Delivering high performance teamwork

23 Degrees North is an architectural practice based in Muscat, Oman set up by Nadia Maqbool in 2011 as the first professionally recognized 100% Omani-owned architectural design studio in Oman. At the same time, Nadia was the first UK qualified female Architect to achieve professional recognition from RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) and ARB (the Architects Registration Board) within the Sultanate.

Three years later the studio won Oman's prestigious National Entrepreneurship Award 2014 for Best Small Enterprise in the Service Sector. This award qualified 23 Degrees North for intensive business strategy coaching and mentoring. This in turn led to Nadia's successfully competing in 2016 for one of 35 places in the Sultanate's rigorously competitive NCP (National CEO Program) which recognizes future leaders within the private sector. the Outward Bound Desert centre, opened October 2017

The basis for all this recognition of entrepreneurial innovation and business leadership success rests on the highly collaborative way of working Nadia established with her team - including the intention to programmatically develop young Omanis' talent and capability to contribute to the economy. As a result of this approach, 23 Degrees North has helped seed a highly entrepreneurial ecosystem of best practice excellence in the design and execution of world-class architecture in Oman. One example of this is the French School which won the MEED Social, Culture & Heritage Project of the Year or the Outward Bound Oman Desert Centre opened in 2017.

23 Degrees North brings a very clear methodology and step-by-step process to the way it brings high performance teams. This relies on a series of frameworks distilling complex research around team and organisational dynamics into simple-to-apply toolkits and quantum coaching techniques. This approach results in a team that brings an enquiring, learning-to-learn mindset and innovative problem-solving techniques to all its work. The client sits at the centre of this collaborative system in a way that ensures the client's vision co-creates the final design through an open, iterative process the frames and re-frames issues to achieve the best possible expression of form and function, cost and aesthetic, sustainability, heritage and essence of place.

23 Degrees North brings this high performance team building capability to all its collaborative engagements with strategic partners. The aim is always to provide the client with a custom-assembled team of world-class talent equipped to deliver the precise expertise required by the client in the most cost-effective, time-efficient and technologically cutting-edge way possible. At the heart of this is the very simple precept that it is the quality of trust and relationship with the client that ultimately drives any high performance team's success in terms of truly outstanding, ground-breaking and user-right deliverables. The outcome of this truly collaborative team-working approach is a nimble program capability that delivers projects to time and budget no matter the inherent difficulty of the terrain (an inhospitable, remote desert) or the ambition of the sustainability proposition (a truly self-sufficient, technologically self-reliant building).

23 Degrees North's journey into team working started around a single table in an office in Muscat. The studio now has experience of setting up project teams working around virtual technologies in different parts of the world. The key gain here is not in terms of cost and time savings (though these can be considerable) but the relentless focus on driving creativity through open sharing of best practice, expertise and learning from every part of the globe - and from across any and all disciplines that inspire awe and admiration in the built environment that shapes our human world.