This morning on the way to work I passed a cyclist on the phone. She had an earpiece in and was gesturing madly with her hands as she spoke. As you can imagine this didn’t look too safe while cycling through rush-hour! It did however get me thinking about hand-waving, and how ineffective and counterproductive it is. For the cyclist it not only made her journey unsafe, but of course went entirely unseen to the person she was speaking to. In the built environment a lot of hand-waving unfortunately goes on too – just not the physical kind – as the dictionary puts it:
“insubstantial words, arguments, gestures, or actions used in an attempt to explain or persuade.”
At GCA we don’t do hand-waving, just plain speaking, common sense solutions, and even though it’s often harder to accept in the short term, we will always try to say when we think something will give you problems down the line. So if you ever encounter us in a meeting hand-waving over some details of your project, or even on a bike in rush hour, do please remind us of our rule: “no hand-waving please!”.
Robin de Jongh