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10 ideas for better design competitions that inform better projects, too

July 24, 2011
architecture, Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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Situationist Drawing Device Exploded Diagram by Ji Soo Han

The go-nogo debate, when considering responding to a Request for Proposal, includes an assessment of the capacity of the firm to respond to the context of the request. That is, do we have the ability to respond with sufficient ideational and representational robustness to deliver what the client seeks? Can we get what they want done done in the time they want it done?

The RFP we were considering had at least one member of our team saying no. I think the measure of his response was based on a conventional method of developing a project and the sequences of development, presentation and approval.

I took a different tack, and thought that the time frame demanded an approach similar to developing a submission to a design competition. Competitions, never sufficiently resourced, demand an energy and focus that is distinct from normal project processes. We produce creative and innovative ideas and use critical and spare methods to present them in a very compressed time.

It made me wonder, also, why we do not use such effective processes in the normal course of our work.

Coincidentally, writing in the Design Observer, John Thackara reflected on his experience as a juror in design competitions. He observed ten faults in the way competitions are staged, and offered ten suggestions for improvement.

I offer a link to them here, because I think that his suggestions to improve the process also inform the way we do our work in other contexts. In a quick companion to Thackara’s list, here are some rough starter thoughts of our own:

  1. Consider the client’s design brief, his program, as a challenge. If we haven’t written the program, it is probable that it does not contain much of an articulation of what the client is trying to do and why. Nor will it contain much about how the client sees themselves and their project in a larger context of business, society, culture and history. We, however, have been brought into our profession with a rich background that places architecture and its practice in that larger context. We are also critical, in a thoughtful way, about how much of the world around us could be improved. Why not approach our client’s project in this way?
  2. Take the opportunity to develop a rich set of internal connections, seeing the project not just for production, but also for development. The time and fees that set the context for project design and delivery are immediately limiting and compromising. They force us to focus on deliberate and efficient processes, and the team is set to produce. Projects, however, offer the opportunity for rich connections between people and great opportunities to develop and improve skills and aptitudes. There is no compromise to the project and, indeed, great probable benefit to it by paying attention to individual and team development opportunities as the project progresses.
  3. Identify something in the project brief that evokes attention and commitment to meaningfully advance the quality of daily life. Every day, millions of people do things in the buildings we design. Make thoughts about how their lives are enriched or improved by designing the life of the building after occupancy, and not just the processes that put it on the earth.
  4. Invite other disciplines as co-designers, not just as consultants. We tend to parcel out tasks to consultants whom we’ve invited to the project for their own perceptions, knowledge and reflection. Using them as co-designers, however, enriches what we do and what we can achieve by drawing them to a great intimacy with the purpose and mission of the project.
  5. Consider the project beyond its footprint. Every building exists in, is influenced by and, in turn, influences a broader context of connections over time.  Consider the building as a tool and understand how, beyond occupancy, it can assist what others are trying to do , as well.
  6. Research the real world. If we engage in research before designing, we tend to look at typologies, styles and solutions. But the projects we look at have themselves been commissioned to do certain things and, as we know, have influenced other moves that may not have been initially intended. Seeing them and learning from them in this real world context can contribute considerations for a much more robust design solution.
  7. Make stories about life in the building, not just about the development of form. We can improve the performance of our clients, the return on their resources and their own development as patrons by imagining the life that people will live in these environment, and telling stories that inform why certain design decisions were made with those stories in consideration.
  8. Discuss the criteria for success with the client. Help him develop his own critical mindset about a more meaningful future in the process.
  9. Engage others. We once invited friends of our designers to come to a presentation of our work and offered them the opportunity to comment on it. I do not know why we do not do this more. We engage the support of others on our Boards. why not engage generous outsiders to perform a similar role of adviser or commentator on what we do?
  10. Engage project management as stewardship. Beyond the management, application and control of ours and our clients resources on projects (on time, on budget) consider the longer life, role and importance of the building and act as stewards of its success.

As always, I’ll appreciate hearing your thoughts. What can we learn from our experience with design competitions to inform how we approach projects in daily work?

The Meredith Workplace Attraction Curve

July 13, 2011
Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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I propose that a significant increase in the performance of people and value in corporate real estate could be captured and delivered through a more customizable workplace.

There are many models around to illustrate how personal activation, amplification or augmentation of provided platforms yields high levels of satisfaction and performance enhancements. Simple examples include the phone in your pocket. Over time, you have explored and tested various “apps” to get your device to be just right for you and what you want to achieve. The device not only looks the way you want it to, but has functionality and features that you selected and the data that use use more frequently. The apps you chose also enhance the way you interact with other people, other systems, and the physical world. Your device, through its customization, is more useful, attractive and valuable to you.

The place where you work probably has very little of these benefits. The workplace is a place of constraint, not of augmentation. Standards and benchmarks for the planning of the workplace define generalized patterns related to positions rather than roles, and to organizations rather than activities. My workstation is a compromise of size, configuration, technology, location, comfort, etc. I have a sense that if I were provided less, but then able to pull up certain physical and technological “apps,” I’d be more satisfied and effective.

Hence, this graph, the Meredith Workplace Attraction Curve, as a representation of a theory and opportunity for exploration and development. I propose that the workplace defined by others has rapidly diminishing return. A workplace that is designed by its users can deliver accelerating returns to people and place.

Push platforms and diminishing returns

“Push platforms” are the kinds of workplaces as designed and delivered conventionally, typically by Corporate Real Estate. One of the defining characteristics of this type of workplace is its diminishing acceptance as more and more people participate in it.

“Distraction” is the almost universal claim representing an underlying fault in the design and delivery of this kind of workplace. The demand for freedom from distraction comes from the inadequacy of the physical workplace to support effectiveness, and is a claim that begs separation – walls, doors, mobility.

At a certain point, the internal separation reduces the meaning and purpose of being in a workplace. Where alternatives are available, people will choose them as preferable to their purposes, and bail out of the provided workplace. This selection is the manifestation and fulfillment of policy that values space reduction over worker potential.

Pull platforms and increasing returns

“Pull platforms” are new types of workplaces we’ve referenced before and have these characteristics –

  • A “plug-and-play” nature designed for the convenience of its users, rather than its providers
  • Modularity, that is, with components that are both self sustaining and compatible for connection with others
  • Flexibility, able to respond to otherwise unanticipated needs of its users and participants
  • Agility and adaptability, with features that allow it to support and capture increasing returns
  • Evolutionary with the potential for its value to be enhanced by the improvisation, experimentation and improvements generated by its users
  • Environmental richness, providing intrinsic rewards to those who are committed to its use and contribute to its value

This type of workplace, inherently attractive to those who seek higher levels of contribution and performance, has an increasing value curve. The more that customization to purpose satisfies personal and organizational effectiveness, the more people are attracted to it. The more people who are attracted to it, the greater the points of connection of the social network of work and the higher probability of growth in personal and organizational potential as a result.

The tipping points

Distraction in the push platforms is a function of scale and proportion – too many people in a space reduces its effectiveness and causes “evaporative cooling.”

However, “distraction” in pull platforms occurs when there are too few people engaged. The intentional collaboration and synergies cannot take place until a critical mass catalyzes an energy and a corresponding acceleration in value as more people connect to the network and in the working space.

Quote from Chris Hood in the July 2011 issue of Buildings magazine

The power and potential of platforms and pathways in workspace design

May 2, 2011
architecture, Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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We’ve made great strides in workplace design over the past decade.

Informed by increasingly enlightened management practices, augmented by mobile technology, supported by new developments in furniture and equipment design, and shaped by the significantly different workstyles and working relationships of a new generation, the workspace became more relevant to the emerging world of work.

The complexity and layers of facility standards were reduced, the workplace became more open, and the social nature of work advanced from the cafes and foosball tables of the dot.com model to more sophisticated understanding of the informal networks that are essential for good team work. Employee dread with the assumed characteristics of concepts like “free addressing” was replaced by comfort with the discovered benefits from agility and flexibility in working and organizing dynamically.

The best-in-class office now exhibits a significant shift of resources toward team work from the hierarchical management model of a generation before.
Despite these advances, and with the impacts and influences of the economic pressures and strategies of the past couple of years combining with the rapid and continuing evolution in the nature of work, many of us are yearning for more.

What is that’s missing now? Where is the value of the workplace shifting? What’s next?

Time has become more precious making the effectiveness of place more important

A key factor in our discontent may be the quality of the contexts in which we work.

Time has become more precious. That is, as information, context, and opportunity grab more of our attention and time, we have come to place more value in the nature and quality of our experiences.

The tools we now use are beautiful objects and also perform very well, yet we also expect a sustaining relationship with them. We customize them, augment them with personally selected apps, and embed them with more and more of the information that enrich the quality of our lives and the performance of our work.

As our time working in and out of conventional office environments has become more fragmented, and the management of the relationships, networks and information we use has become more complex, we now seek a relationship with place, as we have with our tools, that augments and amplifies our identify, our image and our effectiveness.

Said another way, the preciousness of time increases our attention to purpose, and this attention, this measure of effectiveness makes the experiences of working – the unique and valuable experiences of working – more important.

What matters is no longer how much time we put in at the office, but how effective the time is that we do spend there. What makes that time more valuable are the experiences we have while we are there.

The “performance” movement aimed inaccurately

“Performance,” the consistently referenced metric of the effectiveness of the knowledge worker began to be a focus for workplace design. The “high performance workplace” was a goal to be reached through new approaches to office design.

But over the past decade, a key measure of workplace “performance” became, instead, the cost of its real estate. The less space dedicated per person in a corporate space supposedly meant increasing performance for the organization.

Mobility programs, for example, had the potential of increasing individual and team performance by introducing more flexibility and choice into the workplace. These programs rapidly lost authenticity as they became a real estate tool rather than a human resources and creative management tool. “Mobility” became a program used to push people out of the office to find their own workplaces as a means to reduce the cost burden of corporate real estate.

This unintended yet driving “performance” metric was, of course, one with diminishing returns. Not only was there a finite limit to the amount and cost of space that could be cut, but signs also emerged of a resulting reduction in the creative or productive output of organizations.

A key issue was the experience of working. That is, as space decreased, so interactions, the engine of innovation and of engagement, also decreased.

The office went from a place where people came to work together to a place where nobody wanted to work. As long as the workplace is measured as real estate it will be perceived as a cost, as well.

The emerging world of work demands a radically different approach to workspace planning and design

I think that the emerging world of work demands a radically different approach to workplace planning and design.

Let’s turn to a survey, of sorts, of projections for what the emerging world of work might look like. Why, in other words, do I believe that it is time for a shift?

There has been a significant body of research and analysis done in recent years to comprehend and understand the “information age,” “knowledge work” and the characteristics of the “knowledge worker.”

Similarly, the change in generations, or more specifically, the rather radical shift in the characteristics of the first generation emerging from and influenced by the technological embeds of the “Information Age,” has shaped a new body of thinking about what work is and looks like to this emerging generation and also the influence their workstyles may have on what work looks like for everyone else.

Here are just a few of the projected characteristics of the emerging world of work –

  • An individual’s social networks and their ability to capitalize on them mean that companies will hire those with higher 
“reputation capital”
  • Increasing developments in mobile technology change everything about work, both where and how it is done
  • The increasing importance of teaming, the power of social networks and the potentials in communications technology enable the formation of “work swarms” – connected individuals forming teams quickly to capitalize on opportunity
  • A generation immersed in gaming may use some of its organizational principles, like the formation of guilds, to form high performing teams and leading companies to hire not individuals but entire teams
  • Successful individuals will have a different mind-set characterized by global thinking and cross-cultural power, social participation, openness to continuous and contextual learning, and speedy movement on identified opportunities
  • The continuing merging of work and life will be accepted as a new normal, and the value of flexibility will replace the values of separation or balance
  • Non-routine skills become more important, work becomes more informal and spontaneous, and skills in charrettes or sketch-ups become increasingly valuable

What seems significant and characteristic in these projections is the importance of time, a focus on purpose, the value of flexibility, the accommodation of the non-routine, the power in new but temporary operational forms, and the rising influence of externally-connected individuals and teams over internally managed organizations.

What seems significant, in other words, is the increasing value of experiential design – the qualities and characteristics places and spaces that will be sought by self-defined and ad-hoc teams to support speed and effectiveness in their quest to capitalize on emerging opportunity.

We are at a point where neither the centrally-provided and regulated workplace of the past nor the anonymous and commercial “third place” workplace of the mobile worker satisfies. What guides our thinking for the next workplace?

The shift in value toward tacit knowledge

As the value of knowledge has shifted from that which we hold unto ourselves to that which we share with others drawing them to participate, our attention is drawn more to the power an potential in tacit knowledge.

Organizational evolution and development takes place through a continuous interchange between two forms of knowledge.

Explicit knowledge is formally codified and transferred, and is transmitted in easily accessible forms such as words, numbers, and formulas.

Tacit knowledge is expressed in more than words and frequently without words, and involves both cognitive and technical skills – beliefs, images, intuition, craft, know-how.

Tacit knowledge is difficult to develop and uncover, yet it is the most valuable form of knowledge for the evolution and sustainability organizations. It is subjective and experiential, and is frequently context-specific.

In an economy in which explicit knowledge is more easily and rapidly transferred, it carries the threat of diminishing value. Tacit knowledge, the unique and differentiated knowledge of people and organizations, carries increasing and potentially accelerating value in this economy.

Tacit knowledge, however, has been called “sticky” knowledge. It is best transferred between individuals through socialization, and this requires a context of shared experiences and direct interactions.

It is becoming clear that the surviving and thriving organizations of the future will be the ones who can uncover, access, augment and accelerate the flows of knowledge.

The importance of socialization and experience

Uncovering and unleashing the power of tacit knowledge, which requires social interaction, moves our attention from the attractiveness of place to the attraction of great experiences.

The relatively nascent discipline of “experiential design” as applied in the workplace has moved us from a closed, process-oriented workplace to a more open collaborative place of creativity and innovation.

The principle tools of this wave of design were developed and used to illuminate the social nature of work and enhance the potential to capture its undefined but anticipated benefits.
This initial focus on the social has aimed inaccurately. While supporting the kind of interaction that contributes to cultural development, this first wave of workplace innovation brought socializing spaces – the Starbucks model – into the workplace.

However, it missed the more powerful purpose of socialization – to move tacit knowledge through an organization. That is, the innovators of workplace design focused on the thing rather the purpose.

After a decade of embedding “social” spaces in organizations, we are learning more of what this term socialization really means. We have learned that Increasing the value of the experience means moving the organization from measuring the performance of place to measuring the potential of people. It means moving from you measuring them to them measuring you.

It means moving from measuring things to measuring interactions.

This is why it is time for a new shift in what we’ve called “experiential design.” How do you add value to the experience of working when the places of that experience are exhausted?

Platforms and pathways

I’ve become influenced recently by the work of John Hagel and John Seely Brown, leaders of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. Although their most recent book, The Power of Pull, mainly addresses the domain of technology innovation, I’ve found many of its principles – how small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion – to be relevant to the way I think about the role of the workspace.

Hagel calls the power of pull “the ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges…unleashing forces of attraction, influence and serendipity.”

This “drawing out” means moving from the measurement of the performance of place and people, a diminishing return, to the potential of people supported by the right kinds of spaces, an increasing return.

A key tool in capturing this potential is experiential design. Hagel defines two environments to consider for the value of the experiences they host – platforms and pathways.
Platforms are teaming environments designed to attract and support “diverse providers and users of resources.” The are the foundations that provide the experiences that enable teams to be effective, to spawn new teams, and to create and capitalize on rich connections between them.

Pathways are the channels through which people participate in and contribute to flows of knowledge. Pathways include the networks we communicate with and through, and the relationships with people and resources where we find the information and experiences that enable us to learn, grow, develop and evolve.

Let’s imagine the look and feel, the experiential quality, of a workspace designed as a “pull platform” –

  • It has a “plug-and-play” nature designed for the convenience of its users, rather than its providers. It is modular, and both self sustaining as well as compatible for connection with others.
  • It is flexible, able to respond to otherwise unanticipated needs of its users and participants.
  • It is dynamic and adaptable, with features that allow it to support and capture increasing returns.
  • It is evolutionary and its value is enhanced by the improvisation, experimentation and improvements generated by its users.
  • It is a rich environment, providing intrinsic rewards to its users who are committed to its use and contribute to its value.

This concept, using the workspace and the tools and principles of experiential design, is, I believe, the next focus for leading workplaces. Planning in this way can yield sustained attention and increasing interactions to uncover latent individual potential and drive organizational learning and improvement.

I believe we need to start a new discussion around the experience of work and how to generate tangible value from the workplace. We have to help companies see that “workplace strategy” is no longer about real estate but is instead about generating new business opportunity.

The old institutions are dying

Old institutions are dying and we are now at the front edge of a great social revolution. The technologies we use, the global ecosystem we share with others, and the ethos that informs our behaviors all influence a seismic shift in the ways that work is done.

New organizational and operational forms are emerging in response, and what we called “work” is now different in all of its dimensions.

It is shocking that everything about work has changed, but very little of the workplace has.

The leading organizations of the future will be the ones where a highly motivated, innovative, and focused workforce discovers to be the most effective places for them to achieve, learn, build networks, uncover opportunity, and build businesses.

I therefore believe that the leading organizations of the future will be the ones who “get” the experiences of working. They will be organizations who understand that the emerging metric of performance, leadership and success is the growth in people’s potential driven by the effectiveness of the environments providing the experiences people seek and through which their organizations thrive.

I’ll be pleased to have your comments.

Walking cities and work swarms

December 27, 2010
architecture, Design strategy, Strategy design, urban, workplace design
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The concept of “work swarms” and other forms of time-based or project-based collaboration evoked a recall recently of the concepts of the 1960′s architectural collaborative known as Archigram.

More appropriately said, the concept for the Walking City devised by Ron Herron, offered a view of the potentials for technology that are only now, 50 years later, being realized.

Herron’s concept imagined large ships of collectives of people and technology walking the landscape and applying knowledge, experience, expertise wherever it was needed and then moving off to other problems in other places. Peter Blake, writing in Architectural Forum in 1968, said,

Walking City imagines a future in which borders and boundaries are abandoned in favour of a nomadic lifestyle among groups of people worldwide. …Walking City anticipated the fast-paced urban lifestyle of a technologically advanced society in which one need not be tied down to a permanent location. The structures are conceived to plug into utilities and information networks at different locations to support the needs and desires of people who work and play, travel and stay put, simultaneously. By means of this nomadic existence, different cultures and information is shared, creating a global information market …
(From the Archigram Archive)

Others have commented on certain similarities of the commercial structures of our more recent times, and the instant cities that enable the globalization of war. In seeking formal or operational similarities to the sketches and descriptions of Archigram, however, many are missing what seems to be the key, yet unrealized vision of the group. The concept of spaces that engage a full spectrum of experience for people who, freed from the bonds of place, are then able to contribute and share knowledge across the world is a concept that is still restrained by the behaviors and practices of management, by the “best practices” of the real estate industry, by the zoning of most cities, by the rise of the culture of security, and by a failure of imagination in the design profession.

I think the vision is not “architectural” in conventional terms, but that it is very much about the experiences that architecture supports and can provide. Archigram’s Walking Cities are not battleships for the countryside, but are representations of a full and free set of sustaining experiences that enable people, dedicated to doing good things, to move to a place together that is not their home and and do work together untethered and unfettered by traditional or conventional policies and practices in the provision of place, space and technology. We know how to do this now without the heavy weight of Herron’s land cruisers, but even they are much lighter than the physical infrastructure we now have to work with and in.

I am, in other words, still looking for a developer.

The Power of Place, part 2 – How a design strategy powered a global strategy design

November 12, 2010
Design strategy, Detroit, Strategy design, workplace design
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Jim Meredith enjoys a chat in the "Creative Lobby" of Team Detroit headquarters

As you all know, we put ideas into operation with the hope that they will have lasting impact. Despite our purpose and intentions, most architecture and design projects have a finite conclusion – the doors open, the client moves in, and they and we are off to our other business. What we’ve done exists on the landscape for its and our lifetimes, yet it seems relatively rare that we get insight into how what we’ve done affects the lives of those who experience the places we’ve designed.

I was pleased, then, to find this story in the New York Times this week. Ostensibly about the promotion of a key creative person at an ad agency, key pieces of the article told a story about the resonating beneficial influence on the business performance of a company for whom I, in a former position, led a team to design a regional headquarters. The article is a great testimonial to the power of what we do in advancing strategies that help design resonate with business benefit well beyond the project itself.

Uncovering what “job” the client actually wants to do

I’ve probably talked too much about the Detroit WPP project, but I like it as a clear example of a great way to practice. I was Principal-in-Charge of the Detroit project which was conceived by WPP as a relatively simple collocation project. WPP had grown through acquisitions and, as a result, in major markets, came to hold a number of different agencies who had leases in different buildings in different locations with different terms. Bringing different agencies from different locations together into their own suites in one building would simplify lease terms and CRE complexity.

But I was interested in a different approach. Our mission is to link workplace design strategy to our client’s business strategy design. At the time of the project, about 2005, the advertising and media businesses were experiencing a revolutionary fragmentation of the Mad Men model of business and were challenged by internal competition among advertising, media, planning and other disciplines seeking relevance, influence and dominance of the marketing agenda. So I was deeply interested in working with WPP executives to take advantage of this “collocation” project in Detroit to actually generate and test a new business model, and one that could be facilitated by a radical new approach to workplace design.

A window into the process

Almost every day during the site search and design phases of the project, I would join an executive of one of the agencies in his office, or he in mine, and we’d scribble diagrams on a whiteboard. We began by discussing the concept that bringing the agencies under one roof was an opportunity to “tear down the walls” between the businesses and develop a “new lexicon” for both the business and the places and spaces where it would operate. The objective was to find ways to enhance the creative output of the companies and deliver higher value at lower cost to its clients.

Each of the agencies was, in a sense, complete. Each had a full palette of administrative, creative and production functions. There was, however, a great range in the size of the agencies, from 65 to 650 people (the companies under consideration for collocation collectively employed more than 1300 people), so the strengths of these functions in each of the agencies varied as well.

Collocation could, it seemed, easily allow an integrated concept of back office functions like HR, finance and IT to enable greater strength and improved efficiency for all. But we also quickly began looking at integrating other functions like research, media and others, and eventually creative as well to test the potential of an integrated approach to deliver higher creative value. As this developed, we began to also challenge approaches taken in earlier projects in other cities where collocation simply meant each agency having its own suite but together in a single building with a single lease.

Linking strategy design with design strategy

Eventually, we had an emerging new business concept in mind, as well as the realization that the extraordinarily dynamic business conditions meant that the shape of organizations that moved in to the building would not be the same as the ones with whom we began the project. The design, then, had to accommodate ongoing organizational redesign and continuing rapid evolution defined by market and business conditions.

We began to work with a radically open concept that would adhere to certain guiding metrics of the WPP CRE program as well as the lingering cultural and identity concerns of the agencies. I developed, nonetheless, a “two seats for every employee” design program. Visualizing that the emerging design of the business – my client began to call it “integrated creative communications” – would find success only through a (then non-existent) collaboration between agency teams, I reasoned that only through an agile physical place that enabled the socialization that would nurture a sense of shared values and the development of a shared culture would this success be achieved. So in addition to a home base for 1350 people, there were also 1350 seats in a variety of different kinds of settings for the combined staff to get to know, and trust, each other and start to combine disciplines and expertise and begin to work together.

Allowing time to activate

Although initially resisted by the executives of the agencies for logical arguments about brand identity, interagency competition and proprietary information, they nonetheless agreed to let the design concept develop to reflect the emerging business concept, even as it was developing.

“I think I was pretty skeptical” of the Team Detroit concept at first, Mr. Barlow said. “You’d walk in a room and say, ‘He’s with Y&R; he’s with Ogilvy,’ and you’re all sitting together. It was weird.”

As results were achieved, Mr. Barlow said, it became clear that “the whole would be equal to more than the sum of the parts.”

Within 3 months of moving into the building, the agencies dropped all resistance to the business concept and rebranded themselves as an integrated operation named “Team Detroit.” The business concept (and the spatial concept) is now the model for WPP’s work globally, as the article discusses.

The project has won design awards and has been published in various places before. But this article from the New York Times today is a better testimony to the power of what we do when we help organizations develop and articulate strategy designs better, and then develop design strategies that deliver measurable business results.

[Quote from "Selling Ford Around the World, From Detroit" by Stuart Elliott in the New York Times, November 12, 2010]

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The power of place – how shared physical place trumps virtual networks

November 12, 2010
Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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We’ve always been interested in how physical place contributes to the development of organizations. We have a portfolio full of examples from our own work, and it is always delightful to find affirmations in other places.

This article in today’s New York Times is a great primer in the power of place. Twitter’s choice of a location for its operations has generated a feeding frenzy among other tech companies who what to be in the suite – or on the elevator – next to them to capture real measurable benefits in the proximity. Among those benefits are these –

  • Contact learning – “by hanging around with executives at one of the hottest tech companies today, some of the magic could rub off”
  • Network expansion – “There, he has been stalking executives on — where else? — Twitter, to see who is to visit Twitter’s offices. When he finds out, he pounces and “hijacks the meeting,” he said, by asking them to swing by his company”
  • Influence sharing – “Through elevator and lobby run-ins, he has also forged a close enough relationship with Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, that Mr. Costolo is helping Klout raise venture capital.”
  • Serendipitous resonance – “they are hoping that proximity to Twitter will lead to chance encounters in the elevator, partnerships or an acquisition — or simply that some of Twitter’s fairy dust will land on them.”
  • Opportunity amplification – “physical proximity — as close as working in the same building — leads to increased knowledge, productivity, income and employment.”
  • Technical support – “he frequently hops in the elevator to visit Twitter to ask technical questions about the company’s changes to its tools for software developers”
  • The power of pull – “It’s certainly something that adds to the credibility of the address when you have people coming to see you, and you can say it’s the Twitter building.”
  • Motivation and energy – “It’s a very energetic spot. It makes you feel charged up when you walk in.”
  • Property value – “the vacancy rate for big buildings in the area has decreased to 21 percent from 26 percent, and average rent has increased to $32 from $29 a square foot”

There is, of course, a delightful poetry in all of this. As the article reflects, “Mr. Fernandez and other Twitter admirers see the irony in their desire for personal interactions with Twitter executives when their business is focused on building virtual relationships. ‘Even though it’s all about tech and the Internet, the real magic of Silicon Valley comes from people being in the same space,’ said Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify.”

“For certain early-stage insights and design matters in a very fast-moving, hot industry, the proximity, even at the room level and the elevator level, is important,” he said.

There is also another great lesson in the story –

  • Link design strategy to business strategy design – “We spent more money than we probably should have as a start-up to make everything feel as cool and pretty as we could, so people wake up in the morning and want to come to work,” Mr. Stone said. “I’m not surprised other companies want to take advantage of all the mojo we put into the place. I would do the same thing.”

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I am looking for a developer

October 31, 2010
Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
6 Comments

New ways of working | Apple store, Tokyo | image by -nathan on flickr.com

Everything about work has changed, but nothing of the workplace has.

Work looks different, now.

Major forces in technology, the economy, society and culture have combined in such a way that  even the near future will be dramatically different from what we’ve experienced over the past several decades.

A casual recitation of the trends we’ve seen in new ways of working – mobility, agility, globalization, collaboration, crowd-sourcing, innovation imperatives, networked organizations, creative class, work anywhere, etc. – reveals the early components of massive and accelerating change.

And the lexicon of the current and emerging future – work swarms, hyperconnectivity, augmented reality, gaming, simulations, spontaneous work, the collective, etc. – is language that does not yet have counterparts in the world where the design of the workspace takes place.

We are very surprised by the slow pace of change in the planning and design of places for working. We believe that beyond our ability to see and comprehend what the future of work looks like, there are significant forces that constrain our ability to get to where we need to be.

The failure of the discipline of design to match the pace of the emergence of new ways of working will certainly mean frustration and, more importantly, restraint on the ability of organizations to capitalize on the promise of the future.

We think that new institutions and new approaches are necessary to resolve this issue.

The existing paradigms of the workplace are very strong and limit the ability to achieve rapid change.

At the core of this dilemma is the heavily embedded practice of looking to the future from the past. We have spoken before of our resistance to the terms and the articulations of workplace “trends” because we believe that the change taking place in society is so substantial that the future can no longer be extrapolated from the experience of the past or the components of the lagging present.

There has been and, until the Great Recession, continued to be significant investment in the physical infrastructure supporting the way that work used to be done. The office building in best practice, for example, is a form based on past organizational designs and management practices that uses components, modules and metrics to reinforce a conformity to hierarchy, entitlement, and a cellular array of assigned workspaces. Over time, these have generated a well-developed and applied template of core design and placement, floorplate size and dimension, and floor-to-floor heights that shape the organization of work, and even influences the size and displacement of organizations. Form does not follow function anymore; rather function fits form.

Those components, what we call the lexicon of workplace form, also represent a mature economy that has been well developed by furniture and equipment manufacturers, ceiling and wall component manufacturers, and the technologies of energy and communications distribution. This has also bred a generation of workplace design specialists, increasingly constrained by time and fees, who have developed an aura of market and practice area expertise that reinforces the incremental extrapolation and application of “best practice” templates rather than real workspace innovation.

And the embedded resistance to change in the corporation suppresses the mandate for change

Even while accepting the logic for new ways of working, management education and practice has been unable to adapt to and keep up with the extraordinary speed of change in the way that work is actually being performed.

In recent years, even the growing awareness of generational differences has generated merely stylistic differentiation in the accommodation of different ways of working without understanding the substantial emergence of entirely new forms of organization and execution.

The “trend” to make the workplace more “social” by introducing a Starbucks style into the lunch room is but one example of the misunderstanding of the emerging social nature of work, communication, networks and innovation.

The existing institutions are powerless

While the corporation correctly senses that the current form of the workplace is worthless, it has not yet formed an understanding of what form of workplace has value. Workplace design consultants have illustrated that whether through layoffs or through mobility programs or through otherwise unrecognized shifts in how and where work is done, you can walk through the corporate offices these days and not see anybody there.

As the economy continues to press on corporate performance, most companies cannot shed real estate fast enough. The relentless purge is based, at least in part, on the traditional alignment of the corporate real estate function with the finance organization. Human resources, marketing, R&D and the value-generating portions of the organization have not yet assembled the point-of-view, position and power to influence the real estate momentum.

And, of course, the supply side of real estate, for a long time afraid of change, has led the design and delivery of the corporate workplace based on “exit strategies” – the generalization, commonization and commoditization of corporate offices to assure rapid turnover of occupancies even as the demand for a high level of customization and agility begins to emerge.

New institutions are necessary

The sense that the conventional designers and providers of the spaces and places where work is done can not adapt to provide a new model has led some from outside of the domain of “best” practice to attempt to innovate and create.

The Kauffman Foundation, for example, deeply concerned about the pace, volume and success of the entrepreneurial endeavors that power job creation and economic growth, have developed the Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation. They have commissioned a prototype space to act as a “test-bed” for the development and application of new modes of organizational design and development under the belief that space matters to people’s performance.

Similarly, Jeff DeGraf at the University of Michigan, has generate the Innovatrium concept. In his work with major corporations, he has found that great strides can be made with executives in an off-site, non-corporate context, but the pace and success of change is lost when they return to the conventional corporate space. The Innovatrium is a prototype to find a physical mode to implant in the corporate office to assure greater success in innovation initiatives.

These are early, small scale models, and there is a lot still missing.

So…I am looking for a developer

Our specifications are still in development and, in any case, we want this to be a mutual and multidisciplinary endeavor. Our model will evolve from design and development, from research and insight, from analysis and innovation, from prototypes and testing, and from new “metrics” around the experience of working.

We’ll return to this subject periodically. In the meantime, here is a very brief review of only some of the things we are thinking about.

The new model will use a new language of workspace design, a new lexicon of form. Since the leading edge of new ways of working is evolving so fast, and since older ways of working are moving so slowly, event the current language of work and design is losing value fast. “Collaboration,” for example, already has the weight of workforce skepticism, and everybody knows that the little table out in the open is not the supporting device. The new language must not carry any burden from inadequate responses from the past.

The new model is one of service, not control. Corporate real estate and facility management have provided things. The metrics of their performance and the limits on their resources have meant that the efficiency of the management of things and the minimization of the cost and amount of things have been their focus. “Standards” and “mobility” are a couple of the ways this is done, and “performance” became a financial, not an achievement, metric. The new model will instead understand and appreciate the importance of the way that people will get things done, and will provide the most effective resources for accomplishing the purposes of the organization.

The new model will be a sustainable model. Stocks and flows may be the underlying concept for the provision of space, not assignment and entitlement. This is at the core of our thinking. Corporate ownership and the long-term implications of real estate investment have combined to generate an inflexible and over-supplied model of space for work. We think a third party approach with a different model of supply is worthy of development and promotion.

The new model will seek talent centers, not cost centers. People will find and deliver success through their expertise and mastery in combination with a context-specific network of other experts and masters. These people will have the choice of being where they want to be, and that choice is increasingly an urban choice, in globally-connected, resource-rich centers. Workspace will come to be comprehended as a community, not a finite workplace.

The new model will focus on the experience of working. We believe that the leading organizations of the future will be the ones who “own” the experience of working. The measures and pleasures of performance will be determined by the people who fulfill the purpose of the organization, and not by the organization. Top talent will move to where they can be most effective, where the constraints on achievement have been removed, and where the available resources activate, augment and amplify their contributions and achievements.

Contact us if you’d like to explore with us how to develop the workspaces of the future.

[Image by -nathan on flickr.com]

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Honest signals

September 20, 2010
Design strategy, workplace design
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I made a passing reference in an earlier post to work being done by MIT in the domain of non-verbal communication in the business context, now presented in a book by Alexander Pentland, Honest Signals. It seems worthwhile to return to that for a minute.


image by ddotg via flickr.com

Pentland defines “honest signals” as certain non-verbal cues that can be seen in the interactions between people, typically in face-to-face communications. Falling generally into four classes – activity, interest, mimicry and consistency – they are subtle behavior patterns that we pay little attention to but that can be observed and measured.

Through what he calls “reality mining” Pentland has discovered and studied this “second channel of communication” – important components of communication that revolve around social relationships and that significantly influence our decisions, even though we may be unaware of their influence at the time.

He cites the counter-intuitive evidence of the destructive nature of certain policies related to socialization in the workplace. AT&T, assuming that the efficiency of one of its call centers would be higher if its staff took lunch breaks at different times found, instead, through Pentland’s research, $15 million in performance improvements when they let everybody go to lunch at the same time. Those breaks allowed employees to informally talk out problems and find solutions that reduced stress and improved their performance.

He also likes to cite one component of their study involving entrepreneurs and investors. Investors who were present at the personal pitch of the ideas supported an entirely different set of business plans than those they had selected only through reading.

That understanding of the role of tacit knowledge and the influence of interpersonal dynamics is significant. We are unaware of these behavioral cues in our interactions with others, yet the decisions we make as a result of those conversations are profoundly affected by them. Again: visible behavioral patterns that we don’t notice influence, without our knowing it, the decisions we make.

Now, go into your workplace and look around. Do you see high-walled cubicles where individuals scrunch down out of view of others? Do you see long walls of offices with doors creating a kind of “threshold resistance” to connection and communication? Are you a manager resisting socialization in your workplace?

If this is the form of your workplace, now imagine all that is being lost by missing the opportunities for those “honest signals.” Is your company struggling to stay in place in your industry? Does this research suggest a different approach?

According to Pentland, “It turns out that those sorts of unconscious signaling behaviors are enormously important in determining the functioning of an organization. In organizations, most of the communication that’s complicated, that’s really important, still happens face-to-face…it’s person-to-person; it’s not by email, it’s not by memo. And yet all of that face-to-face stuff never makes it into the digital record. There may be a memo summarizing a meeting later, or an agenda, but what actually happened never shows up. And all the interactions in the hall or around the water cooler are not even in the org chart. And yet that’s where everything happens.“

5 tactics for more valuable workplace design outcomes

July 11, 2010
Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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I was inspired by a sentence in a rather good article in the Wall Street Journal this week about Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America. The article references a manual the TFA members use that provides the tools and techniques that make them so successful in raising the educational achievement of the students in the schools where the teach. This is the sentence that caught me –

One chart explains why teachers should choose an objective like “The student will be able to order fractions with different denominators,” rather than “The teacher will present a lesson on ordering fractions with different denominations.”

It caused me to reflect on the power of language in the design and allied professions. As in this example, the subject of our work is frequently not the objective of those we serve.

The dominant lexicon of achievement in architecture and design projects includes objectives like “on time/on budget.” Yet, I do not think that any of our clients has ever built something for the purpose of being on time and on budget. They build for the purpose of advancing the goals and purposes of their enterprise. However, there is rarely a reference to this purpose and its success metrics  in the guiding principles of the project or in the review of its completion. The conventional professional lexicon and its associated quantitative and qualitative measures express self-reflective and self-congratulatory objectives that tend to divert our attention and could take our services and solutions well off target.

That sentence from the TFA manual, Teaching As Leadership, made me speculate on the value of renaming one of the core disciplines of our practice. Would developing best practices in “outcomes management” instead of “project management” reverse the continuing erosion of the scope of our profession and its slide into commodity service? Could assuring that the guiding principles – the program requirements – of any project have a well defined and understood linkage to the purposes of the enterprise increase the value of our relationship with our clients? Could the project “post-mortem” (egad! what a term!) include a post-occupancy review that specifically tracked the performance outcomes of our client’s enterprise? Would “outcomes management” yield an entirely different approach to design (“pilot projects” to test and prove assumptions, for example) and an entirely different relationship with our clients (a significantly broader “surface area” of contact and a longer “dwell time” of relationship that experienced with “project” management)? How do we develop space and place concepts to more effectively enable people’s participation and provide the utility to unlock their contribution of value to the enterprise?

Here are five tactics that I’d suggest to begin to change the lexicon of professional practice and move in this direction –

  1. Uncover and understand the business issue, the job the client is trying to get done –  Move the expression of the client’s project mission from “we need (or don’t need) more desks,” to “here is the problem we are trying to solve,” or “here is the opportunity we are trying to capture,” or “here is the contribution we are trying to make.”
  2. Define the role that people play in this mission and purpose – what do people who work for the organization do or need to do to get its work done? Move from depictors of spatial function to descriptors of workmodes.
  3. Listen and observe – develop insight from the ways that people work both in the larger world as well as in the project context. Whatever the context, seek and identify the spatial motivators of human engagement.
  4. Identify the unmet needs – uncover what has not yet been invented that would help shape better environments for people to do this work, creating places and spaces where new opportunities can be found and developed to do the job the client wants to do
  5. Invent, test, develop – generate and test new ideas, learn from them, make the solutions better

I’ll develop these ideas further for a future post. In the meantime, and as always, I’d greatly appreciate your own thoughts on this subject in the comments.

A new value equation for organizational real estate

May 6, 2010
Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
1 Comment

Emerging opportunities in organizational real estate and workplace programs – and how to capture their value

I have become considerably optimistic about the future of our practice from the evidence of disruption that had been latently present and now is increasing activating our economy. What had been a slowly emerging awareness of the need for doing things in new ways is now attaining greater momentum through the recognition that a fundamental shift has taken place, and that new strategies and designs are essential to successfully get in the flow of new achievement.

I sketched a diagram, an emergent equation of sorts, that begins to express some of the shift and its potential in a couple of domains of interest for me.

It tries to express that the content of the institutions and organizations of the recent past, which had still been bound up in closed and constrained systems, is breaking out and finding new value through more open and innovative systems. The impacts of this change of state include the collapsing value of the services and infrastructures that sustained the older systems in the first decade of the millennium, and the emergent power and potential residing in the transitional white space between the recent now and the yet-unformed next.

Some familiar recitations

Corporations, as individually competitive entities, were essentially closed systems where not being number one or two meant death. They were administrated by hierarchies enclosed in towers expressive of stature, status, and power. The value in these towers was attained through internal controls like efficiency of utilization, and external influences like financial instruments.

These real estate values were achieved through a set of services, equipment and standards managed separately from the core purposes of the organization, and yet influenced the shape of buildings and cities. People sat in policy-defined cubes. Furniture manufacturers fabricated responsive and dimensionally-confined systems. And architects and designers influenced site selection and lease negotiations based on “test fits” measuring the efficiency of the ratio of space enclosed in cubes versus the amount of space left over. Developers achieved “investment grade” ratings on their buildings by, among other things, reducing the inches of building constructed between the module of the furniture systems proscribed by the corporate standards and the minimum dimensions of aisles defined by code. Geometric precision defined economic value.

Then, a confluence of global comic development, financial meltdown, technology acceleration and the innovation imperative scrambled the value set. Rising real (and artificial) estate costs initiated a quest to squeeze, and “footprint hierarchy” disappeared. Technology enabled a work-anywhere potential, and realistic real estate utilization metrics proved the case for dramatic reduction in real estate demand. Innovation, the key to competitive differentiation and precious growth, was now believed to arise from a culture of creative and cross-disciplinary collaboration for which the cube was an enemy. Even after economic collapse and the disappearance of price pressure on real estate decisions, the demand for space may now be felt more by the coffee shop than the corporation.

Leading organizations are now trying to find ways to operate as networked clusters of competencies rather than closed corporations. The concept of work “stations” now only has value if you believe that if you have one you will not get laid off; instead, quality of place and attraction of space get attention. Work, in any case, is no longer contained in a company’s buildings, nor by the clock, and is progressively becoming part of a seamlessly networked, diversely urban lifestyle. People now much more agile in place and time, choose places and spaces that are the most effective, or can be made more effective, for whatever activity is part of their workstream.

So, what might this mean?

Our clients regularly ask us about trends. Understanding what is happening in workplace planning and design, for example, allows them to become current, test their status against industry and competitors, and make more informed choices about their own programs. Trends, a term borrowed from the world of style, may however be evidence more of group-think and less a valid tool for decision-making. The trend-setter may actually have been the only one in the chain who made an authentic move, creatively adapting and innovating their workspace to meet the unique and differential needs of their organization’s purpose. His followers may now be experiencing the frustration of trying to fit function to form.

In a recently posted video of his presentation at a TED conference, Simon Sinek offers a diagram – “the Golden Circle” – of the path to influential leadership, and a simple formulation that people want what you believe, not what you are.
Individuals and organizations with a well-formulated and articulated belief system (“why” – their purpose for being) develop aligned and authentic means to deliver on their promise (“how”). In order for the “how” of their organization to be effective, they shape their presence in place and space in the character of their culture (“what” – the tangible and physical expression of their unique DNA).

Trends in organizational real estate and workplace design

In their real estate and workplace design programs, aspirational organizations may see the impact and influence of others’ space moves and, sensing “trend,” may choose a similar approach for themselves, believing they, too, may benefit from the concepts.

The trend-setting organization may say – we are relentless in our quest to understand the needs of our clients and their customers. To get this understanding we do our work standing next to them, enabled by technology and support policies that allow our people to work in our client’s places. We’ve developed an agile workplace with all of the tools to support and nurture our highly committed and recognized staff.

The trend-following organization sees a “trend” to shed real estate costs through a reduced space inventory and minimized allocations. They initiate a mobile work “policy” and measure their success with a 40% reduction in occupancy costs, which, they believe, enhances their competitive position in the market. Their people begin to experience a high level of stress, make  harmful decisions based on the celebrated internal metrics, and cling to a cubicle as an entitlement and an assumed job insurance.

If I could apply Simon Sinek’s principles to our advice to our clients, I would always propose that we design from the inside out. Developing a deep understanding of the purpose and goals of the organization (the why), we would then begin to shape with them a strategy design (the how) to meet their goals and then begin to uncover, test and develop concepts to shape a design strategy for place and space (the what) to enhance the performance of people and to achieve and sustain leadership in their mission.

In other words, I’d try this new formula with them–

  • Articulate why you are in business and let that purpose be the principle drive of real estate programs and decisions
  • Define how you uniquely do what you do, first without reference to space
  • Shape space and place around the how

This is a great time for corporations and other forms of organizations to reassess the purposes and power of place for their own goals and objectives, whether considering new initiatives or reviewing the impacts of past or recent programs.

What do you think?

© Jim Meredith
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