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Welcome to Beyond Titles, where we go beyond the Surface to discover the real stories behind the roles in each episode, we invite fascinating guests to share their journeys, expertise and the purpose that fuels their work.
Whether you're looking for inspiration or insight Beyond Titles offers a fresh perspective on the people who make a difference in their fields, tune in and join us as we explore the human side of every profession.
Okay.
Hello everyone.
And thanks for tuning into this episode of Beyond Titles.
I am so excited to be joined by Drew Sinclair today.
We're going to be talking all things rapid growth in an industry that has seen a lot of
change over the years as well.
And Drew's certainly no stranger to what change means and change management.
So Drew, thank you so much for taking the time and welcome.
I'd love if you could share a little bit about yourself before we get started.
Sure, Kendra, thanks for having me.
My name is Drew Sinclair, as you mentioned.
I am the CEO of SVN Architects and Planners.
We are an architecture and planning firm, but really an integrated or transdisciplinary
practice in that we do a lot of different things, but in a kind of collected, integrated
manner.
We're based in Toronto, Canada, but also have a presence in Mexico, out of an office in
Mexico City and a secondary headquarters.
in Vancouver that serves our West Coast operations up and down West Coast US and West
Coast Canada.
Awesome.
Thank you for that introduction.
I mean, as a fellow Torontonian, very excited for this conversation as well.
I mean, we had a very high level chat earlier on where you were telling me, you you've
taken the firm from 30 to 200.
You've seen a lot of change and a lot of growth.
uh Talk me through a little bit of your journey from, you know, when you started to...
present day, you can start at any point, but give people a little bit of context as to
what brought you to the CEO position.
Sure.
uh
maybe a bit about myself.
So I am a late 40s architect by vocation.
I was trained as an architect, but I have a background in the social sciences.
I'm also a geographer.
If that is a profession at all, I did study geography at McGill University in Montreal.
And in the time before I worked professionally in architecture, had a, we'll call it a
crossover job where I worked in international development.
So looking at the
the impacts of um global shifts in land regulation and how it impacted the growth of
cities and the expansion of communities.
My entry into architecture, although that intervening period working in international
development really took me far away from issues of urbanism and issues of design or design
quality.
um
I had a fairly radical moment, a fairly radical pivot when I started studying architecture
and moving into architecture in that I moved from, I'll call it a uh progressive social
discipline into one that is very much a discipline uh organized around tradition and
constraint and uh we'll call it uh culture.
that's architecture as a profession.
And so I...
uh
Again being in my late 40s for much of my 20s I was walking this line between staying on
the kind of social side of the discipline and then uh evolving into a design professional
and so for my late 20s early 30s, I worked almost exclusively in uh
design forward practices or kind of global leaders in design.
work for a number of firms in New York City and I lived in Amsterdam for several years
working in design firms.
And I'd say the entry point and a lot of the way I approach, we'll say leadership and
practice comes from uh understanding the duality of design and city building and urbanism
as a social discipline that operates on human environments, but also operates on
communities and immaterial things that we can't see.
A lot of architecture tends to see the physical as the kind of primary thing we work on,
but understanding the social is also something we work on.
That comes from my history, what preceded my role as an architect.
And uh then what I gained from understanding and working in really world-leading design
practices was an understanding of the transformative power of uh really exceptional uh
spaces and exceptional...
uh
environments and the, the, the, the, really the, the, the socially beneficial impact of
materials and, and, you know, light and dealing with the, the, the kind of sculptural
nature of, of architectural interventions.
And so a lot, in a lot of ways, our practice is a, is is a melding of those two ways of
thinking.
uh And it didn't happen naturally or easily.
So my path into leadership in architectural practice was really one where I had to
navigate that fine line.
And Kendra, I can't remember if I told you this or not.
I had a funny entry point into leadership in practice.
I had won a large or a fairly significant Canadian architectural award called the Prix de
Rome.
uh It's an award that's granted by the Canadian, sorry, the...
m
Canada Council for the Arts.
It's an award that you have to be nominated for.
I was nominated by a number of my professors at the University of Toronto and then it's
effectively a competition where these nominees are held up.
Each nominee has to prepare a research plan or a project plan of sorts and then you're
given, if you win it, a grant to...
You have the title, you're a pretty real recipient, but then you're given a grant to study
this theme of your choice in whichever geography you choose.
I chose Northern Europe.
I was looking at the impacts of, again, law and legal structures on quality of design and
design outcomes in cities.
But what it did mean was I had a chance to live in Northern Europe.
I lived in Amsterdam in 2008, end of 2007.
My return to Canada, I fell quite in love with both the urban environments.
Amsterdam is an amazing city.
spent a lot of time in Copenhagen and Stockholm.
uh
I had a really amazing, because I was afforded the benefits of this grant, I was given a
really amazing opportunity to move between these cities and spend time interviewing a lot
of practitioners of both urbanism, urban design, and architecture, and getting opinions on
how cities grow and evolved.
And I ended up in a role where I was able to participate in really exciting and amazing
projects in Amsterdam.
And this is preceding the 2008 financial crisis.
So in the fall of 2008, while in Canada, where I
practice today, I think we were quite buffered from the global impacts of the financial
crisis in Europe.
It hit really hard.
So the firm I was working for at the time, which was primarily a master planning practice
that did a lot of work in housing, shrunk dramatically.
So I was home for a brief period.
In the time I was back in Canada, I...
a number of things happen here that would make it difficult for me to return to Europe.
I can tell that story a little bit later if it's of interest, you know, notably the work
in Europe disappeared.
So I was in Canada looking for a place to stay and I met my partner, my future partner,
John Van Oosteren.
I had met him briefly in the late 1990s and I visited him again when...
in September of 2008 when I was looking for a we'll call it, estage or an internship that
would carry me through the balance of 2008 with an expectation I would go back to Europe.
And John was going through this very tumultuous but fascinating process to...
really dissolved his firm at the time.
He owned a firm with one other partner, split it in two, and then he was reestablishing an
architectural presence within something that was becoming a purely planning practice.
And so I stepped into his office at exactly the right time.
You know, it's an interesting thing if I could spin one lesson out of all of this.
It's that there is, for young practitioners in architecture, and I'd say the same thing if
you're in finance or law or other evolving disciplines where entrepreneurship will take
you.
uh
somewhere that there are roles you'll find that are an unusual match for personality and
aptitude and somehow I stumbled into this one because of this uh fortuitous circumstance
around a global financial crisis and being in a lot of ways uh waylaid.
Thank
use a very Canadian term, when there's a big snowstorm and you're stuck in a house, uh
storm stayed in Canada while the financial crisis carried on in Europe.
So I stumbled into this practice and learned very quickly that I had a fairly unique
skill, less so for, we'll call it straightforward leadership or...
uh
any kind of normal kind of corporate leadership behavior.
I had a great skill for assessing rooms and circumstance, learning very quickly and uh
understanding an appropriate path forward, whether it be for business development or
trajectories of firm or modeling and figuring out where we were gonna grow next or a win
approach for a specific project.
So uh in a very short period of time there, I made myself a...
a very important and necessary part of that firm infrastructure.
And within about a year and a half, I was a partner of that firm.
oh It's an earlier iteration of the practice I lead today, but it's amazing.
The other lesson I'd say, and this is more, I probably can share some stories to describe
a little bit later, but uh in architecture,
if you graduate, and I'd say probably, as I mentioned, similar to law or maybe medicine or
other disciplines where you eventually grow or build a practice with a pool of clients.
In architecture, the discipline as it's defined in through education is fairly narrow and
it doesn't necessarily create a lot of space outside of, call it design innovation or
demonstrating kind of aptitude for design for uh demonstrating a kind of social innovation
or a kind of...
you know, it doesn't necessarily celebrate those ability, those who can synthesize the
kind of vast inputs from other disciplines or trajectories into the work.
What I was able to do was that in a way.
I mentioned I had a period where I worked in international development and I worked on,
you know, themes more related to globalization and broader kind of trajectories of.
legal changes happening in other parts of the world.
I'm going to be really specific.
I looked at NAFTA.
I looked at the impacts of NAFTA on land deregulation in Mexico and how it was impacting
regular organization.
But uh what I was able to do by teaming up with John Van Nostrand, my partner, the VN and
SVN, was find an opportunity to bring that interest and those themes into architectural
practice.
There's an area that wasn't really explored as much in Canada, which was
We think about urban design and planning as a pretty known process.
We develop policies for cities, we do zoning amendments, do re-zonings, we have official
plans or official community plans that govern how our cities grow.
We do master plans that kind of set out the form for new communities as they emerge.
But how...
all of these documents function as, in a way, social engineering exercises that result in
the quality of community or the quality of design in a place or the quality of public
realm or public spaces or the usability of cities that wasn't a significant area of focus
for firms or even for research or in the post-secondary institutions that taught the
discipline.
So it was my personal fascination and I think something that was a kind of
thing that was simmering at the side of John Van Oosteren's practice at the time and so
when we came together we were able to in a way reassert that as the primary focus of our
collective work.
uh So I just gave you all the ingredients for the fantastic growth we've experienced.
There were lots of little hiccups and things and stumbles that happened along the way but
if I could distill everything I just said into one word I figured out something I cared
deeply about when I was much younger.
uh I entered into a discipline that was fairly uh conservative.
It was uh fairly regimented in its structure of practice.
And by figuring out a way to merge my very particular interests into a very sort
traditional model of practice, we were able to create a real niche that we could grow into
a high value practice that still has a significant growth trajectory today.
Absolutely, absolutely.
that's, mean, you've worked in some amazing places on some amazing things.
And, you know, there's something that really, really stands out to me that I want to dig
into and narrow down a little bit.
And you're talking about, uh and this is where I think we really align too, because we
kind of both play in the intangibles in a way, right?
The things that really influence how the tangible structures or how tangible skills are.
are rolled out and you think about something like architecture.
You look at it, does this building structurally make sense?
Is the zoning okay?
Does it make sense to have it here?
What will that do to the community?
But what you're asking is layers deeper and not just what will that do to the community
today, but how does the community grow into this building?
How does this building grow into the community?
So
That's obviously not the easiest thing to pitch always when you're talking about
potentials or hypotheticals or down the road this could.
So talk to me a little bit about your process for getting buy-in when it comes to those,
you know, some of those things we can't see but that you know based on...
science based on data or based on your knack for doing what you do, knowing that this will
benefit a community, even though it might not totally make sense to a developer or an
architect in the moment.
I would offer that a lot of it is buy-in is earned of technique in a way, or manipulation
or method.
uh First off, I would contend that most of what, when I talk about, we'll call it the
social impact oriented or the larger impact oriented approach we deploy in most of our
projects or project work, while...
based on the kind of conventional or the very rational metrics you laid out, the same ones
I did early in my introduction, that we're basically desiring efficiency, structure,
cost-effectiveness, something that stands up, something that serves its program and
purpose, the core things, the things that make architecture.
has program, it has a site, it's kind of facilitated by structure.
All of our clients live in a pretty dynamic world where they're trying to compete or
they're trying to make difference or they're trying to fulfill some business function or
something.
By methodology or technique, a huge part of what I do or what we do in selling the service
is marrying our service to core need.
So understanding that as we pitch or as we sell, uh the framing exercise to understand uh
what we do is to utilize the rhetoric or the language or the needs or the program or the
project that's proposed by our client and uh kind of position our approach within what
they're trying to achieve.
And a maybe useful example, uh in our practice today, uh a lot of our work is for...
uh
still private sector or commercial clients that are building housing or building in the
state part of the economy where we work in.
It's a lot of student housing or private student rental accommodation or purpose-built
rental or affordable rental housing.
uh
These are always projects that are extremely cost constrained and the cost constraint
tends to drive a lot of the decision making around these projects but there is a unique
program in each one of these projects whether it's accommodating students and the student
life programming, whether it's accommodating uh some very specific uh subset of we'll say
the larger population needing to be housed.
Maybe it's the hard to house, maybe it's transitional shelter program or maybe it's a rent
gear dinka program for single women living with children, whatever it ends up being.
I just dumped a whole bunch of programs on you.
uh Meeting the requirements of that program and then meeting the requirements of the
budget, meaning designing a building that's feasible, I those are the things that were
given.
uh When I talk a little bit about the social aspects, the building and what we try to
offer through the services we provide, uh
A huge part, there's a series of themes that we kind of trend.
One is designing for or accommodation for change over time.
And that isn't historically an obvious function of architecture.
We tend to think of these things almost like geology.
You build a building, it's a permanent fact until years down the road, you realize it's
redundant and it needs to be torn down or changed.
And so...
Our clients are fairly, who work in the business space, work in the, you know, they work
in the realm of hard assets, which are these buildings, are pretty aware of through their
ongoing maintenance obligations that these are in a way living things.
They do change.
They do need to be managed over time.
And whatever capital they're deploying to build it in the first instance, the best use of
that capital would be not just optimized for budget today, but to optimize for budgets in
the future.
It means building resilient buildings that are durable, but it also means buildings that
can fundamentally
change, can shift, they can become in a way circular, they can be recycled into something
new.
You know the building that has a program today to accommodate say a shelter program for
the City of Toronto, we're working with the City of Toronto in Canada again on delivery of
uh shelters for homeless individuals living in the street.
uh
The city has always had a shelter program through their housing services uh division.
it's changed as need changes.
And there are times where on the streets of Toronto, are thousands of unhoused
individuals.
Now, it sounds like a huge number, but it's city of about 7 million in its gross sense.
So it's not unlike other American cities or European cities.
uh But that...
time and need fluctuates over time and the demographics and nature of who needs to be
housed changes over time and the services and programs that are operated by the occupants
also change on a kind of five or ten year cycle.
The general approach, the theory and the kind of philosophical underpinnings about how
these services are provided
is also quite cyclical.
These things shift over time.
And so we tend to think, and part of our entry point for dealing with these clients is you
tend to think about these things as armatures, uh a little bit like a super flexible
structure that will accommodate shifts as the program that's within them shifts and
changes over time.
that works really well or that has a kind of gravity in these conversations for two
reasons.
One, our clients know they're gonna change.
That's really amazing.
it's also really amazing business proposition to say that like we're facilitating these
shifts or changes uh as time progresses.
So, you know, a couple of examples of that is a shelter uh operated by a not-for-profit
but private organization in downtown Toronto called the Fred Victor Mission.
It was an early project of ours.
My partner John did the project.
We were involved in further retrofits of the project.
But John's great innovation in the project was really taking what had been a
for like very fixed, kind of contained living environments and changing it to something
that could be much more mutable.
Things where walls could shift, partitions could move.
uh Over time there was an idea that the building could evolve and accommodate families as
need be.
uh We did a project with the YWCA in, again, downtown Toronto that was designed to uh
really women-led families.
rent geared to income project, which means that it's kind of low accessible rent.
uh again, because the nature of the building, it accommodates families understanding with
shifting demographics.
uh While 10 years ago, a woman led family of any type uh living independently may have had
two to three children as a kind of common.
uh
The YWCA brought to us was a program to accommodate largely women living with one or two
children, understanding with demographic shifts happening elsewhere in Canada.
needed to accommodate environment that allowed some of these suites to shift to
accommodate much, much larger families.
So we can't design for that mix if it's going to change within three to five years.
What we have to do is look at the core structure and figure out a way to allow the client
to change it as need arises.
And so it becomes a fundamental part of the program.
become.
So, you know, I'm talking about housing and affordable housing primarily, but we tend to
deal with transit in the same way.
We do a lot of transit mobility planning that we tend to think about it in our practice,
at least as something that is in a state of becoming.
don't design for the end use.
We design for the end of our engagement so that it can accommodate whatever comes next.
so projects like Ontario Line, it's a 14 stop subway program.
working on the City of Toronto for the City of Toronto for the public transit agents.
in the province of Ontario.
And a huge part of our project is future-proofing.
the entire station environment so that it can accommodate various approaches to
development, whether eventually they might want to build housing on it or they might want
to build theaters or they might want to build libraries.
The transit is transit.
It needs to accommodate passenger movement in out.
It needs to accommodate, you know, fairly complicated things like changing all the
mechanical equipment.
So you need shafts to remove the mechanical equipment from tunnels.
But, like those, that complexity can kind of be managed for today.
The complexity that, or the
the value we bring is thinking about the complexity 10 years down the line when they're
looking for developer partners.
So they want to take advantage of the real estate value and the rooftops of these
buildings and then vend that uh to create value for the public.
um So it's pretty amazing exercise.
I mean, I think in transit uh specifically what we're doing today is something that hasn't
really been done anywhere, which is design systems.
that anticipate overbuild, anticipate the city eventually fully overtaking them and being
built right over top.
If you think about most stations that you visit in, especially North American cities, I
think in other cities in the world, in Europe, in parts of Asia, uh because of the value
on land in cities.
Transit has historically been fully integrated in large complex development or sometimes
in smaller development in neighborhoods.
In North America, we tend to think of subway station entrances as little boxes that sit on
vacant lots.
And so while there's a kind of necessity of creating efficiency in delivering that model,
we've had to envision a city that fully subsumes these stations and they become part of
buildings in the future.
I love that.
I love that.
It's forward thinking, it's progressive, and I mean, I can almost see one of the new
Ontario Line stations from my window.
yep, very, very familiar with all of that.
And it's exciting to know that there's opportunity and space to grow into.
the utilization of these things, right?
And I think that's, somebody who would use that often, it's very reassuring to know that
it's not just going to be a box, but that there are grander plans and that that's being
thought of in the future for that change management.
So music to my ears, thanks for making my day.
as, mean,
We could nerd out on this for a very long time because I am absolutely loving this.
And I think that there are so many lessons and so much information that not just applies
to urban planning and also to architecture, but just generally in business that it's one
thing to make a decision.
in kind of a static mindset and mind frame, but what businesses should be doing,
especially with the evolution of, you know, technology and what have you, that they should
be thinking about dynamic environments and they should be planning on how do we grow into,
you know, some of the processes that we've set today because they'll likely have to change
three or three years down the road.
as my, you know, my kind of final wrap up question for you, translating what you do for
clients internally for your
teams, what does that look like and how do you kind of do you mirror that process um
internally with your teams?
you, what's that term?
Do you dog food, dog food your own process?
I don't know the dog food term, I think I understand what you're getting at.
I would say that yes, absolutely we do.
I want to be careful in saying that because I think if you ask different people in the
organization, some people would say, yes, that's our method and approach.
We're constantly dogfooding.
I love that.
uh But I'd say we're constantly uh collecting data internally and then operating in a
consistent reflexive exercise to adapt the firm as change emerges.
uh I think maybe two responses.
One...
that I think our organization, like any organization, how good it is at that is
specifically related to the leadership is like a leadership mentality that is geared
towards evolution and adaptation.
what...
And the second part of this, in order to facilitate that, I think what often happens and
what I've observed in working for other practices and to a degree in our own practice,
thinking about some of our historic or former partners, uh often, especially in design
disciplines or professional disciplines, uh a dogmatic view emerges over time of the way
things are or the way things should be.
You come up with an approach to practice and that becomes the way you do it.
We've uh gravitated over time, and I wouldn't say this is my invention, I'd say this is
fairly authentic uh value that's emerged in the firm.
We've tended to see ourselves as a listen first practice.
Now that sounds, it's very simple, listen first, that's great.
uh There's a bit of a story around that.
We're architecture and planning practice.
Planning in Canada and in the US to a certain degree, uh distinct from other parts of the
world is
intensely reliant on consultation and engagement, meaning that there are legal structures
in Ontario where...
I practice primarily in where Toronto is, there is a planning act, uh a provincial act
that oversees how planning will be carried out.
And it mandates, it requires that levels of public or stakeholder engagement take place in
every change or every progressive or projected planning project.
If you're rezoning a city, if you're developing high level policy, whatever it is, there
has to be an effective public process as well as a professional process to develop the
uh the policy or the master plan or the design outcome.
uh It means that this kind of engagement thing is a core skill that Canadian or...
We'll just say planners.
don't have to make them Canadian planners.
That planners have.
uh what, you know, maybe the story is more John Van Oosteren's practice, or my partner
John's practice.
uh Historically, well, we've been, most of what we're talking about today and most of our
practice today resides in Canada, the US and Mexico.
Historically, we had a much more international practice.
We did a lot of work uh in Africa and Latin America.
We worked in communities that were impacted by energy development and sometimes mining or
resource development.
often by national investment and significant infrastructures.
And we would act as
not planners or architects, would act as, uh we'll call it advocates for the social
impacts of the work.
We were generally hired by the authorities, but our work was to embed within the community
and not to sell, not to be part of the delivery infrastructure.
It was actually part of the, uh how do I say it, the community infrastructure to manage
impacts in an effective way to ensure there were positive outcomes.
uh If you think about...
maybe when we were growing up, Kendra, you know, in the, I don't know how old you are, so
I'm not going to pretend that this works for you, but I would say in the 90s, later 90s,
there was a constant thing, I was still a kid, but it was a constant theme that if there
was a big mine project or a big dam being built someplace in the world, the impacted
populations were,
disenfranchised significantly through the process.
So John's approach, and he'd started doing this in the 80s, but really ramping up to the
90s and the early 2000s, was develop a team that would allow organizations to work with
communities to achieve better outcomes.
And I'd say the lesson in that, and it kind of resonates through some of the messaging
that came earlier, is that better impacts for community, those that maybe aren't
straightforward,
components of business plan inputs, better impacts for communities on the ground, better
messaging, better economic opportunity, can be a better bottom line approach for major
businesses or commercial enterprises.
And so you hold that at the back.
What it did mean for John is he perfected the way of practice.
It's absolutely born out of Canadian planning where on mining or energy or...
major infrastructure projects all over the world, he made it a point to consult deeply.
You didn't have one conversation.
You didn't have the managed, you know, two or three policy required conversations.
You had as many conversations as were necessary to build a complete picture of the
conditions so that the outcome was informed not just by the architect, not just by the
visionary, or not just by the commercial enterprise that is business plan driven.
It was driven by the collective inputs of a huge data set.
all of the data that's collected by all these individuals as you build a project and move
forward.
uh This list in first value.
We do talk about our values opening the office and Listen First is in fact the first
value.
It's really about that.
It's about uh internally as we grow, we build the firm, we always start with, I'll call it
a Listen First exercise.
We don't really brand it like that, but it is a Listen First exercise and it's always a
managed process to collect as many inputs as we can to first frame the problem or the
project or the work we need to do in a certain way.
And then eventually to generate.
know, variants that we can assess to determine the best outcome.
um That kind of methodology, talking about dog fooding, your word.
um
It relies, well, we're still a design forward firm.
We do great design work.
have incredibly talented people.
If you add the superpowers gained from an extraordinary data collection exercise, working
with a much better data set, a dynamic data set, where all of those involved in the
process are contributing, it gives you the potential for something really extraordinary.
For us, as we've evolved the firm, it means an amazingly high level of uh employee and
senior employee
buy in to all the processes we go forward.
A huge level of, I'd say, emotional ownership over the trajectory, the directions of the
practice.
A really amazing, sort high level investment in the work and the projects we do, but also
in the evolution of the firm and how people are mentored and developed into really
effective professionals.
And so I...
We can have a whole other podcast on how that approach has led to very specific, I'll call
them business innovations, business innovations related to software, AI adoption, business
innovations related to how we do our resourcing within the office and how we run our
business development processes.
This constant reflexive exercise led by this Listen First approach has really just set the
basis for most of the success we've had in the last 10 or 12 years.
That is fantastic.
And I genuinely think we will need to do a follow-up podcast because we'll need to dig
into that a lot more.
So I will be in touch to schedule that.
I mean, with that, there are so many lessons, so many takeaways for people who are at any
stage in any vocation really.
And I just want to thank you for your time, for your expertise, and for sharing all of
this with us.
It's been wonderful.
you very much for inviting me.
This was a real pleasure.
Thanks.
Pleasure is all mine.
And Drew, just high level, where can people find you if they want to follow along and
learn more about the amazing work that your teams do?
the firm is SVN, SVN Architects and Planners.
You can find us online at www.svn-ap.com.
All our contact information is available on our website and uh of course email is the
easiest way to get in touch with us at any time.
I can't recount our socials easily off the top of my head, but we have a presence on
obviously LinkedIn, but certainly on Instagram as well.
And uh any connect via Instagram, any sort of social media,
or by email, we'll respond to right away.
Fantastic.
Well, thank you again.
This will not be the last time we'll hear from Drew.
We will definitely, as I mentioned, be doing a part two and follow up if that's something
you're interested in.
And I look forward to continuing this conversation.
Thank you.
okay.