Tag Archives: Strategy design

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

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]

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

November 12, 2010

Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design

1 Comment

Another example of how physical place matters, even for designers of virtual worlds | Becoming neighbors with Twitterhttp://ow.ly/38H8x—
Jim Meredith (@archizoo) November 12, 2010

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.”

The Power of Empty Space (part 2)

November 3, 2010

architecture, Strategy design, urban

I am looking for a developer

October 31, 2010

Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design

6 Comments

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]

Going with the flow

July 13, 2010

Strategy design, workplace design

1 Comment

Image from Self Defense by Stephane Malka via BLDGBLOG

In a couple of recent discussions on LinkedIn about the evolution of the workplace, I could sense the signals of a reluctance, or fear, in the justifications for resistance to a more open, agile workplace. Much of it comes from paradigms around the term “mobile” implying a necessity to give up the company workplace. Other resistance is more superficial, having to do with the old conventions of why someone just has to have an “office.”

I always find in these discussions a tendency to go to form rather than activity, avoiding the opportunities to explore the personal benefits of the emerging workplace concepts.

A day later these citations showed up in a couple of posts by Diego Rodriguez of IDEO on his excellent Metacool blog. He wrote about the considerations of both Joichi Ito (CEO of Creative Commons) and John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla). Each, in their own posts reflected on the power and opportunity in chance encounters.

A couple of direct quotes from each –

Joi Ito – Focusing on everything

Referring to some of the things he’s learning from Hagel and Brown’s book, The Power of Pull, he says
“…you should set a general trajectory of where you want to go, but that you must embrace serendipity and allow your network to provide the resources necessary to turn any random events into a highly valuable one and that developing that network comes from sharing and connecting by helping others solve their problems and build things.”

He then is reminded of Edward Hall’s definition of polychronic time vs monochronic time (p-time vs m-time), and says –
“In m-time, we delineate time and space into meetings and cubicles allowing organizations and institutions to scale massively. p-time is like a Arab majlis where everyone is invited at the same time and they all mill around in the waiting room of the sheikh while the sheikh has a series of meetings in the open inviting people into the meeting like a long flow of consciousness. P-time lacks scalability and order, but it is rich in context and serendipity. At some level, if you plan everything, you are very unlikely to be able to embrace serendipity or be as ‘lucky’.”

And he concludes –
“I feel like I am floating in a rich network of highly charged people and serendipitous events, not a single day going by where I don’t feel like ‘Yay! I just did something really good!’”

He does, however, also reflect on a matter of context –
“I find that this P-time method allows me to have a much richer high context thought process involving more people. The problem is, it’s hard to then get anything structured done.”

John Lilly – Adventures of the mind

John first reflects on his youth when, falling asleep in a lecture, he misses what was perhaps the very first demonstration of the World Wide Web. Talking about turning points in life and the things that influence them, he says –
“A bunch of decisions that I thought were really important turned out to be not important at all, and some things I decided to do just for fun changed everything.”

He reflects on this and offers that –
“you never know when a decision you make is going to have a profound effect in your life. At least, I’ve never been able to tell. So my coping strategy — what I do to make everything work for me — is try to put myself into situations where there are tons of great choices, tons of great people, tons of great outcomes possible — so that it makes the odds that I make some really important & good choices that much better.”

Why this matters

These are the illustrations (even more illustrations!) of the benefits and achievements that come from more open approaches to the contexts in which work is done. Yes, Ito will need to find a way to shut out some stuff when he wants to concentrate and focus, but I assume that neither he nor Lilly would be proponents of conventional office space.

As Hagle and Brown point out in their book, this time that we are in is no longer about stacks of information but about flows, and to be successful you have to get into the stream.

––––––––––––

http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2003/08/06/going-ptime.html

http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2010/05/13/focusing-on-eve.html

http://john.jubjubs.net/2009/08/21/adventures-of-the-mind/

http://metacool.typepad.com/

5 tactics for more valuable workplace design outcomes

July 11, 2010

Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design

3 Comments

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 –

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.”
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.
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.
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
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.

Has the quality of the experience brought by mobile technology become so satisfying that it is no longer satisfying to work in a fixed place?

June 1, 2010

Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design

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

Dangerous and seductive curves

May 4, 2010

Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design

3 Comments

Aircraft carrier in landscape, Hans Hollein

I may have referred to this before, but recent readings bring the idea back to mind.

In one of those influential lectures very early in college, Hans Hollein, an Austrian architect, offered an insightful illustration of the relationship between technology and society. I can not remember why he was speculating on this in his talk, in that long ago time when computers were kept in special locked rooms and run by punch cards, and chalk was used on chalkboards, and his own reputation at that time was shaped by a couple of small shop designs.

He drew a graph that looked like this –

His point, reinforced over and over since then by developments none of us could have foreseen at that time, was that technological development moves inexorably on, but social development lags. When the gap between the states of society and technology becomes too great, a social revolution takes place. Society adapts to technology.

That broad contextual reference reappeared when reviewing these two graphs in a recent post by David Sherwin in his very nice Change Order blog –

He called his S-curve the “Design Investment Curve,” and offered it to designers as a way to set client expectations about an appropriate pace of development of a concept and project. I think the offering is appropriate, yet I think his perspective, and the scale of the curve, may be shifting.

I many cases, the commissions that come to us as architects and designers are already on the acceleration portion of the curve in our clients’ minds. A corporate or organizational strategy has been formed internally, budgets have been developed and schedules set, the project has been formulated and moved into the workstream of an implementation team, RFP’s have been developed and a selection process executed, and then we get the commission. Client interest, anticipation and anxiety must be high at that point, and so, as Sherwin points out, are expectations. We are by this time, as in Hollein’s graph, “society” to our client’s “technology.”

It may be very appropriate for us to adjust our client’s expectations about the probable or possible pace of a project or program. But another graph appeared in my reading recently, and I wonder if it does not set a different tone.

I was watching a video of John Seely Brown presenting to a class at Stanford recently. His new book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion was about to come out making the argument for the need of new approaches and the rise of new institutions to meet emerging needs and be successful in emerging contexts.

His point, like Hollein’s, was that the advance of technology was inexorable. Brown’s graph illustrated technology with a very steep and very tall acceleration line and also served as a representation of the “flow” of ideas in our time. His argument was that survival/success/prosperity would mean that we get into that state of flow and adjust our strategies and programs to fit, like this –

So what does this mean for architects and designers, and their clients? Maybe this –

We are in the state of social revolution that Hollein represented by the vertical breaks in his graph
We need to adjust our own expectations, and get into the flow that our clients are in or trying to get themselves into
We may want to explore the power of small, smart moves, developed in collaboration with others, to uncover what matters and to sustain position in the flow
We need to understand how to quickly develop effective and powerful “creation spaces” for ourselves as well as for our clients

What are your thoughts?

—archizoo

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