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Tag Archives: workspace

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.

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.

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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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
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Whether in our professional work, in online discussion groups, or in our readings, it seems that the subject of workplace transformation is itself in a transformational state. People still cite statistics justifying one side or the other of the ongoing open versus closed debate, and others are counting the amounts of corporate real estate savings delivered through alternative work and mobility programs as supportive data to expand them.

Certainly there is an evolution, a progression taking place, and perhaps all of this data buzz is the signal that the subject is finding traction, but the metrics are still about consumption, and not yet about production. That is, “performance” seems defined in terms of a space/cost metric and not sufficiently in terms of organizational achievement.

In the meantime, as the design of the workplace lags, the design of technology that initially enabled alternative workplace programs never sleeps. Today, the 2 millionth iPad has been sold as more and more people discover the delights of the latest technology that lightens the load and allows almost access to almost any type of information in progressively more satisfying form, anywhere and at any time, and sharable.

In relatively rapid development we’ve gone from bulky laptop to lighter notebook to Blackberry to iPhone to iPad. We’ve fretted about work/life balance yet now go mostly with the flow. We’ve gone from traveling salesman to knowledge worker to worrying about how to accommodate the socially-connected gaming generation in the workplace.

We are learning that the old institutions are dying, as well. Leadership in commerce is increasingly being achieved through collaborative insight and breakthrough development, much of it achieved from relationships established after serendipitous contact at the peripheries of our core pursuits. These connections are, in a large part, the products of technologies that have made us lighter, more agile, more networked, more aware.

So this is what I am wondering: As the pleasures of these technologies have enabled the increasing satisfaction of connecting, developing ideas and achieving the good things that come from interaction in or from places other than the office, but since only a portion of those experiences are shared by people working in assigned space in offices – is it getting lonely in a conventional office?

What is the impact, in other words, of the experiential gap between the design of virtual and physical work space? Are there barriers to achievement, organizationally or personally, presented by working in assigned office space when the activities of others are being augmented and amplified by the ability to get out and move around?

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?

The latest workplace design trends

May 14, 2010
Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design
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Among the most common expressions of advice as anxiety turns to optimism in the economy relates to the preparedness and actions of leaders. “You must rapidly move from the status quo,” so many advisers say, “and establish and consistently articulate a vision for moving forward.” It may be this vision quest that so many organizations are going through that makes the request for a review of trends such a frequent agenda item in our conversations with current and potential clients.

As I noted in our last post, a review of what others are doing now provides information, a measure of pace, a confidence in direction, and other assurances that you are on the right path. I cautioned, however, that trends, in this sense of “solutions,” are more the evidence of what others may have found to be the right move to make, yet may neither connect authentically to your own purposes nor deliver similar or related results.

Redefining trends

I thought I’d return to this subject, with a slightly different skew. Reviewing trends as “solutions” to help shape your path forward begins at the wrong point and may lead to bad results. Understanding and analyzing trends that shape what you do and how you do it is an essential discipline in shaping and communicating vision and purpose, and in shaping and delivering services and products that have value to those you serve.

More specifically, shaping a workplace transformation program based on the trends you see in the actions of others may be more harmful than doing nothing. Shaping a new workspace around the trends and directions driving the value in what you do can be a powerful agent in sustainable leadership.

Transform, and activate

A major social services organization was facing challenges brought by the reduction of resources as a result of the economic collapse, and a corresponding rise in demand for their services. The leader of the organization recognized that they would have to begin to do more with less. He quickly realized that he could never accomplish that mission-rich but resource-spare agenda in the type of workplace where they had been working. Although a generous gift from a financial services company, it was generations out of date, compartmentalized, and walnut-paneled. And it dragged on their energy and purpose.

This leader researched trends in workplace design and spoke with architects, designers and furniture manufacturers. He began to form a vision of the workspace concepts that he believed would characterize the type of organization they would need to become – open, collaborative, agile, responsive. He then embarked on a major program to find and design the right type of space. He included in it all of the elements that he had been advised were the components of a more open and collaborative culture. He then moved his organization in and waited for the culture to take shape.

After several months, this same leader began to shape another program – this time to “activate” the workplace. Even though his organization’s workspace was at the leading edge of a typology for action-oriented organizations, the results he expected were not materializing. Returning to the recent reformulation of the organization’s mission, he put together a proposal to augment the earlier project with artifacts of the unique work his organization did, and more representative of how work is actually done in the organization. They are now implementing a tuning and amplification of the concept in place.

Touch down, and touch base

A leading consulting organization had an innovation culture and a staff who worked closely with their clients in modes that were highly mobile. They were able to design and implement mobile workstyles that progressively reduced demand for their own corporate real estate. Each iteration of the program brought the ratio of people to seats higher and higher, and the ratio of real estate to people lower and lower.

The people who worked for them had no problem with the evolution of these programs. They did their best work in close contact with their clients, and traveled around the world to deliver their advice. The company became a model and their workplace transformations became benchmarks for others, the influential origin of a trend toward aggressive mobile workforce solutions.

This company however, began to have problems with the results of these programs. They had so successfully supported mobile workstyles that their people rarely had contact anymore with the company or their peers. The knowledge they had when they entered the company was not expanding, and the experience they gained in their work was not being transferred. Their brand power, formed from collective intelligence, experience and expertise, was eroding.

One component of their solution was, oddly, a workplace transformation program. They developed a workplace that was so authentically responsive to the experiences and behaviors of their “road warriors” that it became their preferred place to touch down. These “offices” became the places where they found colleagues and traded stories, where they updated and sustained their sense of the brand, and nourished their intellectual energies before heading off on the next engagement. The company is now making headlines again, and the next wave in its business innovations currently under way.

Envision, and transform

A large creative services organization composed of several advertising and media companies recently began a lease consolidation program to bring all of the companies together in one place. These companies were fiercely independent, proud of their brand legacy and, in some cases, competitive with each other for clients and accounts. And they were very resistive to the program.

They participated, however, in a series of exercises that looked at the changing nature of the business they were in, the drivers of change for themselves and for their clients and customers, and the products and services they would need to develop to survive the change and to achieve and sustain leadership. This analysis led to insights that allowed them to envision the behaviors and experiences that would be essential to how they would frame and deliver those services. They then shaped a workplace and workspace transformation program around those experiences and behaviors.

Within a few months of moving into their new workspace, their principal customer, a global manufacturer, complemented them on the impact he felt to his business from the change that had taken place in theirs. Both the companies and their customers had survived a very challenging business context and today are leaders in their markets.

M-Shaped Strategies – A process inversion

These are the successful stories. In each case, these organizations shifted direction from initial intentions and achieved results from solutions that were original to their purposes. So many other organizations in these times, however, are starting with goals of “cost savings” and embracing workplace transformation trends and implementing programs that shed and minimize real estate but threaten the effectiveness of their mission.

The identification and analysis of trends is very important in the formation of a vision or development of a strategy for a robust and sustainable future. The trends to study in this context are not solutions, however, but problems. These trends are the weaker and stronger signals of emerging change, or of dissatisfaction with the now, or of a shift in value or values that provide the insight shaping the moves you want to make to be effective, or to lead, or to fulfill a purpose and meet a need in the future. They are what Roger Martin calls the “mystery.”

These trends define the context for what you will do as an organization. Clayton Christensen calls this the “job” you are asked to do, the root problem your customer wants you to solve, or the result they want to achieve through your products or services. In the examples I cited above, the social services organization’s customers wanted advocacy, the consulting organization’s customers wanted to trust in and receive the value of the brand, and the media company’s customers wanted integrated creative communications.

The role of the workplace in each of these “jobs-to-be-done” was influenced by considerations of functional, emotional and social experiences of both staff and customers in these organizations. People who worked for the social services organization or who had an interest to contribute to its programs could be moved beyond volunteering and donating to active advocacy by becoming immersed in the story of the community they would affect. People who worked for the consulting organization and their clients would progress throughout the exchange of experiences and knowledge gained in a global practice by its members. Customers of the organization composed of the media and advertising organizations would benefit from the creative and coordinated programs developed by in the collaborative and open culture of its agencies.

The jobs-to-be-done and the understanding of the experiences of staff and customers of these organizations were the underlying and salient considerations that then shaped their workplace strategies, programs, and designs. Each of these organizations, achieving and sustaining leadership through what they do are now effectively, trend setters, and have the potential to influence the moves that others make. But the strategies and concepts used by the agencies, for example, which could be seen as representative of a trend in design for “agile” and “collaborative” and “team-based” workplaces, would be inappropriate or insufficient for the jobs that the other organizations were trying to do even though they, too, wanted to support agile, collaborative teams.

A recommendation

I would recommend an inversion in the process and origins of the conversations we’ve seen as a trend in the quest for trends.

If you are an organization who also believes that the nature of your workspace influences the impact of your work, try inverting the conventional process. Try starting the conversation with your architect or designer by telling him or her about the trends deeply affecting your clients or customers – the “mysteries” in your scan and the “jobs” your clients want done – and how they might affect the direction you feel you need to take as an organization. I assume he or she will then engage with you in a conversation about the experiences that are at the core of your offering, and shelve the conventional presentation of the portfolio and the latest styles of workplace design.

I think you’ll be happier.

…..

© MEREDITH Strategy & Design | M-Shaped Strategies ®

Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Prescription

Roger Martin, The Design of Business

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A new value equation for organizational real estate

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