The opening was a day. The structure underneath it took years.

I think about that whenever a leadership team shows me a new strategy. The strategy is the building everyone can picture. My questions are about the stairs: who will carry this, where the argument about it will happen, and what will make the new thing easier to do than the old one.

What I would tell myself in 2010.

Spend less time describing what could happen in the building and more time on what will make it happen when you are not there. The imagining felt like the work. It was the invitation to it.

Paul Steele