I was brought in to reposition a firm that had lost its place in the market. The strategy worked. The organisation wasn’t ready for it.
The company had been in Vietnam for nearly two decades. The first ten years were strong: an international firm riding the wave of a market that was just opening up, alongside developers who needed partners they already trusted.
Then the market matured. Local firms got better and cheaper. International competition for concept design became ferocious. The firm found itself squeezed: too expensive for technical execution, not differentiated enough for creative leadership. Surviving on fragments of projects: a concept phase here, a local partner role there, at prices that kept falling..
The diagnosis was clear. The solution was a structural shift: positioning as Lead Design Consultant, contracting and coordinating all disciplines, owning the full project arc from strategy to delivery. Not just designing, governing.
That positioning addressed something real in the market. High-profile developers in Vietnam were being served by a fragmented ecosystem: international firms competing aggressively for concept work, local firms undercutting on documentation, external project managers strong on time and cost but unable to guarantee design direction and consistency across a complex, multi-year project. The LDC role filled that gap, and faced far less competition than either end of the market.
Making it work required more than a repositioning argument. It meant restructuring how the studio operated internally, how the HCMC and Hanoi offices collaborated, how they related to Headquarters, how work was sequenced and quality governed across phases. Those changes are also what allowed the firm to absorb the shock of COVID without collapse.
Then the real constraint emerged. A model that redistributes how value is created also redistributes where power sits. When the people whose authority depended on the old model are still in the room, transformation becomes a political problem as much as a strategic one.
That’s not unique to Vietnam, or to architecture. It’s the hidden constraint in almost every institutional change process I’ve observed: the strategy is sound, the results are visible, and the resistance comes precisely from that visibility.
The lesson isn’t cynical. Organisations can change. But the sequence matters: you need the internal architecture to support the new model before the new model starts threatening the old one.
#DesignLeadership #OrganisationalChange #Architecture