What Founders Can Learn from Architectural Design Principles.

The founder’s life can consume you—speaking from personal experience as well as witnessing many founders’ immersion. Once you’ve embarked on your entrepreneurial path, it can be challenging to keep your beginner’s fresh eyes.

In fact, many first-time founders don’t realize how imbalanced, skewed, or dysfunctional their ventures have become. Don’t get me wrong; every venture has its own imperfections and dysfunction, as well as its own strengths. But when you’ve lost perspective, it’s much harder to solve a challenge or crisis with clarity, lucidity, or calmness.

Here’s an exercise for founders who need to gain some perspective. Architects and engineers apply these design principles to environments and products. Try applying them to your venture.

First, what are the principles of architectural design? They include:
• Balance
• Proportion
• Rhythm
• Emphasis
• Unity

BALANCE – Constructing structures requires the observation of balance, which includes physical, spatial, visual, etc. When thinking about a growing entity, keep in mind that balance is not a static condition. The goal is to ensure that you, your team, and your company are allocating sufficient time and energy to all your priorities. In other words, you’re not neglecting important components of your operation.

Ask yourself the following questions:
• Is there an effort to create balance in my venture?
• Am I juggling for balance among work, home, and personal time?
• How well are my team members addressing balance in their lives?
• How well are we juggling for balance among all internal and external team members and stakeholders? Or is it skewed completely one way?
• As we review all operational components, where is the imbalance? Where are we spending too much time and energy? Where have we neglected?”

PROPORTION – In architectural design, proportion refers to size, space, and scale.
• If you were to visualize your venture as a physical entity, what operational components would you assign to various allocated spaces? What is disproportionate and should be recalibrated?

RHYTHM – Visual rhythm can be the flow of lines, colors, patterns, and/or texture.
• Viewing your venture as a visual movement through space, is there a steady rhythm instead of spurts of start and stop?
• Given the current state of your venture, does it need steady rhythm or a spike?

EMPHASIS – Each design has a focal point that attracts the viewer’s attention.
• Does your venture have a focal point? How do you define the focal point?
• If it does, what is your venture’s current focal point and is it appropriately placed?

UNITY – All the design principles should come together to achieve unity and harmony.
• Are all the components in your venture working in concert?
• Do you see coherence and cohesion?
• If not, what is missing and what can be done to move forwar

This exercise may not provide an immediate answer to your current challenge(s), but it should help you to step out of your founder’s shoes, have fresh eyes, view your venture from a different framework, stimulate your grey cells into action, and help you devise appropriate solutions.

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