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Strategy design

Stock and flow, Part 2

April 15, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, sustainability, workplace design
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There seems to be this point in every project about strategic transformation –

New concepts are thoughtfully generated to respond to the strategic vision and to enhance the success of the organizational transformation. They then meet resistance. This resistance is a fear of the unknown and is expressed in operational terms that assert the unique value of the current lexicon of “how things are done around here.”

We’re in the midst of this reaction in a project intended to transform the way that biomedical research is done at a state university. The reaction arises primarily from a facilities planning team who provide the buildings and spaces to the research institute. They have been joined by the user community who are reacting to their tagging questions – “You guys wouldn’t want to work in that open of an environment, would you?”

The response is, of course, “Well, no!” It is followed then by the claims of the need for a conventional office with opaque walls and a door. “I have 25 years of research records that I have to keep in my office,” says one. “We spend 80% of our time in our offices writing the grants that support our work and this institution, and we can’t do that work out in the open,” says another.

The research lab leaders, the Principal Investigators, are then happily assigned 120 square foot managerial offices appropriate for a state bureaucracy – a desk, a manager’s chair, a credenza, a sideboard, two guest chairs, a lay-in ceiling, an overhead fluorescent light, paint and carpet, a window, a door.

What’s wrong with that?

Well, for one thing it’s sad. We’ve made so much progress in designing working spaces that are so much more experientially rewarding, environmentally sustainable, resource appropriate, and performance enhancing.

For another thing, the result is probably the wrong answer to the wrong questions.

Finally, the result probably means that the intended purpose of the building – to advance the speed and success of benefits to patients – will not be fulfilled. We know this, because we know that innovation is driven by social factors – awareness, interactions, informality, egality, etc. – but the provided design solution is about other stuff – hierarchy, entitlement, privacy, etc.

What’s really missing is careful and thoughtful observation of the way that work is really done and where. What’s also missing is awareness of the big shift that has already taken place and is accelerating in so many other quarters–  the shift from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows, the shift from things to people, the shift from static metrics to flow metrics.

We’ll get to more of this about stocks and flows  in a subsequent post. But for a primer, let’s go back to the Principal Investigator’s claim that 80% of what he does and where he delivers value is in the office.

In a series of interviews we did in developing an understanding of the project, not one of those was conducted in a PI’s office. In the lab tours we attended to observe working conditions, we never saw a PI in her office.

We did capture a number of other data points (informally) that might be represented like this:

If this is anywhere close to typical and accurate, then it is clear that very little of the PI’s work is done in his office. More importantly, the work that is done outside of the office, the real 80% of the PI’s time, is where his value truly is developed and delivered.

If the PI’s office is “stock” and his activities are the “flow,” it is easy to visualize that the real value, and the real focus of our design attention should be in the flow – in the “white space” of the plan, the places in-between, the places and spaces that accelerate flow.

The dream setup – getting to a workplace design that supports the way work is done

March 27, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, sustainability, workplace design
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photo via marroww.tumblr.com

If you haven’t already checked it out, The Setup is a great little site, answering the question of what people use to get things done.

Although a bit on the geeky side, I always find its entries to be an excellent reflection on the workspace. Each of its posts is a single person answering a stock set of questions about who the person is and what they do, what hardware and software they use to do their work, and what their dream setup would be.

In a bit of a delightful mashup today, I found this description of a dream setup below and the [unconnected] photo above.

Someday perhaps I will go around carrying only a book, a change of clothes, a pen, a water bottle, a folding umbrella, and a little capsule that turns into my livelihood when opened. Rollable hi-res screen and keyboard, tiny computer the size of a cell phone or smaller but as light as a pen, with high-speed satellite connectivity anywhere on the globe. In this world, my sleeping bag, pad and windproof hammock weigh only a pound put together. For half of the year I travel the world, alone and with companions, with a small bag slung over my shoulder like Kwai Chang Caine. We sleep outdoors, travel on trains, and a few days of the week sit some place cozy and create beautiful software or solve interesting problems that improve the world.

I had just finished a programming and design workshop today with a client concerned about “going too far” in providing a significantly lighter and more agile environment for its staff, despite a strategic imperative to change its culture, its organizational design, and its operating processes, and to leverage that change to recruit top global talent in service to a mission to improve the world.

Some of what I believe to be the biggest barriers to change in organizations are the organizations that provide the places where the enterprise does its work. The reflective model of The Setup might be a good tool to use to understand the defining workspace interests of the emerging generation of creative and innovative people.

Is MTV Scratch the next binder on the wall at GM Headquarters?

March 25, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, Detroit, innovation, Strategy design, sustainability, urban, workplace design
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GM has turned to MTV for advice on how to market to a younger generation of car buyers. I found the article in the New York Times that reported on this rich with irony, yet packed with insights to opportunities for where to go next.

Let’s look at a couple of these.

First of all, this is a matter we’ve got lots of experience with. We’ve been inside of GM headquarters, the GM Design Center, and the GM Image Program (dealerships) programs, providing strategy and design consulting services. In each of these cases, we could not find authenticity. That is, the connection between the people who develop the product, the people who shape its brand presence, and the people targeted as consumers of its products is broken.

The New York Times article finds this disconnect in several levels –

The next generation is not buying cars I commented recently about observations I’d made at a breakfast meeting in Chicago. We sat in a corner window and over the hour that we sat there I saw about a thousand people walk by, none of whom were older than thirty. While I remarked on the youth of the city, a local colleague noted that we were a block away from a transit stop. His point was that it cost a lot to own and use a car in Chicago, and only more mature and rich people drove to the city. What I was seeing was the mass transit demographic. This is a big thing. The world is urbanizing rapidly. Great opportunities lie in global cities. Young people flock to these 25 global cities. A car is a burden in these places.

MTV does not belong in GM headquarters The cultural misfit is enormous, although I am not sure that the suits from MTV are much different from the suits from GM. I once sat in the offices of a GM exec in charge of strategic planning. He swept his arm around the room to designate all of the consultant reports shelved on the walls and remarked of the millions of dollars spent on outside advice that went no further than these shelves. And don’t forget that one of the more prominent current advisers to GM is its 80-year old long time exec, Bob Lutz, famously known for the generationally-aligned statement, “Global warming is bullshit!”

GM headquarters is still the Death Star The MTV Scratch consultant hired by GM refers to GM headquarters as the Death Star. GM, like many corporations, engages architects and interior designers for its workplace through a facility management function. Facility managers are afraid of taking chances, script everything going to execs and, since their success is measured by cost reduction and not more positive metrics, manage for their jobs and not the jobs of the people they provide space for. This makes every floor the same regardless of the type of work that you do, and the latest version of those floors was delivered through a real estate “compression” program. There is nothing here that aligns with a youthful culture, and nothing in this workplace that would attract a new generation of employees.

Nobody in the generation is selling cars to the generation We thought that the best chance for real change at the dealership level was with the electric car. Here was a product that broke cleanly from the past. It was a product that necessarily required a new approach in the delivery of information to the consumer, new behaviors on the part of the consumer, and an entirely new potential on the service side of the business. The targeted demographic must certainly be a different generation, and closing a sale them should certainly call for a retail force with compatible cultural, economic, educational and community values. Instead, electric car sales are stagnant and the dealerships where they are sold have been in a process of renovations ever since the bankruptcy. These dealership updates, called “facility image programs” are now one of the largest contracts for one of the world’s largest architectural firms who are delivering the types of programs that a new study from the National Auto Dealer Association concludes with “our belief that the economic value of these programs remains only weakly demonstrated, our worry that program cost is excessively high, and our concern that such programs may not be best preparing automotive retailers for the future evolution of our industry.”

It all takes much too long and costs much too much, and then what do I do with it?  Consider the product cycle of the most popular devices on the market, Apple’s, and compare that to GM’s. Consider the cycle and popularity of the apps that are downloaded over the life of the device to enrich our experiences with it. Consider the transportability of data and experience from one device to the next via updates and the cloud. Now compare that to the depreciation and terminal life cycle of the automobile.

All the values have changed The design culture that generated the nostalgic image that leads this post grew up in a time of geographic expansion and love of the highway. We now live in a time in which the recent economic collapse leaves massive potholes in the economic miracle that built the highways. As roads decay to off-roads and build a huge market for SUVs, the younger generation, driven by both values and value, squeezes into small cars swallowed up by those roads. Who wants to drive on our roads anymore? What romance can be formed, what lyrics could be written, what literature would be inspired by the crumbling infrastructure we now experience?

GM’s best strategic play may be not with MTV but with the oil companies and the government and a sustainability philosophy. Constraining one, stimulating the other, and comprehending the third might bring people back to cars – cars providing authentic experiences designed, built and sold by people who’ve had those experiences.

The Space – How Abbey Road informs the workplace

March 24, 2012
Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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photo by starberryshyne on flickr

I recently found this truly delightful appreciation of the Abbey Road studios where some of the great music by the Beatles was recorded.

It’s a long report on a talk and conversation with the authors of a major book on the Beatles, Recording the Beatles. The conversation rotates around music recording and the relationship of space, place and technology to the sound of a record.

We are, of course, in a time in which technology enables recording almost anywhere, and does not even require musicians to be in the same place or even record at the same time together. Recordings from Abbey Road studios, however, had a certain rich quality of sound that characterized the Beatles and certain other recordings made there by Pink Floyd, The Hollies, The Pretty Things, and others.

Most of this was because in days before digital recording techniques, the space where the music was recorded mattered. One of the authors, commenting on Abbey Road says, “you had to make sure the source material was as good as it could be. So they laboured over making the rooms as sonically pleasing as they could be, and that room is unique – everything sounds good in it.”

That “unique room” at the core of this appreciation is Studio Two at Abbey Road– “The Space.”

It’s a concept that’s almost disappeared from pop recording: the space, the room. Plenty of modern music, of course, has no need for physical space, its sound-world being entirely virtual. But any record which uses traditional instruments, or features ensemble playing, can benefit from a sympathetic room – and not because of any inherent superiority in “organic” recording (much of the best work done at Abbey Road, in fact, specifically aimed to alter or subvert the live sound). It’s more that the basic discipline of musicians working together in one clearly-defined space – where things sound good from the off and can be tweaked and enhanced from there – creates a certain mood, a fire which doesn’t quite catch when records are pieced together over many months in a chaos of different studios, or in one of those secluded capsules with no ambience, no sound of its own.

What a fantastic reminder about the power of place and space! Most of the spaces where we work are the products of considerations that are very remote and abstract, and far from this kind of sensitivity to the “tuning” of the space and thoughtfulness about people “working together in a clearly-defined space.” Imagine what’s lost as a result.

Or rather, imagine how Abbey Road informs the workplace. Imagine the potential creativity and output that could be had by “making the source material as good as it could be” and by “laboring over making the rooms as pleasing as they could be.”

Imagine a workplace designed for “the basic discipline of people working together in a clearly-defined space.”

You don’t compete by purchasing airplanes…

March 22, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, Strategy design, workplace design
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I’ve been absent from the blog for way too long, totally consumed by a great new project opportunity that should provide lots of good content here.

As I warm up to the task of getting back to writing, I offer this delightful and appropriately inspirational piece that I found in today’s readings. This is from Bryce Dot VC, whom I hope does not mind my capturing this excerpt from his blog –

Last week while prodding a pitching entrepreneur on his competitive landscape I rattled off potential competitor after potential competitor in order to gauge his reaction. After appeasing me for a few of them he paused, mid-sentence, a little befuddled. Then he stopped altogether.

A little exasperated, he said something along the lines of:

Startups don’t compete with airlines by purchasing a bunch of planes, hiring a bunch of pilots and locking up a bunch of terminals at airports. Startups compete with airlines by inventing videoconferencing.

It’s as though he was channeling Buckminster Fuller who said:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

How car dealers uncovered a surprising key to greater customer satisfaction

February 10, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, Strategy design, workplace design
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from Factory Image Programs: A NADA Research Project

 

One of the more active and heated debates on the value of design to business is over what are called “factory image programs” for car dealerships.

Most car manufacturers, concerned about the alignment of dealership appearance with their product programs, periodically impose or strongly influence updates to the physical quality and character of dealers’ facilities. Most dealers resist the programs because they are unable to link a measurable business benefit like increased sales to the high cost of these programs.

So the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) commissioned an independent study to uncover and identify the value in the programs and recommend a resolution to the ongoing conflict between them and the manufacturers. The study was just released at the annual NADA convention a couple of days ago.

I expect I’ll return to comment further on the study in the near future. But I did want to offer an initial and very interesting out-take from the study.

After discussing the diverse and complex array of considerations and influences that made solid conclusions almost impossible to derive, and especially after uncovering that the annual costs of billions of dollars spent on dealership facilities meant very little, if anything, to people buying the cars, the study uncovered an unanticipated yet solidly expressed value in the programs.

…dealers expressed pleasant surprise that, after they completed a store upgrade, it became much easier to attract, retain, and motivate good staff. One multi-point dealer even told us that “I modernize as much to attract good staff as to impress the customers.” Another pointed out that with improved employee morale came improved CSI scores, which makes sense. The impact seemed especially powerful in the service area: as one interviewee put it: “A dropped ceiling in the service bays will do wonders in attracting and retaining good technicians, who are pretty used otherwise to being ignored.”

Despite the experiential evidence that there was this direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction (CSI = Customer Satisfaction Index), there apparently has been no survey by the manufactures or the dealer association to uncover and verify these anecdotal, and logical, findings.

And I think that’s where I’ll return in future commentary. I have some significant experience in factory image programs and have consistently been surprised with the fact that they align things (store fixtures) with things (car designs) but not the real experiences with and in these things.

That to me is the most important point of this study, affirming what we know from other places. The real power of workplace design lies not in the “brand image” but in the experiences of work. The quality and character of the workplace directly links to attraction, engagement, morale, motivation and performance of good employees, and that directly links to quality and character of the customer’s experience with the organization.

The NADA has, in other words, discovered what we’ve said in so many other places – the leading organizations of the future will be the ones who “own” the experiences of work.

Where you [don't] sit in the office

February 8, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, Strategy design, workplace design
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We reflected recently on the debate taking place about the appropriateness of an open office to meet the needs of a diverse population with diverse needs and characteristics. Our position was and is that this is not an either/or choice of the rightness of open versus closed. We are also concerned that a hybrid may not be the best or more robust response, although we certainly believe this is an acceptable midterm-in-the-transformation-of-the-office solution.

Our emerging position is that work has changed substantially and fundamentally, and we now believe that the either/or/hybrid battle uses an increasingly archaic language. We believe that an entirely new lexicon of form is essential to get on and stay on the curve of the increasing momentum of change.

Beyond the open/closed debate, there is also the one about where we work – home or office – and the relative value of each. A recent example of this debate was published on the Bloomberg Businessweek site, here. As with the open/closed debate, we think that these arguments proposing that one or the other is the more correct place are the delightful indicator of a revolution in the making, yet also reflect a depressing tendency to hang on to an ancient lexicon and miss the currently delicious opportunity to design a new language of work and the places and spaces of work.

What is, however, great to grab from the debate is the data from the emerging science of space and interaction. In the Bloomberg Businessweek debate, Ben Weber cites the growing evidence of the benefits of productivity, engagement and job satisfaction that come from face-to-face interaction. This kind of data is helpful in shaping new solutions for the place we’ve called “the office” and is also helpful in identifying the cultural characteristics and attributes of personal and group behaviors that should be the “program” for designing new types of spaces where the new activities of work can take place.

In yet another example, Bob Frisch asked the question, “Does it matter where your top team sits?” in a recent HBR article (here). He is, essentially, advocating something we’ve done in past work, which is to provide multiple settings for people to do their work. “Two seats for every employee” sounds counter-intuitive in a time of great compression, but the mantra reinforces the recognition that capturing the value of face-to-face interactions means supporting it in lots of different locations.

Our take is that all of this discussion is the illumination of the fact that we work differently now and need a different response to thinking about and designing the workspace(s). Whether we sit at home or in “the office” or with one team or another, or in a place for focus or a place for collaboration, we should begin to recognize that we work in all of these places and in all of these modes. We should no longer demand a place only for one of us and try to make it work for all that we do, and we should no longer accept a place of work provided by the companies we work for that does not provide lots of places for us to work in the modes that best support what we need to do at whatever time of the day we need it.

We desperately need to move on in the world and get new stuff done. We need new places to do that.

Getting out of groupthink and into pursuing opportunities

February 5, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design
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Lego Flying Car by katimar via flickr.com

There has been a lot of conversation in recent days about the form of the office and how to design it for those who work in it. This is enormously interesting to me because this conversation, like many others in culture, politics and business, is an exciting signal of the search for real innovation and of a desire for a revolution in the way we provide the places and spaces where we do the things we do.

Argument and revolution

The “conversation” that I reference is the point and counterpoint in recent debates about which way is best – the old comfortable way or a recent newly proposed and tested way. A round of confirming and contradicting commentary was recently evoked by Susan Cain’s article in the New York Times. While trying to make a case for consideration of the closeting needs of introverts, she broadly bashed the new, open workplace as a product of “groupthink” in its pejorative connotation. Using the same term in almost the same week, Jonah Lehrer referenced the incredible volume of creative product emerging from the famous Building 20 at MIT, “one of the most creative environments of all time,” generally credited to the informal interactions happening between people of different backgrounds and interests. And Alison Arlieff weighed in with the groupthink that collaborative spaces aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Closed office vs. open office.

The “revolution” that I reference is my belief that a third form with a new language will emerge. This third form will have immediate credibility in the forehead-slapping “of course” mode and will make both of the currently debated forms artifacts in a rapidly receding history.

Getting out of groupthink – New forms will be generated from a new lexicon

I propose that the current arguments are nostalgic and a bit arrogant. They are arguments of an estate that recognizes it has lost its case but does not yet know where to turn. And they are arguments of a self-appointed enlightened who believe that the right way is the way they proposed to counter the old way but is now being uncovered as having had insufficient rigor, and that now has piles of data bias making a great case against it.

I think that the core issue we are now confronting arises from the loss of meaning of familiar terms like “office” and “workplace” and, even, “work.” “Office” is a term left over in the slow evolution from industrialization and carried the implications of production and supervision in its form. Attendance, for example, was a key characteristic of its managerial mode. “Workplace” implied a single setting, the place where work was done, the place that was separate from the other stuff we did, the place that was defined by time, location and character. “Work” was something separate from “life” and disregarded the reality that, even in the old mold, one defined the quality of the other.

In almost every meaningful, productive, and rewarding context now, these terms are antique.

“Work” certainly has changed dramatically from the dreary and dreaded stuff we did for “the man.” Most of what we call work, the valuable stuff, is creative in some form. Most of what we do is self-defined or collaboratively determined with a team oriented to a goal that is more frequently something defined by them and not by a manager.

There is no single “workplace” any more because we do what we do in multiple physical settings and multiple virtual settings, as well. Time, also, is no longer a limiter in what we do. We carry huge amounts of information on tiny devices everywhere we go, and we connect with our networks anywhere we are. In an odd inversion, we may find solitude and focus sitting with our headphones on in a public cafe and, when we are ready for socializing our ideas and learning from others, we go to the office.

The office best serves as a place for connecting with a network of knowledge and resources to get purposeful stuff done. The productive social buzz and innovative activity that now takes place there is called “distraction” and blamed on an “open” office by those who claim a value of “focus” to name whatever it is that they do behind their six-foot tall cubicle walls. They are missing the reality that entitled square footage for playing computerized solitaire never had, and now certainly no longer has, value. They miss that the work that is valuable is not the consumption of time but the generation of new ideas and approaches with a team of other highly motivated people. Those people, when they need focus, find a place for focus. Otherwise, the buzz of collaborative activity is the visible manifestation of the generation of value for the world.

Pursuing opportunities

Arguing about which of the existing ways of designing a workplace is wasteful. It is a form of the groupthink that the debaters debate. Work is no longer done in one place, and the office is no longer one thing.

Reflecting on what we do, and how we really do it, and then generating, testing and developing new environments for the activities and behaviors of work is productive and valuable.

As Kevin Kelly says, “Don’t solve problems; pursue opportunities.”

The office as an App, redux

February 4, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, Houses, innovation, social design, Strategy design, sustainability, workplace design
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use case study house via davidgalbraith.org

David Galbraith offers an interesting vision for the transformation of thinking about and designing houses. My interest is less in the specifics of his design, but more in the consideration of this approach to almost any space where we live or work.

We continuously accept a lexicon of form – “living room,” “dining room,” “office” – that no longer appropriately serves the way that we live. We accept these forms and functions because they may be the only choices the market makes available to us, or because of social norms that we feel we cannot challenge or do not know how to challenge, or because they are imposed upon us by another authority.

Considering how what we do would be expressed in a web app offers a context for insights into how work and life could flow better and satisfy more.

The web apps we select to download or use are those that are well designed both in visual and functional character. We appreciate mostly those that are agile in character, that reduce complexity, that are light in system demands, that have a simple logic at points of decision, that flow well. We appreciate those that provide, when we want or need it, a link to augmenting or amplifying information or features. We choose the ones we like because of the quality of the experiences we have with them, which are mostly engaging and efficient.

I don’t recall that we’ve had a client who has approached us with an initial and core request to provide a better experience. Most typically, the language that accompanies the commission is an oblique goal metric like reduced square feet per person that occludes the real goal of the organization to become more engaging for the people who do its work and more effective in achieving its purpose.

Many of the tools and techniques our profession has attempted to use to move our client’s language into experiential considerations work only where experience is the business – in retail and hospitality contexts, for example. Clients in corporate, scientific, or institutional domains typically squirm at the imprecision of an experiential parameter.

Why do  people who carefully choose and use web apps use an entirely different language and criteria when commissioning the places and spaces where they live and work? Why is more thinking and emotion invested in an app that costs next to nothing, but nothing of similar critical thinking applied to the experiences in the spaces that cost millions? Could the use of the Web App metaphor be a more effective tool in transforming thinking, perceptions and investments?

(See also The Office as an App, part one)

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