In the article Three Ways to Use a Yala, I argued that longevity is a hallmark of great service. But we usually don’t observe this because our lives (and our measures of performance) unfold on the wrong scale. 

So what might a truly successful outcome look like over the long term? The Sydney Power House Museum provides an example.

 

 

The Project

In 1986 the Government of New South Wales, Australia asked a company that I worked for to help it sort out some problems in its Public Works Department, and the task fell down to me.

These problems arose from a project to create a Museum at the site of an old Power House in Darling Harbor, Sydney. The project had been underway for five years and was the centerpiece of New South Wales’s Bi-Centennial celebrations. But it had got a bad press due to the very public acrimony between the project manager responsible for developing the Museum’s content and the architect responsible for the building work. With just two years left to the anniversary of Captain Cook’s first landing in Australia both said that, judging from the other’s progress to date, the work would not be finished on time.

I asked four people from the Museum team and four from the Construction team to meet together for three days to plan the remainder of the work. To my surprise, the Museum’s project manager came to the meeting with all his functional heads plus the curators of all the collections, more than twenty people. Not to be outdone, the architect sent for his managers and foreman. Soon there were forty people and I had to find a bigger room. 

I hadn’t planned such a large meeting of angry people, and I had to improvise. First we moved all the tables to the side of the room and arranged our chairs in a large circle. Next everyone briefly introduced themselves: I asked them to use the analogy of an animal or car to tell us something about themselves. “Hi, I’m Helen”, said one of the Museum people, “I’m the curator of the Communications Exhibit and I like to think of myself as a seagull, flying around at a dizzy height, shitting on people down below”. Jim, a member of the Construction team, said he felt like a taxi, because he spent his life moving people from one place to another and back again. This light touch gave everyone a chance to speak, made them smile and helped melt the chilly atmosphere. What to do next?

I told everyone that they had a lot in common: they all cared deeply about the success of the project and all were, in different ways, highly creative individuals. Together they could almost certainly overcome any problems that they now faced. With little help, they began to list and prioritize issues and brainstorm solutions.

It was clear that there were some key places – interfaces – where coordination between Museum and Construction teams was essential. For example, one of the largest exhibits was a Catalina Flying Boat, due to be hung from the rafters of the old turbine hall, which had to be lowered into the building before the roof was finished. Elsewhere, a steam locomotive had to be rolled into place before the walls were built. And there were more complex interfaces: the Museum wanted to be able to run their collection of steam engines and Construction had to install the boilers and air-conditioning to make this possible.

A fundamental difference in design philosophy emerged. The architect had designed a bright and spacious building in colors that “echoed the changing light of the Australian day”. The Museum’s ideas on displaying their collections had been influenced by the Hong Kong Science Museum, a concrete monolith whose exhibits are spot lit dramatically in darkened rooms. The Museum had hired the designer responsible for the Hong Kong museum, an American, to oversee their work. The architect saw this as an affront to the Sydney design community and wholly inappropriate for a prestigious Australian project.

When the Museum agreed to drop their American consultant, and the participants began to explore the idea of exhibits and spaces that harmonized rather than contrasted, they became more and more excited about the possibilities. People grew in mutual respect and understanding. Impatient to get on with the job, the meeting broke up after only two and half days; no central plan had been produced, but new friendships had been made and follow-up meetings arranged.

In characteristically Australian style, the most eagerly anticipated of the subsequent meetings were the fortnightly barbeques held on the construction site where the Museum people (mainly women, most young and single, though perhaps a bit bookish) toured the progress with the Construction crew (all men, all fit, many single).

The Sydney Power House Museum opened on time and saw 1.7 million visitors in its first year. It remains a major tourist attraction and is still one of the finest museums in the world.

I had done little and was tempted to conclude that these people would probably have resolved their differences without any kind of intervention. But a satisfactory resolution of conflict is not inevitable, as demonstrated by the British Millennium Dome. This showcase project, marred by increasingly public discord, was similar to the Power House Museum, except that it cost more than ten times as much, failed to attract a million visitors and closed after one year. 

So what?

What might we learn from the Power House Museum experience?

1. Constructive behavior occurs spontaneously when social systems exceed some threshold of complexity, diversity and connectivity.  It is exactly this kind of behavior that makes complex relationships more than the sum of their parts. In the jargon of complexity science: “self-organizing systems use feedback to ‘bootstrap’ themselves into more orderly structures”.
   
   
2. When this happens emergent systems can become brilliant innovators. They are more adaptable to sudden change than top-down hierarchies. They display a bottom-up intelligence that crystallizes into a vision for the relationship’s future that is grounded in its roots. 
   
   
3. Managing relationships as complex as these is all about setting the stage for such collective behavior to emerge. This means understanding how the parts of a complex relationship are defined and rearranging the connections between neighboring parts.
   
   
4. Many exchanges are negligible, irrelevant, or may even cancel each other out (large numbers of change initiatives, for example, or heavy-handed attempts at control can create so much noise that they drown emerging signals). So emergent behavior may benefit from temporary isolation from other interactions to reach the critical mass necessary to become self-supporting.

In short, to manage complex relationships successfully, we need to make it safe to talk… to create a Yala. 

Return