Growth by unfolding
rather than blueprints
Hi all —
I went down yet another rabbit hole - this time reading a bunch of Christopher Alexander’s work on architecture.
He argued against the mechanized, industrialized style of building that emerged after the second World War. Instead, he proposed the “timeless way of building”, or growth through unfolding.
There’s a lot in Christopher Alexander’s work - I’d be lying if I said I understood 5% of it - but the idea of growth through unfolding struck me as something we could all benefit from in product / business development.
As a society, we tend to approach all building through the industrialized, mechanized “blueprint” lens. This is in theory an efficient, scalable, and predictable means of building things.
Are blueprints necessary? We assume they are, because they come before a home gets built.
But buildings from homes to massive cathedrals were created before detailed blueprints. Even before the population was literate and numerate, we managed to create great buildings. Architects would create high-level drawings, yet plans evolved as the work progressed.
In fact - Christopher Alexander would argue and I tend to agree - that society seemed to create more beautiful, living buildings and communities prior to blueprints and mechanization.
Rothenburg-ob-der-tauber was not only built without blueprints, it was built prior to the printing press, in what Christopher Alexander would call the “timeless” way of building that creates living spaces and communities - rather than the “blueprint” style of building that creates antiseptic buildings and dead communities like the typical condo “community”, in the first image above.
The timeless way of building is highly contextual, and follows the process in which things in nature grow. Building via unfolding generally means you create one room at a time, but always considering the whole structure and how it engages with its surroundings. The ultimate result will not be geometrically “perfect” but it will be coherent, as shown in the difference between natural unfolding (6a+6b below) and drawings (6c+6d below).
On the other hand, building via blueprint means you create the “right” plan on paper, and make that happen in reality. It can’t incorporate all the context on the ground, but fortunately it rarely bothers trying.
Unfolding scales, though in a different way than the blueprint style: Communities built through a decentralized unfolding process create the kind of timeless coherence that make the people within them feel connected. They integrate life, work, family, community, in ways nobody could have planned but just seem to function in practice.
And industrialized, mass-produced communities might be more efficient to rapidly build, but they generally lack the connective tissue that creates enduring communities. Blueprints are great on paper and in theory. But what planner can anticipate or even create the conditions that make a community thrive? Who can profess to know that much?
But who cares, and why does this matter for entrepreneurs?
Let’s revisit some principles from the past two years of writing:
Context creates most of the leverage in business. Context is found on the “demand-side”: what’s going on in customers’ worlds that causes them to need to change, what alternatives they consider, etc.
It is very, very hard to understand context. Understanding context largely happens through what I call “blue collar” interactions with a lot of potential customers (e.g., doing a bunch of onboardings, helping customers do their job, doing the job for customers), rather than through surveys, abstract generalities, or things you wish were true.
Shaping projects to get to a state of coherence/completeness as quickly as possible is the way to build when you don’t - can’t - know whether you’re right in advance. Shaping helps you take an idea and turn it into a buildable concept, and
And now, unfolding is the process by which sequential, shaped projects form coherent products and businesses. It’s okay to not know exactly where you’re headed. In the beginning, nobody does. (And I have my suspicions of whether anybody truly knows where their business/product is headed.) As you shape additional projects or features, you take in more knowledge about the context and respond accordingly. Treat backlogs and roadmaps as suggestions, and let the product unfold as it needs to.
I don’t just believe these principles create better products. I believe they create interesting, beautiful (!) new businesses that continually evolve, learn, unfold. I think this is the future of business, especially in a software-driven world that requires fewer repetitive processes by physical machines or people.
I am working on squaring away these principles with the “mechanization” of execution: We need to create predictable go-to-market systems that achieve results. We need to create stable customer journeys that deliver consistent customer success. We need to generate product and engineering processes and infrastructure that enable rapid delivery at high quality. We need people to work together in a non-chaotic way. This kind of mechanization can create soul-destroying workplaces, but it can also create a platform for individual and team success and fulfillment. If you have any thoughts on this, please send them my way!