seven principles

Shawn Glen Pierson’s work is a expression of six defining principles based upon observations of the client experience:

Multidisciplinary collaboration

Involvement in each project. While most firms keep consultants at arms length and introduce them sparingly or late in the process, we welcome design-trained minds that bring understanding of the issues from unique and valuable points of view. This creates a balanced and comprehensive response, a richer experience for the team and an enhanced return for the client.

"The goal is to grow smarter, not bigger. We want to know more, and not simply have more minds that know the same as everyone else."

Specialize in each client. The trend for most firms is toward finding niche markets, but this can create a divergence and isolation of knowledge. We prefer to provide a focus of knowledge on what each particular client needs, offering a background that includes significant experience across many typologies. That's smart.

With our unique broad base of experience, and a ready and willing variety of consultants, each project informs and enriches the next. And, its more fun.

Practice transparency.

We believe that the best clients are informed and engaged participants with a desire and a right to know what happens behind the scenes and within the relationships that frame investments they make in their properties. 

That is why we provide meaningful information to our clients. From the beginning of each project, we help guide you toward a successful collaboration, so you will know the road ahead and when, why and how we engage in each step. Through the later phases of the process, we document each of the decisions we've made and the responsibilities of each party, as well as provide a great reference. Transparency helps you make better decisions and that matters.

Keep learning. 

Ask employees of most firms about their company's education policy. Be prepared for laughter, or tears. Upon joining a firm after university, employees are often on their own. In most offices the mantra is "billable hours" and the education limited to free-lunch seminars presented by manufacturers' looking for an easy entree to a firm's client. 

We value and encourage constant continuing education. Our world is moving fast, and we owe it to ourselves, to our clients and to society to keep learning, thinking, stretching, challenging, creating.

Be part of the future. 

To their credit, most firms do something well. Then usually, they do it over and over and over…and over…again. But what is the point of assigning highly educated, talented and presumably creative minds to perform repetitive tasks? There are excuses for this: a bottom-line mentality and CYA perspective that represents an intellectual retreat from a responsibility to explore new and better responses to challenges; summarized as, “let’s not reinvent the wheel.” Fair enough; however, the wheel is not always the best solution.

Why concede to others to innovate?

Efficiency is to be applauded, but not at the expense of a better answer. This is at the core of our responsibility to our environment. Part of our definition of an elegant solution is one that has not been copied from another tangentially related project, but one that expresses this inquiry's essence.

It's about the idea.

Look on the door of most firms, and you'll see a name...a person's name. Look inside most "name" firms and you will find talented yet repressed minds that are de-motivated every time they walk under the office transom.

As often as not the person who's name is on the door will not be part of your process. And there is no suggestion of an idea.

Not only does this common practice contribute to the often suggested impression that the best results are reserved for the elite, but it denies the essential truth of our process…a collaboration relying upon a coalition of active and engaged minds working together toward common goals.

We celebrate the idea in each of us, and in you.

God is in the details.

Some, and in fact many (if not most), share the observation that, “the devil is in the details.” In the sphere of Design, Development and Construction, this simple phrase references “details” such as Contract language, or the nagging incompleteness found in Specifications that are unspecific, in architectural detail drawings that exhibit ambiguity, or in material samples that require imagination. The common refrain of “the devil is in the details” is a well-founded complaint regarding the too-common absence of forethought and of care.

We elevate this human expression to the more philosophical, forgiving, aspirational and transcendent, “God is in the details.” We believe that if we pay special attention and we focus our faculties; to think about what we write, to write with the reader and speak with the listener (you) in mind, to draw pictures for those who will follow them to craft the materials and make the connections, and to set examples that will lead to our shared goals…if we get the details right…if we ask the key important questions along the way…we will arrive naturally and gracefully.

Shawn Glen Pierson 240.731.6278