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workplace design

Reactionary work dominates the daily agenda

May 30, 2012
architecture, Strategy design, workplace design
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Perhaps the domain of “creatives” needs further definition, yet the results of this survey are interesting in the characterization of the nature of creative work today. (here)

There are a number of good insights or, perhaps, confirmations of what we already know and experience.

Buried in the article reporting the results, however, is one of those pokes at the open office environment, again. The observation of what most workspaces are like may be accurate. But the fact that most open office spaces are not designed well is not a case against the benefits (also acknowledged here) of the forms of communication that are most effective for creative work and that are confirmed in the survey.

A well-designed open office is not a simple thing. How visual connections affect disruptive behavior, how sound masking supports attention in the midst of buzz, how a choice of alternative settings also provides places for focus, and other concepts support the interactions of productive team work yet also the solitude and focus of productive individual work should be part of the exploration that creative organizations make before making the error of believing the design of workplace is a binary, open-or-closed choice, or even that the problems of conventional open approaches are a given.

Of course, while blaming the setting, most of the disruptions people experience, most of the sources of “reactionary work,” are not from the noise in the environment but the “noise” on the screen – email, instant messaging, twitter traffic, “insecurity work,” etc. And the fact that these interruptions are self-generated is getting a lot of attention these days (as here and here and here).

Sketching and testing to develop rich solutions leanly

May 29, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design
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This was a nice diagram in David Aycan’s article, “Don’t Let the Minimum Win Over the Viable,” in the Harvard Business Review blogs.

Although written around the idea of “lean startups” and specifically around the concept of the “minimum viable product” to release, it has potential application in other creation contexts, as well.

via http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/dont_let_the_minimum_win_over.html

I liked especially this observation from Aycan:

“Sketching or mocking up experiential prototypes and then testing them with consumers or potential partners, while also explicitly jotting down your operating and business assumptions and using them to discuss the business with industry experts, allows you both to pick a promising route to invest in the development sprint and to pivot with confidence”.

What resonated most with me was the implication of the value in this periodic interchange between “experiential prototypes” and “operating and business assumptions.” Of course, in almost any well-managed project for the development of physical stuff, a periodic touch on cost as business assumption is de rigeur. However, in many projects, once the design concept has been proposed and accepted, only the internal production metrics guide its development forward.

Aycan’s sketch illustrates a recommended approach contrasted with diagrams of “traditional linear” and “standard sequential pivot” approaches.

In workspace design projects, that consideration of the “experiential” – logically at the center of the project’s purpose – is rarely evoked. The prototypes actually developed are sketches that try to capture spatial experience but not working experience. The various phases of project development, more akin to Aycan’s diagrams of “traditional” or “standard” processes, are checkpoints of scope and cost, only. It is atypical that a conversation is started by the tougher question of how it is that this concept continues to be relevant and valuable to the purposes for which it was intended.

However, rich solutions, leanly developed, evolve from a process that is continuously and progressively curious about delivering benefits to the organization and its customers and stakeholders. Aycan notes that, “Like a product feature, the idea is not to perfect the economic model prior to building the MVP, but to have some idea that the economics you are proposing will set the venture up for eventual profitability and a low-friction scaling process.”

Most importantly, the process of sketching and testing alternatives generates insights and builds a shared mental model among the design and delivery team and with the client. This approach typically assures alignment with the organization’s values and nurtures the “personal, passion-igniting elements” that are at the core of great projects.

Everything about the design of the office has just changed

May 26, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design
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Everything about the design of the office has just changed

Via Wired.com comes a bit of news that changes everything about the design of the workplace and, I’d offer, everything about conventional corporate real estate.

“Steve Ballmer has an 80-inch tablet in his office. He’s got rid of his phone, he’s got rid of his note paper. It’s touch-enabled and it’s hung on his wall…It’s his whiteboard, his e-mail machine…and it’s a device we’re going to sell.

“The idea that there should be a screen that’s not a computer, we’ll laugh at that in two years.

“Every screen should be touch, every screen should be a computer and should be able to see out as well as see in. That is the way the world is heading [and] those screens are going to be big, small, wall-sized and desk-sized.”

Imagine an “office” with a tool of this scale. Imagine what teamwork looks like with tools like this. Heck, imagine what “individual” work looks like if you don’t have tools like this.

What’s a desk anymore? Really. Imagine working in a piddling 10′ x 15′ office with your IT department’s standard issue. Imagine being left out as everybody else gathers around the people manipulating the 80″ displays. Heck, imagine what “individual” work is, anymore.

Okay. Now imagine work under an 8-foot ceiling.

Everything about work has changed, but very little of the workplace has.

Now, it will.

4 approaches to slowing things down in order to get out front

May 26, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, Strategy design, workplace design
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4 approaches to slowing things down in order to get out front

Weeknotes, May 26, 2012

unknown source

Yet again this week, considerations about being “ahead” of our clients were in our thinking. This is a relatively complex place to be.

Being ahead of our clients is a condition of being ready to propose concepts and solutions before they have come to an awareness or comprehension of the information that they need in order to make good decisions.

Being ahead of our clients is also an issue of envisioning the concepts and solutions that we are confident will be greatly helpful to them in their enterprise, while they may not yet be ready to accept the “risk” of investing in concepts that leap over the intervening decades of development in workspace thinking since their last workplace design project.

They are typically constrained by a variety of factors – low confidence in making a bold move, perceptions of politics in the organization that may imply risk in bringing new ideas forward, lack of exposure or familiarity with the benefits that could be captured from available concepts and potentials, and other factors. Most of these, it seems, arise from having spent too long in one place managing an existing set of resources without having contact with a world of workplace management thinking and workspace design insight that has moved place-making rapidly forward.

We, however, are generally unconstrained as we enter the situation. We have been working for decades on similar issues. We bring to the current context a cumulative set of investigation, speculation, experimentation, innovation and implementation derived from a succession of clients from a spectrum of domains and with diverse challenges and objectives. This body of experience makes us eager to apply what we’ve learned to each new project.

The challenge, then, is how to reconcile these two very different states of readiness. How do we avoid, as we begin to understand our client’s mindset, adjusting our approach to aim only for the middle or getting stuck in the middle because we must produce while our client learns? How do we, realizing we’ll be unable to achieve the excitement and satisfactions from delivering an advanced concept, avoid disappointment and disinterest in the current context? How does our client avoid disappointment and disillusionment with the eventual realization, on moving in, that they could have aimed further out, should have been carried further out by their designers?

Slowing the process to get out front – 4 approaches

There may be other approaches that can help resolve this dilemma, but here are four to think about and test –

What has your experience been? Have you used these approaches and have they been successful? What other approaches would you suggest? Let us know in the comments, or by email.

Slow the conversation to enrich the solution – In most of our experience, the design team comes to a much more satisfying solution if our client has engaged a creative “consulting” team first. The biggest barrier to breakthrough results is a poorly defined problem. And a poorly defined problem is typically a facilities problem – deliver so much square feet of space for this many people at this budget for this fee in this time. None of that problem definition says anything about what you are trying to do as an organization as you strive to bring value to the world. Start by engaging a curious team who want to know more about your company, your culture, your purpose, and how you are different. Engage a team that is especially interested in your perception of the behaviors of your staff that represent your leadership goals, and the experiences you think they should have that will engage them in achieving your purposes.
Develop, and rigorously apply, a set of guiding principles and success metrics – The goal of your project is not to be “on time and on budget.” Goals and objectives like that mean that the project team is working only for themselves. Instead, prepare and present a briefing on the mission of your organization, the values it holds dear, the purpose it fulfills for its customers, and the challenges it faces. Then engage your design team in an extended discussion around those subjects and ask them to generate a set of guiding principles that will lead them to measurable solutions targeted to advance your organization’s purpose.
Generate and test a good range of alternative concepts – Allocate sufficient resources inside and outside the organization to explore alternatives. Alternative concepts can help to more rigorously define the problem, significantly clarify intentions and develop metrics that matter, engage more in the process and uncover latent or politically hidden problems that restrain organizational performance, and develop solutions that are more creative and more innovative and that return much more for the investment about to be made.
Build a network of inputs around outcomes – I believe that, among the most important disciplines of those who seek to serve their organizational purposes better, one is to build a rich network with others who have done, or who themselves are in the midst of, a workspace transformation project. There can be rich rewards in asking tough questions about what the workspace is intended to do, what link there is between those purposes and what was designed, and what now is taking place in the organization as a result. I have been especially surprised that, in more than two decades of practice, I have never heard of a potential client calling one of references, inviting him or her out to lunch, and asking about how their organization is performing as a result of our work.

Postscript

As a postscript, there is, in all of this, the inherent problem of corporate purchasing. Inherent in projects solicited by an RFP and awarded through competing proposals are faults of trust and speed. The people who will ultimately occupy the spaces we design will have been, usually, poorly served by an internal function that uses a process that squeezes resources for everybody engaged in the process. The spareness of resource allocation demanded by the procurement process means a speed in execution that, in turn, means that users will not be engaged in the discovery and design process, facility managers will be unable to change direction or enrich the planning and design process as their awareness of the mis-aimed intentions of the RFP become revealed, and we as designers will be unable to do much more than speculate about the real organizational purpose and goal and apply a templated solution and cross our fingers in hopes of the best for all.

Company lunch

April 29, 2012
architecture, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design
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lunch at google hq by henry balanon via instagram

With a tongue-in-cheek tone, Nick Bilton recently made a rather interesting observation about life at the headquarters of internet giants like google and facebook. Noting that the amenities in these workplaces were so good and so extensive that people never had to leave the building, he wondered if this absence fro the experience of the life the rest of us lead actually reduced the innovation potential at these companies.

Last year, as Larry Page was retaking the helm at Google as chief executive, he told Claire Cain Miller of The New York Times, “One of the primary goals I have is to get Google to be a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion and speed of a start-up.”

Nimbleness is fine, but most start-ups I visit don’t have heated toilet seats and on-site dry cleaning.

If you look at the hottest start-ups and social companies today, they don’t even have real Web sites. Path, Draw Something and Instagram are all primarily mobile experiences. Other social apps like Viddy and Pair, which are quickly gaining in popularity, are also strictly mobile.

But this is the rhythm of Silicon Valley. It is, indeed, its life force. The bold start-up grows, gets comfortable and misses the next big thing, which the newest hungry start-up spots while working among the rest of us.

Coincidentally in the same week, Apple posted updated plans for its new headquarters in Cupertino. By now, everybody has seen the “spaceship” concept, a huge circular building with everything, it would seem, that Apple employees would want.

Apple employees apparently want to eat out, however. So Apple is now planning an off-campus restaurant for its staff, where they can get away from headquarters…but not in contact with others. The planned restaurant will be unmarked and open only to Apple employees.

“We like to provide a level of security so that people and employees can feel comfortable talking about their business, their research and whatever project they’re engineering without fear of competition sort of overhearing their conversations.

That is a real issue today in Cupertino because we’ve got other companies here in our same business.”

Will Instagram displace Apple as the great strategic story of the decade?

April 16, 2012
Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design
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Will Instagram displace Apple as the great strategic story of the decade?

 

The most important part of the Instagram story may not be the billion dollar purchase prize, but the transformational influence that Kodak’s failure in the light of Instagram’s success may have on corporate strategy and design.

Corporate cultures are influenced by short horizons. In a recent Forbes assessment of the Kodak bankruptcy, Larry Keeley observed this condition –

At least once a week, top executives tell me that new growth businesses in their firms are intriguing and potentially important, but they simply “don’t move the needle.” Said in plain American: “The hot new thing simply cannot produce enough revenues this quarter to improve my bonus as a senior executive.” So those projects are starved of resources instead of nurtured.

And in the New York Times, Nick Bilton observes that –

Even if Polaroid or Kodak could have developed Instagram, it’s likely that the project would have been killed anyway. What would be the reaction of almost any executive presented with a business plan to save the company with an iPhone app that had no prospect for revenue?

We’ve become very interested in this concept of “stock and flow” from other influences, but highlighted by the Instagram story.

What are your experiences with this “stock and flow” pattern?

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.

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