What can leaders learn from architects? | A Conversation with Phil Idle

Well, look, school leaders often find themselves at this point of tension between managing education and curating learning.

And that nexus between the two is often where we as architects come in.

And depending on the sort of project we're doing and so forth, we often do come in between those things of managing education and curating learning.

And depending where each one is along the spectrum as a leader and an architect depends on how impactful design can be.

So it's a really important sort of understanding as to what drives projects.

So while architecture is the lens, I think people is very much the subject of what I wanted to talk about because architecture After more than 30 years of listening to schools and communities, whether it's as an architect, a parent, a school board member, international board executive, what I've found in immersing myself in schools and watching how teachers teach and how school boards dream and how school leaders struggle with that tension, the deeper question is no longer simply how to design better schools.

It is how humans learn, belong and flourish together.

And after doing that hundreds of times, you do start to notice something, that place isn't passive.

It isn't just a backdrop where learning happens.

It's very much a place that shapes behaviour, relationships, memories, identity.

And so from a school leader's point of view, every timetable, every policy, every staff meeting, every corridor, every learning environment they may have is saying something about what we believe is what school is.

And so whether we realise it or not, we're all designing and we're all forming environments around us, whether we're architects or not.

And so leadership and architecture don't belong in the same conversation, I think.

They're both about designing human experience.

And leadership designs culture.

Culture shapes place and place shapes people and behaviour.

So I think as people join this conversation, I think there's some powerful things that we all share and we can reflect on.

So there is a myriad of experiences over my own life that have become a lens through which design can impact the human experience and the learning experience, very much so.

i love this i mean this really works for me because so many of the conversations that i have on this podcast are about the human experience i often talk about it schools are just kind of organizations of lots of messy humans you know together, you know, kind of in this thing we call a school.

And it's really interesting that you start off by talking about architecture as something that is related to being humans.

I wonder with current schools or with like the massive schools that you see, has there been a disconnect between the design and the learning within it? Is that something that you're actively working on as an architect to change?