Transcript
Steve Coster:
Hi. I’m Steve Coster, and welcome to the Hassell Talks podcast. We’re really thrilled this episode to have Naomi Stead from Monash University and Bonnie Shaw from Place Intelligence to talk about mental health and wellbeing in the design profession.
It’s really good that we’re having way more honest and regular conversations about this in the workplace than probably used to happen historically. I suppose that’s a silver lining of probably the pandemic and COVID and the very significant mental health impacts of that, which we can talk about in a moment. But these challenges were challenges before the pandemic as well, and it’s been coming for a long time and people have been warning us that there’s serious mental health and wellbeing issues that we need to understand better and address, and it’s particularly so I think in architecture and design.
Naomi, it’s great to have you here. You’re an academic at Monash University. Can you talk a little bit about your role there and the research that you’ve been doing?
Naomi Stead:
Yes. So I’m professor of architecture at Monash University. I’ve been an academic in architecture for some 20 years so have had a long time to observe these kinds of wellbeing issues, particularly in students, also in fellow academics and also in the important subgroup of PhD students who we find are actually a pretty stressed group.
I’m leading a major research project, an Australian Research Council linkage project, which is about the work-related wellbeing of architects and architecture students. It’s a big project. It’s national in scope. As I mentioned, it covers both education and practise cultures because we would say they’re inextricably and importantly linked. And I guess the purpose of the project is really to try and move on the conversation around work-related wellbeing and work cultures and professional identity in architecture because it’s so widespread, the perception that there are major, well, let’s say issues with work-related wellbeing in architecture. Many people believe that’s the case. There’s been a lot of discussion, professional media and commentary, but there hasn’t been a lot of reliable data, empirical reliable primary data to really tell us what’s actually going on, let alone what we could do about it.
So that’s what our project endeavours to do. And we’ve just completed an industry survey of practitioners who broadly understood, not just registered architects in Australia, which was completed by 2,300 people. So that’s a lot for a long survey like this. Really good uptake. And I think what that tells us is not only it will be an important dataset, but also this issue really is being taken very seriously by a large number of people in the profession.
Steve Coster:
Yeah, hear, hear. Totally agree. For me, when people ask, well, why are you so interested in mental health and wellbeing as it relates to architectural practise, it’s because I’m dealing with the same mental health and wellbeing challenges that so many people in the industry are dealing with and I’m dealing with those myself. Is that the same for you? Have you personally found the industry challenging in the past and has that led to your own interest in this area?
Naomi Stead:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve seen bad things can happen as we all know, catastrophically bad things for some individuals, and we all know those stories, and they’re terrible, tragic stories and they shouldn’t happen but they do. I’ve been aware of them peripherally throughout my career. I have mental wellbeing issues of my own, which are probably particular to academic contexts and the kinds of overwork, burnout, cynicism and perfectionism that occur in academia as well. But yes, I have lived experience. I know what it’s like to be anxious and depressed and burnt out as well.
I’ve never been a practising architect, I must say. I’m an academic from the very beginning. So while I’m very familiar with practise cultures, I’m also something of an outsider in that world, which I think is an advantage. It means that I can see it with the eyes of an outsider. I’m interested in the people in architecture. Obviously, I’m also interested in the things that architects produce. I have a parallel life as an architectural critic. I’m the architectural critic for the Saturday paper, but I’m also interested in the people of architecture and the cultures of production. So how is it that the people and norms and social practises and work practises and identities of the people within the profession, how does that enable or in fact, stymie in some ways, the kind of good work that they’re able to produce in the interest of the common good?
I had an earlier project that I was also leading many years ago now, which was about gender equity in the architecture profession, also an ARC linkage project, also with many industry partners. And that led to the formation of a research-based advocacy group called Parlour. And really, I think I can say it changed the conversation around gender equity in architecture in Australia, and increasingly, it’s also being recognised internationally. So I started, much as I hate to say, I’m working my way around the social issues in architecture, started off with gender equity and then started to really see that that was very closely related to wellbeing issues. The reason why women are leaving the profession or some women leave is very closely related to wellbeing issues. And obviously, many of the challenges that women are facing in the workplace are not gender specific. They’re are also faced by men.
So the two projects are really closely integrated in my mind. I really hope that we can change the culture so fewer people are going through those experiences.
Steve Coster:
I might take that opportunity then to also introduce Bonnie Shaw. Bonnie is with us. She’s the co-founder of Place Intelligence, but she’s also recently trained herself or been through a process of training as a Human Potential Coach to understand how to affect your own responses to stress and situations to be healthier. Bonnie, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into that.
Bonnie Shaw:
So I’m a trained landscape architect and urban designer, but pretty early in my career, I built a game with a bunch of friends and colleagues that was played online and in cities all around the world. It was the early 2000s. It was well before the iPhone and Instagram, and it really touched a chord and it led to a placement as a guest researcher at the Senseable Cities Lab at MIT and worked in technology engagement, product design and development in the tech world for about 15 years. And then supporting organisations that were going through rapid disruption and change. I thought I was really good at dealing with change. I thought I was really flexible and adaptive and knew all the tricks and how to manage that stuff really well.
Up until a few years ago when I got really unwell, I ended up in hospital with what I thought was a heart attack and spent about eight hours hooked up to a cardiogram and getting a whole bunch of tests on my heart to see what was going on. And after sitting in the dark for hours, freaking out about what was going on and worrying about my family and what was going to become of everything, a doctor came in and told me that it wasn’t my heart. It was stress.
And so I had this incredible moment of really trying to understand how my perception of myself as being really well equipped to deal with the stress in my life had led me to this point of quite critical failure. And my response, I am a co-founder and leader in a data analytics company. We use massive supercomputers to process huge datasets to deliver insights to the built environment profession, architects and designers around how people use cities over time. I’m used to using data as leverage for better decisions.
And so I went deep on some research and really wanted to get to the bottom of what stress was doing to my body and brain and what had brought me to this point. And I found this incredible body of work that when I made a connection between resilience, which I’m familiar with through resilient cities’ work and the ability for a city to recover quickly from an acute shock or respond to long-term strain. And I found where that work had originally come from, which is a Hungarian endocrinologist that was operating in the 1930s and ’40s, Hans Selye, who is actually the person that originally coined the word stress and stressors. And that work around resilience was actually originally referring to the human body and our ability as individuals to withstand long-term strain and recover quickly from shock.
I started exploring a whole range of different modalities on how to train myself to get better equipped to deal with the realities of the career and the lifestyle that I had chosen, and then wanted to put some structure around how I could then apply and share that with other people. There’s a new skillset that people need to equip themselves with to be able to function in this world that we find ourselves in because the challenges that we’re facing now with the climate emergency, with the COVID pandemic, with a whole range of issues, we need to be in the most effective state, physiological state that we can to be able to make good decisions in a time of really high stress.
Steve Coster:
Naomi, in your work and the research so far, which I know is still in progress and is so important in our industry, you would’ve been thinking a lot about how mental health and wellbeing relates particularly to architects and designers. Are there specific attributes or characteristics of designers that you think make this occur in a particular way as opposed to other professions or the broader population?
Naomi Stead:
So I think what’s interesting about architecture is certain work practises that have emerged. So practises of overwork, I think many people believe that is a possible contributor to deleterious wellbeing effects, but we can see where that comes from. And it comes from a really good place as in a well motivated place, which is that people want to keep designing until they get to the best possible outcome. So what this can mean is that they’re not stopping, they’re just keeping on going, beyond the point where it’s no longer financially viable or beyond the point where they’re really pushing their own personal wellbeing. But it’s really important not to lose sight of the fact that the motivation for that is very good and is very often altruistic.
So I think not just architects but designers of the build environment of all stripes are very often completely devoted to the best possible outcome for the largest possible audience and for the quality, they’re ambitious for the work. They want the work to be as good as it can possibly be.
Steve Coster:
And they’re trying to make the world a better place and they’re more interested in that than their own personal fame and fortune. Naomi, that’s what you’re-
Naomi Stead:
Absolutely.
Steve Coster:
Yeah.
Naomi Stead:
Some people are interested in fame and fortune. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when some people are interested in fame and fortune and the good of the world, I think you can have a both-and situation here, which is important. But yeah, the altruism thing, meaning you put others before yourself, it’s a great thing but it can have effects.
Bonnie Shaw:
It’s both a decline in productivity and wellbeing, but also when you’re under long-term stress and strain, actually, there’s chemical reactions, physiological reactions and neurological reactions that happen in your body that actually shifts the way both your body and brain function and make you think in different ways. They make you make decisions differently. You’re much more likely to have a fixed mindset. You’ve got decreased task flexibility, so you’re more likely to want to repeat the things that you’ve already always done and less likely to want to try new things. You’re less collaborative, you’re less empathetic, more aggressive. There’s a whole bunch of what we would probably start to call character traits that start to emerge when people’s bodies and brains have been under long-term stress that are shifting the way you might engage in a workplace and might engage with making decisions that actually make us much less effective.
Naomi Stead:
Well, it seems to me that one of the key things is that people leave, people simply leave. It gets to the point where they can’t take it anymore for a variety of reasons. And then there is a loss of talent, and this happens throughout the pipeline, let’s say, of people’s career, throughout the career biography as they say. And in my earlier work on gender equity, it was quite clear that a lot of women were leaving at every stage, including just after graduation all the way through to senior levels. There’s a brain drain and that’s a problem because not only, as Bonnie is saying, not only do we need people operating at their optimal most creative, most effective, most lateral level. We also need the most diverse teams and every brain that we possibly can, who has talent in this area, in the room to face these coming challenges. So I’d say that that’s the macro level challenge.
I should say that in our project, our principal partner is the New South Wales Architects Registration Board, and of course all the architects’ registration boards around the country, their mandate is really about consumer protection. They regulate architects with the mandate to protect the consumer. So their interest in questions of mental wellbeing is really that possibly, hopefully not, but possibly an architect who was not working optimally may in fact put lives at risk, their own life but other lives as well. That’s a completely different angle on the question that buildings can be dangerous. They really can. So we really need happy, creative workers to work in the most optimal way for everybody’s safety and happiness.
Steve Coster:
That constant exposure to threat that you’re talking about, Bonnie, and the reaction that that generates in our bodies. We’ve got a particular circumstance at the moment with the pandemic and the ongoing lockdowns where you’re getting really extended periods of heightened threat response. Naomi, are you seeing or are you hearing out in the industry talk about mental wellbeing issues in the design professions that that is really heightened at the moment? How are people experiencing that? Is it burnout like we used to get or is it different at the moment?
Naomi Stead:
I think it has a different flavour. It’s also very clear that it’s having very different effects according to the individual, different effects on different sizes of practise, kinds of practise, locations of practise. Although Western Australians are doing just great, they’re feeling really guilty.
I was in a meeting the other day talking to a young woman working in Sydney and she said, “I am just loving this. I am living my best life. It suits me perfectly.” But there were other people in her same practise who were just really, really struggling, especially the leadership, I must say, who are exhausted. I think the leaders who were really good communicators came into their own during certainly the early stages of the pandemic, and then they reached out again and again and again in every way possible and connected with their staff and brought them together virtually in a completely new way, in a very intentional way as well. Things that previously wouldn’t necessarily have been thought of were thought of explicitly, and it had very, very positive effects, and I think it will continue to have very positive effects, but everyone is exhausted now.
Anecdotally, I hear that a lot of practises are extremely busy, but one of the key sources of staff for them, i.e. people coming in from overseas, is of course no longer available. They’re really busy. They’re really tired. They don’t have the ability to get extra staff. They can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. And so right now, I would say it was a quite particular challenge. It’s just that there was a lot of adrenaline in the early stages and everyone was like, the whites of the eyes were very visible. It’s not so much like that now.
Steve Coster:
And I think people have been very reluctant to take holidays or take breaks because they haven’t been able to travel anywhere or they haven’t felt they can plan. I remember a leadership expert, it was actually from a military background to originally talking about the delayed effect of stress, traumatic exposure manifesting as much as 18 months after the event. Their studies in that setting showed it was a whole year and a half later from some trauma that people suddenly fell in a hole because they held themselves together but they couldn’t hold themselves together for more than 18 months. I think we’ve got a bit of that going on too at the moment, which is almost exactly on 18 months from the beginning of the pandemic in Australia anyway.
And are there things that you are already seeing coming through in your conversations around the research that are pointing to obvious areas where we can improve relatively simple things maybe that might make a big difference? Are those things starting to emerge already?
Naomi Stead:
At a glance, particularly at the qualitative open field questions in our survey, what becomes really clear is that people are seeing it as a systemic structural issue and that it’s not necessarily about the personal failings of individuals. I was very pleased to see that, I must say. It’s not people saying, “Oh, it’s my fault because I can’t work those kinds of hours.” They’re saying, “Well, actually, this is untenable.” A very large proportion of people said that they had changed jobs. A very large proportion of people had a career break. Perhaps those things aren’t surprising. And if you’re in a terrible job, well, you should move. You really should move. Don’t stay there and suffer.
I was encouraged to see that people are understanding that it is the constraints on the architecture profession as a whole which are producing some of these downstream effects. So if the fees that have been charged for project are not adequate, it means that everyone is under pressure and has to work harder in less time, has less control over that workflow and the time in which it needs to be done. More risk, more responsibility, more pressure, more of a high-wire act. One of our early interviewees said that being an architect is sometimes like being the goalkeeper, pretty high pressure. Mistakes are conspicuous.
And so structural issues around not only fee scales and working conditions and adequate resourcing and HR management and financial management, workflow management, but also the valuing of the profession, the design profession as a whole. If they’re not valued financially or valued in a sense of we value good design, well then we’ve really got a problem. So if the profession were more valued … and I must say I get tired of people saying that because it’s like a refrain. Someone. We need a new Robin Boyd to stand up and value architecture in the public domain. But it’s actually also true. There are people doing that. There really are. It’s not like there’s no one, but somehow that message isn’t quite cutting through yet.
Bonnie Shaw:
So my day job is bringing quantitative data-driven insights to bear on design projects to support better decision-making at the front end of designs and the ability to run longitudinal impact studies on the outcomes of great design in the public realm and being able to put some quantitative parameters around what great design does in a community. And so for me, I guess it always comes back to being able to have some really solid evidence around the impact of the decisions that you’re making, whether that’s around your own personal health and assessing where you’re at in a moment before you take action or don’t act or in the impact that a design is having and the value that that can deliver into a community.
Steve Coster:
Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. I also think though, just in the project management space, there’s a lot we could do that would flow through from that through to the conditions for architectural work and production that would help. I think the speed of things has gotten greater and greater. The expectation around the number of options has gotten greater and greater. The turnaround times and the lack of understanding of what goes in behind in order to produce those options, the timelines are just getting pretty ridiculous.
I often wonder whether it’s related to the rise of the whole software industry and the tech industry. We deal with a lot of clients now, I think, who bring these methodologies or mythology from software design and think it can apply to building buildings. But the problem with a building is you can’t upload an upgrade to your beta test overnight if your beta test doesn’t work very well because you’ve poured it in concrete and built it in steel. So there’s a bit of false attribution I think of some of these working methods and mindset.
It takes quite a lot of confidence and evidence, sure, to be able to push back and say, actually, it’s better for us to be slower through this first part and spend the time properly in order that we don’t have issues down the line. And to make that case in the rough and tumble of big complex projects is extremely challenging and very high pressure in itself to make that case. We’ve got to help our people I think as an industry have confidence to do that.
Bonnie Shaw:
I think I’ve seen, having spent a lot of time in the technology sector and working with built environment professionals, I’m seeing a flow between both industries in terms of ideas and thinking and approaches. I think a lot of people working in technology these days are trying to learn and borrow approaches, particularly from the design and architectural sector and thinking very considerately about the impacts of their work now and really starting to take on some of the practises that are slower, that are more ethically driven.
And while I genuinely do believe that the work in the technology sector, particularly around how projects are run in a slightly more agile way, can teach many different sectors a thing or two about how to approach adaptive challenges, there are historical reasons for why things are done in certain ways in particular industries. It doesn’t serve anyone well to pick up and throw those out and just try to run things a whole lot faster and differently. There’s got to be a combination of learning from both.
Naomi Stead:
Yeah. Although, Bonnie, I’m really interested in the times when you should jump the tracks. Do you know what I mean?
Bonnie Shaw:
Yeah.
Naomi Stead:
Like, for example, one of our research partners, industry partners in our research project is the Fulcrum Agency, which is of course a small to medium size practise based in Perth. It started off as CODA, was very successful, and merged with Cox, so they’ve been through a lot. But of course, now they call themselves the Fulcrum Agency and they have very deliberately said, “We don’t want to play that game anymore for wellbeing reasons and business reasons, business liability.” And I’ve been so impressed by how they have strategically said, “These parts of architecture, as it was practised, we think are broken. We want to set them aside. We’re going to call ourselves an agency. The word architecture will appear nowhere. We will charge as we should charge, as we must charge in order to do the work.” It’s just so fascinating to see that they’ve said that is broken. We are walking away from that and we are inventing a new way of doing things.
It’s obviously much harder for really large practises.
Bonnie Shaw:
Yeah. Fascinating.
Naomi Stead:
For example, Hassell, also a partner on our research project. Thank you very much, Steve. It’s much harder. There’s an inertia there. And also as you say, when you’re working with government clients, you can’t just change the way you do things overnight.
Steve Coster:
I think it sounds like, and it makes sense, there are systemic external things in the industry that are definitely contributing that we could identify and hone in on and seek to affect. There’s then things within the way we structure and organise our own practise, which equally we can identify and affect, and I think we’ll try to do that. Bonnie, you’re talking about skills and capabilities as individuals within that environment. Can you talk a little bit more about what some of those practical things are and the things you’ve learned about that help people manage stressful situations at a personal level?
Bonnie Shaw:
The first step is to really cultivate an awareness of what’s actually going on by asking the right questions and get some real quantifiable data to try and understand why it’s happening. As an individual, use your body as a data collection tool. Consider how fast your heart is beating, how shallow is your breath, how animated are your gestures? Are you sweating? Are you feeling a bit uncomfortable? All of those things are really good data to try and get a read on where your physiology is at. And then take a pause. And so once you’ve got your data, pause and assess and dig into it and analyse it and think about what’s going on.
There’s this amazing thing that happens in your body if you’re feeling stressed, if you’re going through a stress response, and you take a deep breath down into the bottom of your lungs and really get down there. It actually short-circuits the stress response. You can’t sit in a stress state and take a deep breath at the same time. It’s impossible.
And so once you’ve got that and you’ve done your assessment, then be intentional about your action that you take and choose how you respond. But it’s about reclaiming your agency from your biology. And so your biology, when you’re not aware of what’s going on, there’s a bunch of triggers and things that are happening that are forcing you to act in certain ways. But if you can just get those steps and take that pause and assess your data a bit better, then you can act with intention.
And then the last thing, and this is in every framework that we would ever use in our data analytics work, is try and monitor and learn from the results of that. So if you are able to then as an individual consciously go through that process and intentionally take action or choose not to act, what happens as a result of that? Notice the reactions that the people you’re with have and how they respond to you and try and learn from that.
Steve Coster:
So then, what about looking forward? At some point, hopefully, we’re coming out the other side of the acute impacts of this pandemic, and whilst it won’t be the same as it was before, hopefully we’ll get more bandwidth back to think about the work we do in the world. It seems to us, at Hassell, that actually through this period, if anything, people have even further realised how important great places are that the value of good quality places for people to come together, whether it’s their workplace or their university campus or the restaurants they go to with friends or the public spaces in their cities. From our point of view, we think the value of good design and good places is getting greater as a result of this and over time.
Do you see that? I guess how does that relate to the issues of mental health and wellbeing? Because we need people to be well enough to get after that opportunity. Right? We need to be in a good enough state of mind and feeling healthy and well enough to capture that opportunity to make that impact on the world. Is that how you see things going forward?
Bonnie Shaw:
Certainly one of the things we’ve seen is a much greater understanding and literacy around the use of data and decision-making. It’s something that’s becoming, if we still had dinner parties, dinner party conversation. People are used to hearing about footfall numbers in the city, and the interaction in the public realm is a daily metric for the health of our cities. I think there’s some real value in that. And particularly as we respond to the pandemic and then turn our eyes towards the increasing challenges around the climate emergency and the skills that we’re going to need as a sector to come together to address some of those big challenges, there’s a real shift in how people are thinking about approaching some of those really big problems and doing that in a way that makes conversations about people’s own mental health much more public and acceptable.
Naomi Stead:
Yeah, exactly. I feel quite optimistic because the conversation around mental health and wellbeing, particularly in architecture but I think in the built environment professions more broadly, the conversation is maturing and the conversation is moving on. And I really hope we can get out of this loop of is there a problem? We think there’s a problem. We don’t really know if there’s a problem. We don’t have the evidence of the problem. It’s a loop. It has been a loop and we’ve been in that for a long time now. But we can get out of that loop and say, okay, well there’s something going on and we can do something about it. And the pandemic experience has proven that we can do something about it. We can look after our own people at every level in every type of practise in a very intentional and deliberate kind of way.
And also, the pandemic has been very difficult because people had trouble accessing professional help, but it’s been very good because people tried to access professional help. A so-called help-seeking culture, which I’m told by my colleagues who are proper psychologists and so forth, is really what we want. There’s no stigma in having a psychologist. I have a psychologist who I see very regularly and it’s very beneficial. A help-seeking culture, which moves beyond on from de-stigmatisation. Of course, we want no stigmatisation, but we want to go on from that, be much more ambitious than that.
For example, leadership of organisations like the ACA, the Association of Consulting Architects, who’ve recently released an Australian version of the Architect’s Mental Wellbeing Forum toolkit, which is a really great resource. Organisations and individuals are really stepping up on this, including Hassell, and I see that as a real cause of optimism.
Steve Coster:
And also the recognition that, oh, we can change how we work. We changed how we work overnight, as you said. And I think we should take that internally, like we talked about before, internally within our organisations but then also outwards as well to be able to say to clients, “Well, why don’t we do it this other way?” Or to say to the industry, “Well, can we suggest a different approach to that because I think if we don’t do it, no one else is going to do it.”
Naomi Stead:
Design professionals really are leaders on values-based leadership in the construction sector. I really think that’s true. So it’s not going to be done by anyone if it’s not done by us. So we really have to step into that, I think.
Steve Coster:
Well, Naomi, Bonnie, thank you so much for joining the Hassell Talks podcast. It’s been great to have you. Fascinating conversation. We could talk for days about this stuff if they let us.
Bonnie Shaw:
Absolute pleasure.
Naomi Stead:
Thanks for having us.
Steve Coster:
Thanks for listening to Hassell Talks. This episode was produced by Annie Scapetis, Prue Vincent and Michaela Sheahan. Subscribe and leave us a review or rate the podcast because that helps us get into the ears of more people and shares these fantastic insights that we gather from across our network of designers, researchers and strategists.
