GB600 Unit 3 Leadership Case Analysis Example

The Studio Walk After the Studio Emptied: A Unit 3 Leadership Case Analysis of an Architecture Practice

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB600: Leadership Strategies for a Changing World

Unit 3 Leadership Case Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The practice, its people and every figure are composite and illustrative; the theory and sources cited are real.

The Case

The principal founded the practice and still leads its design work. From the firm's early years she walked the open studio every afternoon around four, stopping at desks to look at whatever drawing was on screen or pinned up. She marked printed sets in red pencil and talked through each mark aloud. Juniors described the walk in recruiting interviews as the reason they joined, and several former employees who now run their own firms credit it with teaching them to see a building whole.

In 2021 the practice moved to three office days a week, with Tuesdays and Thursdays remote. The following year it opened a second studio across town for a large healthcare client. The principal kept walking the main studio on office days. Within a year, two junior designers resigned, both citing too little feedback in exit interviews. On a residential project staffed mostly by juniors in the second studio, a stair width that did not meet code reached the city's plan reviewer; no senior architect had looked at the drawings for six weeks. The principal's first explanation was that the juniors were not asking for reviews.

What the Walk Depended On

The walk worked because of four conditions that no one had named while they held.

Everyone was in one room. The walk reached every desk because every desk was in the studio. Hybrid schedules and a second site broke that.

Critique was overheard. When the principal stopped at one desk, people at the neighboring desks listened. Much of what juniors learned came from critiques of other people's work.

Drawings were visible. Printed sets and pinned-up sketches showed work in progress. Remote juniors worked on screens no one walked past.

Timing was predictable. Juniors knew the principal would come around four and prepared questions. With staff on different schedules, that rhythm dissolved.

Learning from the Edge of the Room

Lave and Wenger (1991) describe how newcomers learn in communities of practice through legitimate peripheral participation: they take on real but limited tasks while observing experienced members at work, and gradually move toward full participation. The studio walk was a strong example. A junior did not need to be critiqued personally to learn; she learned by being at the edge of the room while a senior colleague's elevation was taken apart.

That explains the pattern of the decline. Seniors, who were mostly in the office and were already full participants, still benefited from the walk. Juniors, who worked remotely more often and sat in the second studio, lost both their own critiques and the far larger number they used to overhear. The walk had not stopped working; it had stopped reaching the people who learned most from it.

The juniors had learned less from their own critiques than from overhearing everyone else's.

The Principal's Misreading

The principal read the decline as a motivation problem: juniors were not asking for reviews. That reading assumed the walk had been a service juniors chose to use. In fact it had been an environment they lived in. Under the old conditions, no one had to ask; feedback arrived every afternoon. Asking for a review requires a junior to know that her drawing needs one and to judge that the request is worth a senior's time, the very judgments the walk had been teaching. Heifetz and Laurie (1997) warn that leaders facing adaptive challenges often treat them as technical problems with known fixes, and the principal's response, reminding juniors that her door was open, was a technical fix to an adaptive problem.

What the Evidence Shows

The evidence for this reading comes from three sources. Exit interviews with the two juniors who resigned both mention the walk: one said she had learned more in her first year from listening to other people's critiques than from her own, and the other said that on remote days she felt she was working without anyone watching. The project records for the stair error show that the junior who drew the stair had asked a senior for a review twice by email, and both requests were answered with a promise to look later. And a short survey of staff found that seniors rated the quality of feedback unchanged since 2021, while juniors rated it sharply lower. The gap between the two groups is what the conditions predict. If the walk had simply lost its value for everyone, both groups would report a decline.

What a Rebuilt Practice Would Need

A practice that recovered what the walk provided would rebuild the conditions rather than the ritual.

Scheduled reviews inside the work. Every project would hold a fixed weekly design review at each studio, with all staff on the project attending in person or on video, so critiques are again shared rather than private.

Visible work in progress. A shared board, physical in each studio and digital for remote staff, would show each project's current drawings, so seniors see work without being asked.

Seniors assigned to the second studio. At least one senior architect would work from the second studio on its office days, restoring the edge of the room there.

A check that cannot be skipped. Code-critical elements such as stairs, egress and accessibility would require a senior's sign-off before any set leaves the firm.

The principal's walk need not end. It would simply become one of several ways critique reaches juniors, instead of the only one. The changes also share the cost of teaching more widely. Under the old practice, the principal carried most of it personally; under the new one, every senior architect is expected to critique in front of juniors, which also prepares the practice for the day the principal steps back.

Lessons for Leaders

The case shows how an approach that works for years can depend on conditions so ordinary that no one notices them. In the manufacturing teams Edmondson (1999) studied, learning rose where members trusted that raising a mistake would not be punished, and the walk built that belief daily by making critique ordinary and public. When the conditions changed, the practice remained, but its effect drained away for the people who needed it most. A leader whose signature practice is fading should first ask what it used to depend on.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Heifetz, R. A., & Laurie, D. L. (1997). The work of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 75(1), 124-134.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.