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Reactionary work dominates the daily agenda

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

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

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

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

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

Everything about the design of the office has just changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, it will.

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

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

Weeknotes, May 26, 2012

unknown source

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slowing the process to get out front – 4 approaches

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

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

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

Postscript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Space – How Abbey Road informs the workplace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How car dealers uncovered a surprising key to greater customer satisfaction

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things we’ve noticed

January 7, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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How. And why. Not what.

This is a very nice piece on enjoying the “how” and “why” in the process of answering a challenging question rather than rushing to the “what,” the answer.

The process of answering a question should be a voyage of discovery, a journey during which you learn something, and one where you enjoy yourself in the process.

The essay made me think about the invisible processes in business, and also how the places of businesses are not designed around the how and why. If the design and planning of workspaces made clearer the purposes of the enterprise, and if the processes people and teams used to get to the what were more transparent and observable, would an organization learn more, create more valuable knowledge, and achieve more?

What innovators share

Somewhat related to the above is this review in the Ottawa Business Journal of a recent book on the “innovator’s DNA.” The review reflects on the power of “the five whys” while also noting the five distinguishing characteristics of successful innovators.

associating, observing, questioning, experimenting and networking

We’d found our way this week, in the midst of our own annual strategic planning, to a discussion about the uniqueness of the places and spaces where innovation seems most successful. As I carry the images of those spaces, I’m making a resolution to shape our design mission – our client’s “program” or “design brief” for their corporate workspace – into a form that links workspace concepts to these 5 attributes.

That is, since most of our clients are engaged in a search for how to generate and support a more entrepreneurial culture, I intend to test a change of the lexicon of workplace design from conventional descriptors of corporate organization and function (“accounting”) and conventional workplace form (“conference room”) to new terms reflecting these innovation behavior attributes.

I expect that radical transformations in design processes and concepts will emerge.

Augmented reality

There are many things to enjoy and reflect on in this proposal of trends for 2012 from the Smithsonian here and here.

I expect I’ll come back to the list for further exploration and comment, since I stopped almost immediately at the first subject, augmented reality.

In a recent project, we found transformative approaches to design through our slogan of “augment, amplify, activate.” A client had a new workspace designed by others, but then found it experientially flat. It satisfied the organizations, functions and facility metrics of the enterprise, but did nothing to change their culture and performance, which was the purpose of the project in the first place. Our slogan was a motivator to the occupiers and the designers to explore conceptual modifications to support behavioral change and development.

This sense of “augmentation” seems like a rich territory for exploration in design. A while back I had speculated on “the autoupdating workspace.” And more recently, a colleague raised a question about augmented reality which made me think in entirely different terms about the “productivity” of both the principal artifact of our service, digital “drawings,” and the activities that take place in the spaces and places we design. I’ve become increasingly interested in how to build layers on top of our digital design information and capture digital information from the physical spaces we design.

The Race Against the Machine

Related to the above, I’ve just finished reading Race Against the Machine, and am now both tremendously excited as well as terribly frightened.

The motivation for me is to begin to imagine the role of the workspace in assuring the race with the machine. Finding a strengthening signal in the requests we are getting from clients, there is an accelerating realization that space supports enterprise sustainability, but this is increasingly tied to the changes in the way we work together because of the extraordinary acceleration of technology.

We are now attracted to, and attractive to, clients whose enterprise is shaped around technologies that, yes, automate creativity. These enterprises are now, or soon will be, seeking spatial solutions well beyond the most advanced corporate real estate solutions.

The Singularity

And, of course, this.

Focus groups

I am not sure about this, but can’t stop thinking about it. That is, is Facebook a relevant a valuable data source for workspace design? It seems so logical to “crowdsource” criteria and concepts for a satisfying and uniquely productive work environment…how do we best do it?

…and, in case you were wondering

Why humans have chins

Have you thought about the design of your workspace in the same way that Steve Jobs must have?

August 29, 2011
architecture, Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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Steve Jobs, who radically transformed the architecture of computing (and almost everything else), is about to transform the culture and performance of Apple through physical architecture.

Jobs announced his retirement as CEO this week, and that generated a flood of appreciations, appraisals and analysis, mostly focused on what it was that he has done thus far. However, in what seemed to be the last significant act before announcing his retirement, Jobs appeared before the Cupertino California city council to present his proposal for the next headquarters of Apple. I assume this is the catalytic tool he will put in place to have resonating influence and impact on this organization well into the future.

I was fascinated with the design of his proposal, but I was mostly impressed with the choice he and his architect had made of basic form. That is, Jobs presented his proposal as a direct rejection of a campus approach to planning and instead spoke of the need to get everybody in the same place. Jobs’s presentation implied a frustration with the dispersion of his staff among many buildings in the area. In announcing that he had bought the HP campus where he first entered the business, he also said he was going to demolish all of its buildings.

His proposal was a single building on a significantly re-greened site. Much of the resulting chat in press and blogs was around its “spaceship” appearance, but it perhaps was most like the iPod click-wheel, a circle of a building to house 13,000 people – in somewhat older professional jargon that seems oddly pejorative these days, a megastructure.

I focused on this because, with colleagues over the past few weeks, I’ve been engaged in a discussion around the subject of “master plan.” A client has asked us to advise them on the development of properties they have that currently house their R&D operations. They are a company who have moved from the manufacture of mechanical devices to the development of highly sophisticated, globally-networked devices. They are a company who, in other words, are perceived as a manufacturer of devices but are, instead, a technology platform.

I’ve been in this place before. At two ends of the spectrum of big organization with roots in gritty manufacturing but transforming themselves, I’ve designed corporate homes in campuses and in megastructures. I’ve noted this:

  • If you need to reinforce the capabilities and competencies of a discipline, the campus is a good form
  • If you want to integrate the thinking of many disciplines, the megastructure (a unified building) is a good form

I cannot imagine that Steve Jobs with his architect, Sir Norman Foster, did not engage in hours upon hours of debate about form, culture, communications, intentions, transformations and the future. I cannot imagine that Jobs presented the design of his new company home without having deliberated about transformation as much as he has done with everything else he’s generated.

I cannot imagine that Jobs did not see the physical architecture of the workplace as influential and transformational as he did the design of Apple’s physical products that changed whole industries.

So, imagine that – after transforming computing, communications, music and publishing, what’s in the works after 13,000 people go to work in this new building?

Have you thought about your workspace in the same way that Steve Jobs must have?

Why the “office” no longer matters

August 25, 2011
Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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photo via WLCAdultGrad on flickr.com

Metropolis mag had this article today on Going Paperless in med schools. The Yale School of Medicine is giving each of its student an iPad to use in classroom and clinic. They will simultaneously eliminate all paper materials, which have burdened the institution with cost of more than $100,000 per year.

The article reflected on the potential impact on the traditional image of the bookbag toting student. I think the real impact of moves like this will not, however, be on the campus but on the workplace.

After huge numbers of university students spend the next couple of years without paper class materials, they will emerge into and finally fully transform the workplace. Their methods of working, communicating, collaborating and achieving will mean that they will approach the conventional workspace with a look of critical curiosity, wondering what this strange construct called the “modern” office is all about.

What I find especially significant here is that every day major investments are being made by corporations and institutions in workspaces that are losing value at an increasing rate. Designed for individuals processing paperwork, they are already irrelevant to how work is done today.

Those misplaced investments remove employees from access to the resources that really matter, and rob the people who work there of potential to grow their capabilities and contribute greater value to the purpose and achievements of their organizations.

It is shocking that corporate leaders do not recognize and kill this waste, especially in an economy that needs sustainable resource utilization.

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

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.

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