I recently read “People Don’t Want Your Product Design. They Want the Outcome It Provides” by Christie Nicholson, and the title is a good synopsis of the essay. She uses several examples but two jump out at the reader. The first is McDonalds examining why people were ordering milkshakes at breakfast time, and the second is simply the quote “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill [bit], they want a quarter inch hole.”
This logic applies to professional services whether we like it or not, and particularly, I think, to professional design services. No building owner is bragging to their friends that they hired OSE, but they may be bragging that they got their building fixed. Or expanded, Or whatever. They want an outcome for their property and we – along with the architects, preservationists, and contractors we work with – are a means to that end.
I suspect this view of our work, that we are simply a means to an end for many or maybe most clients, is easier for engineers to accept than architects. We are used to being semi-anonymous. For example, many more people know that Cass Gilbert (architect) designed the Woolworth Building than know that Gunvald Aus (structural engineer) did. Bridge engineers are somewhat more famous, but they are usually working without architects.
Of course, if you are a sentient drill bit, satisfaction comes from leaving good holes in your wake. And you might want to read a white paper that Ms. Nicholson linked to, “Outcome-Driven Innovation: Jobs-to-be-Done Theory in Practice.” This advice somewhat contradicts some other recent reading, “Top 5 reasons to be a structural engineer” by David Knight. The first four of his reasons – “our ideas become reality,” “our work lasts a long time,” “we make the world safer,” and “we solve problems” – are not incompatible with our job being to provide metaphorical holes; the fifth – “we are respected professionals” is.
