schneiderism

Dan Wieden, founder of Wieden+Kennedy, said that line about being stupid when asked about his job by Polly Labarre of Mavericks at Work. I believe that the full quote was “My job is to walk in stupid every day.” His point is that there is no way he could know everything, that he is aware of the obstacle of expertise, and that he will not always have the best ideas. So, coming into work “stupid” keeps his mind open to ideas from anywhere, and open to valuing them when they happened. Clearly, that strategy has worked well for Dan.

I read that Dan Wieden quote at Mavericks at Work a few days ago and have been thinking about it over the weekend. I believe it is a very powerful attitude about how we could approach our work and maintain important perspective. I think there is tremendous value in, every day, going to work ready to learn, anxious for surprises, and anticipating the new. In coming to work looking for change, for improvement, and to challenge convention. We need to go to work knowing that ideas can come from anywhere, and should, and that those ideas should be acknowledged, encouraged, and supported… arriving every day with the intent of building this, of making it happen, of not standing in the way. Every day we need to know that somebody, somewhere is better than us… and that is totally cool because we want to learn from them. We need to come in every day hopeful, hungry, and focused on being in a different place than we were yesterday, on being in a different place this afternoon than this morning. We need to spend more time listening than talking, more time trying to understand and see from alternative points of view and work to avoid reaction and to lessen our reliance on instinct and instead give ourselves the time to own our decisions, and be thoughtful about it. We should spend as much energy on building our team as we do building our careers, and realize that our team is better when it is made up of people who just might be, and probably need to be, smarter than us. Instead of adopting the persona of an expert, we should try that of a student. Being a student was fun, everything was about newness and possibilities. Being an expert is limiting.

We all see the well-worn grain of company “culture” begin to show in ourselves and the others we work with. We see the behaviors that are counter to doing things better, to doing them the right way, and we allow this to happen. We see people who have stopped learning, people who no longer have wonder and curiosity and no longer have passion and drive. This is a form of giving up, or retiring from what is important. This is not an option. Dan Wieden nailed it.

In a similar vein, I found an excellent, direct and honest speech by Dan Wieden on the W+K London blog Welcome to Optimism, which I have followed for a long time. Both the speech and the blog are totally worth reading.

For some, that is an incredibly inflammatory statement. As inflammatory as saying that the workplace of the future is not about real estate, which it’s not. That is because the workplace that many of us already operate in is boundless, and is defined by where we are at any given moment. The workplace of now is our home, hotel room, car, airport lounge, coffee shop… wherever we are. The workplace of now is not a desk, chair and filing cabinet. It is our laptop, mobile phone, and other tools that support us in our tasks wherever we are. This is not a new development, but one that has been in motion, and gaining momentum, for over a decade. There are individuals in the workforce now who have never worked another way. This change has been driven by innovations in the ways in which we communicate, in connectivity, and in how we do business. The “virtuality” of business is not something that can be overstated, really, as so many tasks that required meeting in person twenty years ago are now completed without the involved parties ever needing to occupy the same geographical location, or ever actually talk to each other. That certainly devalues the importance of an office with regards to the effectiveness of business process. Or does it?

There is pressure on the office to change in ways that support this boundless workplace. The reality is that the office is not going away, and it shouldn’t as there are many circumstances where we need to work together in the same place, but how we use the physical space of an office environment is changing and evolving rapidly. As such, the ways that our organizations think about the office needs to change and begin leveraging notions of flexibility, adaptability, and customization to task. The physical office is an important node in our network for bringing us together for interactions that cannot be bested virtually, but this is very different than the typical archetype on which most offices have been built, which is the idea of warehousing workers to make operational control more efficient. Our work is increasingly defying the effectiveness of this archetype, and as a result we are experiencing productivity levels in the United States that are staggering. Organizations are learning that we can share a “mission and vision” without actually having to be in the same place at the same time. Some companies are way ahead in their thinking with regards to the boundless workplace, others are stubborn in the face of this change. The reality, though, is that there are many, many factors driving everyone to begin working in this manner and at some point the entire traditional 1950’s corporate office metaphor is going to collapse and be called out as an obstacle to effectiveness, productivity, and employee health and wellness.

That’s the point of the headline for this post. The office today is in so many ways defined by the furniture that fills it. This doesn’t really work anymore, and the office we increasingly require is one that supports business process, and that meets the requirements of being an effective node, one of many, for the ways in which we do business. There will be furniture in this office, it just won’t be defined by it.

A friend shared The Alternative Productivity Manifesto with me. We’ve discussed the workplace of the future and productivity issues previously, especially as these relate to the tension between controlling your time, how you use it, and the pressures exerted by a production focused mindset in so many businesses. The Alternative Productivity Manifesto is an excellent response to the present realities of the 40 hour work week, a productivity system visited upon us in the 1940’s and not revisited since. This despite the doubling in worker productivity over the last sixty years. We’re twice as productive, yet real wages are going down as compared to a historical average. We’re twice as productive, but there is ubiquitous pressure to put in more time, not less, and to sacrifice more to productivity. When did productivity become equated with quantity of time? Why does the worker not also benefit from their own efficiency and productivity? This disconnection is partly driven by our own ignorance of and inability to exert influence over the value systems within corporations, and partly by the enormous industry that has grown to help organizations squeeze every ounce of productivity out of their workforce. Productivity is big business, and big businesses invest big money with consultants that help them optimize and maximize the people that make up these companies. Not only that, but there is an enormous productivity industry focused on individuals promising enlightenment through productivity. This, of course, is achieved through the reading of endlessly published productivity books, blogs and through the purchase of innovative new productivity products. We struggle with ourselves.

In response The Growing Life has put forth The Alternative Productivity Manifesto to provide some perspective, and perhaps challenge the status quo. Here are just a few tenets from the manifesto that resonated with me:

• If your productivity increases, but your pay stays the same, then you’re effectively taking a pay cut (same goes if you begin working longer hours for the same pay).
• Productivity should be designed around our lives, not the other way around.
• The societally scripted routes to success via productivity are failing us.
• Hyperfocusing on productivity often gets in the way of the messy, circuitous, and discursive routes of personal development.
• Massive value creation often happens during times when no work is ostensibly being accomplished and productivity levels are ostensibly nil.

I don’t care what business or what industry you are talking about, innovation matters big time. I get this, and my investigations into how you cultivate a culture of innovation is an ongoing theme on schneiderism. I find it really interesting that companies like Toyota (as well as BMW, Porsche, Audi, Tata, Nissan, VW, Mazda…) continue to receive coverage with regards to the success of the innovative internal cultures they have supported, and the measurable benefits of those cultures in terms of market success, while essentially the entire American automotive industry struggles to find itself, let alone perpetuate a culture of innovation, let alone even THINK about market success. Many, including myself, have looked closely at how Toyota’s long history of creating and supporting innovation wherever it sets up shop. In many ways, innovation defines Toyota. Recently, Fortune took a similar look at Honda and revealed another deeply innovative company culture. It also revealed the demonstrable benefits of that culture.

For Honda, innovation is equivalent to excellence, and excellence clearly pays. The article states that since 2002 Honda’s revenues have grown close to 40%, approaching $94.8 billion. Most interesting to me is that Honda’s U.S. market share has risen from 6.7% in 2000 to 9.6% in 2007. That is partly because of American manufacturers LOSING market share, but is also because Honda continues to provide smart, affordable and innovative products that people WANT. Badly. Honda, along with Toyota and BMW, are the only automobile companies to make it into Fortune’s list of the top 20 of the World’s Most Admired Companies. Apple is number one, by the way.

So, how does Honda make this happen? They let people experiment and explore. The culture encourages this. Leadership wants it. More specifically, they encourage their engineers, especially those who drive R&D, to be entrepreneurial in their pursuits. The kicker is that at Honda not only are employees typically paid less than at the competition, but their opportunities to move up in the organization are pretty limited. That’s because Honda is very, very flat as an organization… and it is this flatness that empowers people to experiment and to be entrepreneurial. To innovate. Employees tend to be incredibly loyal to Honda, as an added bonus, and this also is directly related to the flatness of the organization. That, and they magnify their passion by being around others who are so invested in experimenting, improving, and creating. Others that are passionate about innovating. There is even a surprisingly cool section on Honda’s corporate website dedicated to their focus on innovation, and the important results of that focus. Masaaki Kato, president and CEO of Honda R&D, offers his perspective on Honda’s innovation success:

“We want to look down the road. We do not want to be influenced by the business.”

Masaaki Kato, president and CEO of Honda Research and Development

Despite whatever you believe to be our immediate economic reality, it is a good time to be young, smart, and focused. Companies struggle to navigate what is really a seller’s market for “human capital,” and attract the next wave of talent into their fold. The problem? There are several other companies fighting to recruit the same individual. A very successful public company in the consumer lawn care space that I know well admits actively raiding the talent pools of the medical technology companies in the area. Med tech to lawn care? Why not! The thing is, these talent pools are also targeted by financial services firms, retail giants, and others. They’re all competing openly for the same talent. This is a really good case study in supply and demand. You don’t have to look far to realize this is playing out everywhere. Often times, takeover bids between companies are as much about expanding talent as they are about increasing market share. Talent is perhaps the most important weapon in the battle for market success.

And this is nothing new. Look back ten years and business magazines were full of articles about the looming, and now pressing, “War for Talent.” McKinsey released a study back in 1998 that surveyed 6,000 executives in 77 companies which consistently identified that the single most important corporate resource over the next 20 years as talent, define in the study as “smart, sophisticated businesspeople who are technologically literate, globally astute, and operationally agile.” Sounds familiar. Not much has changed in ten years. What’s more, the study goes on to tell us that even as the demand for talent goes up, the supply of it will be going down. Supply and demand in action.

What’s a company to do? Get aggressive, really aggressive. Focus resources on talent acquisition that are commensurate with those focused on market expansion. The reality is that the former will ultimately beget the latter. As a best practice, companies need to be obsessed with ensuring that they are staffed by the best possible people, from the top on down. This is entirely a quality proposition, and it means always having your finger on the pulse of available talent, regardless of the real need for people. It means having an organized HR team that has an effective talent profile, and relentlessly tests for this profile. It means ensuring that your organization is a recruiting machine, that your people, your environment, and your package are not only competitive… they’re compelling. And relevant. And tailored to the people you seek to attract. Stop and think about your company for a moment, and think about your company in two years if a focused plan to attract talent was deployed. I suspect we are talking about two very different companies.

The McKinsey study also revealed ten years ago that only 60% of the corporate officers interviewed said that they were able to pursue most of their growth opportunities. These corporate leaders said that they had good ideas, and that they had the budgets to pursue these ideas, but they lacked the right people to execute. They reported that they did not have enough talented people to pursue their good ideas, regardless of budgetary abundance. They were “talent-constrained.” Ten years ago the implications of this were huge, and was a part of the feeding frenzy that became the .com debacle. Today these implications are staggering and I have yet to find a similar analysis regarding the relationship between growth and talent, but I would surmise that we are facing similar if not more critical deficiencies in growth as it relates to the talent needed to create that growth, and the lack thereof.

The perspective of this interesting article I found at BusinessWeek is that design value is increasingly driven by very effective and highly collaborative teams. Behind this is the ever-increasing realization that design has the potential to transform and grow business in ways not previously considered. Business leaders are getting this, and as the value of effective design teams become more widely recognized and understood, they are paying more focused attention to how they might effectively support these teams in new and different ways. This is in part due to the complexity of the situations engaged by design teams, that they defy an object approach and rely intensely on an effective collaborative process to achieve the desired end. It is also partly due to changing expectations for the value of design, that it has definitively moved beyond the domain of creating beautiful things and resoundingly into the realm of creating beautiful things that work really well and provide an experience that exceeds audience expectations and solves important problems, while increasing shareholder value. A choice quote from the article:

“The tastemaker idea is out of date. Perhaps there’s a place for taste-making within the consumer market, but the approach is out of date when it comes to more complex stuff, where it’s not just about creating beautiful things…Take sustainability. You can’t have an iconic object approach to the problems of sustainability. It’s a systematic thing.”

Jeremy Myerson - Director of Innovation, Royal College of Art

None of this is to say that process, which I have posted about before, should suddenly take precedence over individual inspiration. It is that the complexity of problems demands a more holistic approach to addressing potential solutions. This is about the power of an effective team, the power of successful facilitation, to take solutions far beyond what perhaps a lone genius may be able to provide. At the level of designing complex interactions and environments that must address a matrix of need, this is increasingly evident.

Set aside your disdain for sticky web monikers for a moment. I have been following the “The Workplace of The Future” for a while now, and have been writing about it since last July. The Innovation Tours that I organize for my team are focused on surveying where boundaries are being pushed and how businesses are responding to changes in the ways people want to work and the resulting impact on meaningful workplace design. No doubt, the demands on the physical workplace environment are changing right before our eyes, being driven by rapid changes in technology, notions of work, telepresence, and shifts in workforce demographics. Intersecting these drivers is the concept of Office 2.0, which encompasses the increasing number of web-based collaborative work applications, such as the smart suite of web applications from 37 Signals. They are a fast, efficient way for users and teams to organize, manage, disseminate and develop information using a simple, intuitive interface. The value of these applications are that they let you work remotely with people in ways that make us less dependent on desktop workstations and organized offices. At their heart, they functionally support collaborative idea and project development and the efficient sharing of documents and files, but the potential for how they will potentially change the ways in which we work go far beyond the functional benefits and they will ultimately influence what work actually constitutes.

Google is in this space with the web-based offerings Google Apps, and Microsoft is throwing its weight behind a rekindled web-based initiative. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller start-up applications also struggling for attention. Start using these tools now. Familiarize yourself. Encourage your teams to do the same. In the imminent future more and more of our work will take place on the web, leveraging web-based applications, and less and less of it will happen within the confines of an office. Smart companies are already there, and are redefining their models based on their own understanding of how Office 2.0 benefits them. In the short term, the biggest benefit for companies is the liberation from legacy notions of space and real estate, in the long term a benefit will be a workforce distributed globally, not locally. Physical offices will become less about the housing of workers during working hours and more about space that supports in-person meetings and collaboration. Think about how you were working ten years ago, think about how you accomplished your tasks and contrast that to how you work now. Now recall ten years before that, and if you’re old enough, ten years before that. I think it is safe to say that we would be hard pressed to not acknowledge the dramatic change that continues to occur, only with increased speed.

There is an annual conference, aptly named the Office 2.0 Conference, focused on exploring developments around Office 2.0 which I am planning on attending this year.

Robert Scoble recently talked about web-based work apps in an article for Fast Company.

We’re going through some very important exercises at work. The goal is a real and unflinching assessment of the state of our industry, architecture and design, and the role we play in that industry. The goal is to seriously challenge notions of status quo, and to question accepted practices. Hard questions are being asked. Tough answers are being put up on the white board. None of us disagree. But, what are we to do with this information, with these confirmations?

We are to change.

Actually, we have already been changing. We know that architecture has become a largely commoditized business, that the value provided by many architecture design firms has been slowly and consistently eroded in the United States over the last 20 to 30 years. Architects have allowed this to happen, and it has happened as issues of liability and responsibility have come to dominate project realities. But instead of embracing this and accepting the challenges, architecture has retreated behind drawings and plans and allowed others to step in and manage the process of building, of making. A long list of other trades were only too happy to step in and take on the historically traditional role of the architect, that of a master builder. Allowing this has effectively removed architecture from the value stream of building. Many, many firms now exist to produce drawings. They are production houses.

What we are finding is priority is the importance of reinserting ourselves into the making and effectively taking back the control of the value stream. We know that we must do what it takes to become the most relevant and influential force in building culture, this much is clear. What is unclear is exactly how we will get there, and I suspect we will continue to challenge and explode traditional notions of design and building. Embodied in this is the reinvention of our firm around core goals of design excellence, as we define it, and the reconnection of our design to implementation, to execution. Architecture is a strategic move, and that move will not be successful if architecture does not protect the value and integrity of the idea, the idea power, from inception through implementation.

While I have framed this discussion around my immediate industry, the reality is that it is powerfully meaningful for a diversity of creative professions who face very similar challenges.

Bear with the shameless self-promotion for a moment while I make a point.

Yes, that is me on the cover of a local commercial real estate publication. It came out last month and something about the interview with me inspired them to put me on the cover. Good times. The point of the interview was a conversation about how the modern workplace has changed, and will continue to change, and how my firm is beginning to experiment on itself to navigate this change and determine those workplace innovations that work, and those that do not. This is as much about organizational dynamics and ergonomics as it is about technology and communications, and it is part of a much larger exercise we are undertaking to develop a comprehensive program and master plan for our office and studio environments. By 2010 my firm will be in a new environment, and ideally one that we own, and this programmatical exercise will inform the type of space we ultimately need to occupy. It is also the inception of a longer term plan to treat our entire office environment as a laboratory, to experiment on ourselves, and be able to model different workplace innovations for our clients by using our own environments as proof of concept. Currently, we have an experimental area of our office, featured in the magazine, that is a studio dedicated to one comprehensive project, and we have used this studio to co-locate the central project team of 8-10 individuals. The space is flexible, surrounded by collaborative tools, and emphasizes the immediacy of communication. It is not private, it is not perfect, but it is a valuable experiment and the quality of work from this team has greatly benefited as a result.

The point that I want to make is that without having experienced and experimented with workplace innovations and organizational concepts it is impossible to appropriately represent them to our clients. For lack of a better expression, this would be “walking the talk.” A significant focus on this blog has been the concept of “the workplace of the future”, but what does that really mean? It means an environment that is about the work to be done and not about place. It means that substantial thought goes into the way an organization works, into its culture and business strategy, and how a work environment can manifest in support of these key aspects. It means that the conservative notion of office organization and layout is not only increasingly irrelevant, but actually counterproductive to the longer term success of a company. At its core, this is the physical embodiment within the environments that we create of superior occupant quality, of environments that are supportive of work and task while also enhancing health, well-being, and ultimately productivity. We know that an environment that we create today may be challenged anywhere from one to five years from now, that is how fast organizations and the markets within which they operate can change. The challenge to us is how we build in flexibility and anticipate this change so that we create value on behalf of our clients that allows their work environments to grow and change in advance of the demands of their markets and their people, without sacrificing the occupant quality of the environment. This is workplace innovation, and at its core involves a thorough understanding of organizational dynamics, occupant quality, product design, communications, materials technology, cultural analysis, and of an organization’s long term business strategy. These are the catalysts to the creation of successful work environments, and it mandates a rethinking of legacy notions of office and a focus on innovations that begin with an individual person’s needs and experiences as they relate to the physical environment.

“White space” is a term describing areas within flexible work environments that represent the diversity of work styles and the supporting environments sought by people who demand alternative ways to work. White space is the focus of an article in the New York Times, and follows an employee at an advertising firm as he spends his time being productive everywhere but at his desk. I think that is a terrific name for a flexible work environments, one that is more about our work and less about place. At its core, white space challenges the traditional notions and expectations of how we work, and the environments that we work in, and represents the growing movement in office design to provide employees with flexible space that can adapt to their tasks and their work styles.

Realize that this is not a generational thing. Most people, regardless of age, would prefer flexibility in their work environment and the freedom to tailor that environment to what is optimal for them. That might mean working at a stand-up desk, or while sitting in a common area. Also, the tasks that we need to perform, the work that we need to do, over the course of a day can change dramatically and are better supported by environments that can flex with these changing needs. What do I mean? Think about the productivity savings if meetings did not have to be in conference rooms and always scheduled for an hour. What if, in lieu of a fixed desk, an office was actually made up of a diverse series of work areas with each supporting specific types of work… from intense concentration and focus that might require quiet privacy, to a raucous and energetic brainstorm, to an open and ongoing collaborative environment that fosters easy communication and connectedness. The net result is a radically different approach to the way we work, and one that defies the 1950’s notion of an open plan work environment. Finally. Beyond this, though, it yields very different space demands for companies that ultimately result in smaller, more efficient office environments which changes the real estate equations and potentially saves tremendous investment in space.

A good example of an office environment that successfully blends white space is pictured above and is one of the environments in Google’s headquarters. Much thought and research went into their environment with the ultimate goal being real support of their people in their work. Google realized that tying people to desks is limiting, and in a fast moving and innovative company the people that make it up need to be fast moving and innovative. The environment of their offices is a manifestation of this need. People are rarely at their desks as they are busy engaging in work that is collaborative, impromptu, and occurring over a large campus. A desk would take them out of the flow.

While Google might be an extreme version of this, suffice it to say that more and more companies are seeing the value of white space in their environments. We know that the office as we know it has been under siege for over a decade. Our work has intensified to a point that the traditional office environment can no longer keep up. The value is in adaptive, flexible and customizable environment that empower and support people and allow them to tailor the environment to the immediate task at hand.

Sun Microsystems is six years into a program that takes full advantage of their technology and is modernizing the way their employees work and adapt to a rapidly changing business environment. This Open Work program has met with tremendous success, and anticipates the type of radical change we are beginning to see more progressive companies embrace. At Sun, more than half of their employees do not have an assigned office space in a fixed location. Employees are allowed to work wherever and whenever it suits them, and Sun arms them with the best in mobile technologies to support this.

Why is Sun doing this? Because they can. The cost of maintaining a legacy notion of “office” is incompatible with the concept of an agile, adaptive, and flexible workforce… especially one that is determined to do business where their clients are. Are they saving money? Most definitely, and in the range of $250 million. This is radical, innovative and apparently effective. Sun is now offering their expertise in Open Work as a consulting sideline business to other companies. For those of us in the workplace design and innovation space… we should be taking note and work to balance this with our own efforts to effect change in workplace environments.

In 1961 Playboy magazine brought these gentlemen together for a photo. From left are George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom. I found this photo to be incredibly cool as sitting together here are, really, six pivotal individuals in the development and perpetuation of modernist design. Men who both individually and collectively left a lasting design legacy. Heavyweights, if you will. These six also had significant influence on the concept and execution of the open plan office environment, and its relationship to modernism, working with companies like Knoll, Herman Miller and Steelcase. How little we have progressed in the intervening time and how much potential still remains.

DWR highlighted the image and commentary from Jens Risom about the photo shoot and the accompanying article in Playboy.

That headline is a riff on a sentence in a report written by Steve Orfield and cognitive psychologist Jay Brand for the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID). The report, titled “Better Sound Solutions” is a comprehensive analysis of the state of open plan office design, especially as it relates to the human factors around acoustics and sound attenuation. The line from the report is:

“We have long been facing a collision course between privacy and space utilization and the economics of space have won the battle so far.”

I don’t think that this statement should surprise anybody. Those of us who have any exposure to the realities of workplace design and the economics of space leasing and acquisition understand that companies are constantly trying to do more with less. The result is an open plan office that is at best dysfunctional and awkward, and at worst so disruptive as to damage overall workplace productivity and very negatively impact employee health and well-being. Much of this revolves around the concept of privacy within the workplace and as it is yet very difficult to present the economic argument for privacy, the situation continues to deteriorate. It is simply much too compelling and easy to make an economic argument based on space/lease costs, one that can be glaring on a cost analysis of a move/remodel.

The report goes on to describe a series of strategies for approaching this problem, and perhaps constructing an effective argument for the economics of designing effective environments, and those that support employee productivity, health and well-being. If you work in this space I suggest you download a PDF of the report and give it a review. I will be posting some of the key points from it over the next few days/weeks. You can download a PDF of the report from Haworth’s website.

I was interviewed last week by a reporter investigating the limitations in open plan workplace design. It was a good discussion, and he was pursuing what I felt to be a very appropriate theme… that most open plan offices are a result of economic decisions and fail to provide workers with a supportive workplace. Despite the fact that we all experience and acknowledge the challenges of being productive in most open plan environments, they persist. There is an abundance of research to challenge the open plan, but the reality is that workplace environments are first a product of the economics of the space lease or purchase, and second the result of the powerful drive to keep the investment in that space as low as possible and to expedite the process. The result is that decision makers continue to miss an enormously valuable opportunity.

People. The people that make up their organization. The people that do the work.

What company today wouldn’t rush to tell you that the people who work there are their most valuable asset? Nearly everyone says this, and it is reflective of the way the economy in the United States has dramatically changed over the last fifty years. And yet, these same people will also make workplace design decisions that have absolutely nothing to do with their acknowledged most valuable asset. But what if they did?

If they did they would find they have created environments for their people that are infinitely more supportive of activity and tasks, reflective of their culture, and supportive of employee health and welfare. They would have done this with minimal additional cost to the project and would yield tremendous gain with a work environment that supports their people. We would be remiss to not think that all of this together might have a positive impact on worker and workplace productivity.

I am incredibly optimistic. There is tremendous opportunity to think differently about the workplace, and bring research supported assertions to the decision making process that are supportive of human factors and the user experience. Through the effective use of research that already exists we have the opportunity to effectively challenge assumptions, to challenge the status quo, and create environments that inspire and stimulate people, environments that are more enjoyable and healthful. This is really very practical stuff and at its simplest is being smart about how we think about sound attenuation, lighting and daylighting, thermal comfort, and empowering the individual to self-create micro-environments that are ideal to their happiness, efficiency, and productivity.

It should be noted that much of this is not new. We have understood that open plan environments are problematic for some time, and research has existed to support dating back to the 1970’s. We have entered a time, though, where companies depend on every advantage possible to be successful in the marketplace and as a result are increasingly accepting and demanding that there is a better way to do things, and that doing it better is in fact supportive of their business strategy and a competitive advantage. Now, the challenge is in convincing the design firms to change their approach, to invest in the research and understanding to redirect design efforts in support of the individual and to provide organizations with environments that are a positive influence and that enhance the success of the companies for whom they are designed. This is thinking beyond the aesthetic of environments, beyond the beauty of edifice, and understanding that the design is on behalf of interaction and in support of the people who will ultimately inhabit the space.

Though you may mistake the image above to be that of a bedpan of the future, it is in fact a telepresence robot from the consumer robotics company, iRobot. It is called the “ConnectR,” and described by iRobot as a “virtual visiting robot.” Not long ago we investigated the homegrown telepresence robot IvanAnywhere, and the potential for that technology in the workplace. IvanAnywhere was created in a garage, so to speak, by inspired and creative tinkerers. iRobot now takes the concept of telepresence to an entirely new level, by mass producing the technology, and making it incredibly accessible. This is completely in alignment with their mission of creating the “robot home,” but I think that is an incredibly limiting way to review this technology as a device such as ConnectR has potential in a diversity of non-home applications. ConnectR allows for a virtual presence by enabling control of the robot via WiFi. It utilizes live video and audio with the built in camera that can zoom into a high resolution mode for reading text. Remarkable. You can also communicate and speak to your audience through ConnectR, and even display your mood by controlling an LED light.

All of that may sound unimpressive, but it is actually quite amazing. You will be able to purchase a telepresence robot (it launches in 2008) off the shelf of your local robot store and then be in two places at once. I am excited to see creative uses of this technology in the workplace, and guarantee that we will see a proliferation of telecommuters now leveraging telepresence. When ConnectR launches next year it is expected to sell for $499. There are innumerable times that I have dreamed of this technology.

via Engadget

There is a terrific article in Motortrend about Ron Dennis and his new “office” (pictured above). Ron leads McLaren… the designers and builders of incredibly high performance road and race cars. Most notably, McLaren has long been involved in Formula One racing, historically building and sponsoring (if not outright leading) some incredible winning campaigns. Think Mika Hakkinen in the late 90’s or so. McLaren is also behind the McLaren F1 BMW V12 powered roadgoing supercar of the mid-90’s that made my jaw hit the floor before I knew any better. It was hand-built by McLaren and sold to very wealthy people for around $1m.

But I digress, and though Ron Dennis is all kinds of cool, and although McLaren is an incredible design/engineering/R+D force in the world of high performance automobiles, this post is actually about workplace design. The article in Motortrend does an excellent job documenting, describing and exploring the new McLaren Technology Center designed by the starchitect Sir Norman Foster, the same knighted gentleman doing surreal projects all over the UAE and Dubai.

The new center is enormous, definitive in its design, and is a hub of quiet and focused activity for the 1000 staff that work there creating and developing high-performance vehicles. It is technically state of the art, and actually looks more like the HQ of NASA… or at least what NASA’s HQ should look like in movies. The environment created by Sir Norman Foster for McLaren is pure and unadulterated Ron Dennis. Ron is very much a top-down leader, and makes no apologies for this. In fact, he seems to revel in his level of control and influence over his organization. The design of this environment was not about focus groups and it was not about surveying employees. It was about listening to exactly what Ron wanted, analyzing that, and turning it into architecture. Here is a choice quote from the author of the article in Motortrend:

“Backwoods philosopher Henry David Thoreau warned we should ‘beware of any enterprise requiring new clothes.’ Dennis now has one of the biggest sets of new clothes of them all, a gleaming monument to the client’s uncompromising obsession and the architect’s near-perfect ability to deliver it. Architecturally speaking, it’s what you should expect when one of the world’s most technically bonkers architects is given a huge budget and a sympathetic brief. And it’s startling. But it’s clearly more than is strictly necessary to build Formula 1 cars.”

It goes on to state that the goal was to give the employees the absolute best environment within which to do their work. I get that, but looking at the photographs, and contrasting that with the facility VW created for the assembly of their Phaeton luxury car in Dresden, seen below, you cannot help but feel the concept of “the best environment” has very different manifestations.

I mean this in the most objective way possible, but where would you rather work? I have spent an inordinant amount of time wrenching on cars, and fast ones at that, and have a love for a clean, well lit and organized garage with everything in its place… but I also crave an environment that I would like to spend time in. This brings us right to the core of issues around involuntary, or non-preferred environments as illuminated by Orfield Labs in an earlier post about the Open Plan Work Group, and efforts to move our workplaces to align more closely with the other environments that we prefer, that we engage in voluntarily. The question I would love to ask the engineers and technicians that spend their days (and probably many evenings) in this operating theater environment is “Does it work for you?” Maybe it does, but I sense a chasm between the efforts to recreate the set of the movie Gattaca and provide the best possible environment for your people to toil in.

Do I sound harsh?

This commentary is in no way to imply that I do not think the new facility is cool looking. It is incredibly cool looking. Maybe too cool looking. The goal here, I believe, is not to just create environments that look “cool.” The goal here is to create environments that work, and this means work in relation to the human factors of the people that inhabit the environment. Given this, and when seen through the lens of architectural dynamics, I cannot help but think the McLaren Technology Center harbors enormous liabilities as it relates to human factors… especially when contrasted with the VW facility pictured above. We see this all of the time, where an organization decides to build a new headquarters and an enhanced presence. Inevitably, this comes down to how design is deployed to reflect the culture and brand of the organization… and it seems to stop there. How these environments actually engage the people that make up the organizations seems to not make it onto the agenda, or not until the very end when it is more of an afterthought. There is more time spent on the public face, on materials that are impactful, than on supporting culture and environments that enhance health. Foster’s firm, Foster+Partners, has a workplace consulting group… they must be engaged in these issues, and they may have brought them to the table in their initial design discussions with Ron Dennis. I surmise, though, that Ron’s style precluded anything being entertained that was not within the boundaries of his aesthetic vision, of which he is admittedly obsessive. The headline, “Dust Can Be Eliminated” is a direct quote from Ron Dennis.

One last quote from the article:

“Staff are allowed no personal mementoes on desks. Dennis tried a total ban on food and drink in the workplace because ‘food contaminates.’ There were slight mumbles from the normally docile staff. Water was offered as a concession.”

Check out the slideshows of VW’s Phaeton facility and McLaren’s new Technology Center, what do you think? Let me know in the comments.

I love it when categories intersect. Like design and astrophysics, or as in this instance… robots and the workplace of the future. It makes for such fertile subject matter.

We’ve all imagined being able to work without physically having to be at work. Different from telecommuting or working from a home office, I mean having a presence at work that is not actually you. I believe that I actually think about this every day. Perhaps you’ve imagined a virtual avatar, or maybe thought about having yourself cloned. Both may be viable options at some point in the future (and Herman Miller is probably already researching both), but a software programmer in Canada has beaten everyone to reality. Ivan Bowman works from home, which is 800 miles from his office. Previously, he telecommuted and would be the disembodied voice sitting on the conference table. In some ways, this worked well, but not having an ability to interact properly with his coworkers, to look them in the eye and see their facial expressions, was making it difficult to understand nuance, and sometimes intent.

Ivan now uses a “telepresence” robot, a creative combination of technologies, that allows him to be present at meetings, engage in discussion, and “move” around the office environment physically. All of this occurs while Ivan sits in his underwear on his couch hundreds of miles of away. The robot, built by co-worker Ian McHardy, is made from a wireless webcam, microphone, flat panel monitor, speakers mounted on an armature at about eye level and attached to a four-wheeled chassis. He controls it from home, and moves the robot about the office almost as if he were there in person. The robot is him. Ivan could be a brain in a jar somewhere, as far as his co-workers are concerned. He can cruise the halls, visit people in their offices, and look people in the eye. Sort of. To date, this solution appears to be working very, very well for all involved… and has brought much attention to Ivan. Actually, it has brought attention to the virtual Ivan, named “IvanAnywhere”.

This robot represents an important direction in the future of work, in the ways we work, and how we interact. Having a dynamic, mobile virtual presence in the workplace can create all sorts of opportunities for both employees and employers. Think about the difficulty in attracting talent in a particular office due to geographical location. That would be a non-issue. Think about the challenges, due to changed immigration laws and regulations, in company’s abilities to retain foreign residents as staff. They can now work from their home country. Think about the efficiencies this could yield in the physical space that makes up the office environments we work in. If even a small number of people work via telepresence robotics there is a savings in the needed square feet for an office space. That alone has benefits to company overhead, energy usage, waste, and pollution. Could this technology actually be categorized as sustainable? I would argue that it can.

Naturally, this all is a long way off, but is it important that an individual at one company took such an interesting and innovative approach to addressing issues that matter in the workplace. That the potential scale of this approach has so many additional benefits is only supporting of our work realities moving more in this direction over time.

via The Record.com

I had the opportunity to participate in a design charette yesterday put on by Steve Orfield and Wes Chapman at Orfield Laboratories. The charette is part of their Open Plan Working Group, which seeks to address issues of building performance, user experience, and innovation in workplace design. Steve Orfield has been working, through effective and substantive research, for over 30 years to support investigations into workplace quality, worker health, and challenging accepted norms of office design, organization, and function. Human factors is a huge driver of Orfield’s work, and the belief that the concept of “Architectural Dynamics (AD)” can change the world.

Organizations like Herman Miller and Lutron support his efforts, and sponsor the OPWG. Both were present at the charette yesterday. Specifically, this event was to explore opportunities to improve a building environment by the creative application of Architectural Dynamics. AD refers to environments that are controlled and influenced over time based on knowledge and inputs from occupant preferences and actual occupant behavior. AD seeks to effect change in these environments through such things as bio-mimicry, cuing, stimulation, calming, and other forms of occupant reinforcement. The goal is to change the workplace from a non-preferred and involuntary environment into a preferred and voluntary environment. Specific areas of influence are lighting/daylighting and view, thermal comfort, and sound addition and attenuation. Lofty goals, to be sure, but Steve and his group are far down the path of effecting real change.

The charette began with occupant research presented that challenges suppositions and assertions we all have about the places in which we work. A great example of this research was measurements of occupant valuations in regards to daylighting and view. Having an outside view is shown to greatly outweigh valuations of natural daylight. That was surprising.

The design charette involved looking closely at an existing structure with significant design liabilities, and how the individual design teams might mitigate the building limitations by creatively applying AD concepts. The results were very, very cool. While there was quite a bit of similarity between the teams, there was also great difference… especially with regards to how far each team was able or willing to push the concepts. Ultimately, there was tremendous alignment on enhancing audience experience, both from a macro (building-wide) and micro (individual) perspective. There was much discussion on how much control should be given to individuals, and how to manage this control to maintain energy efficiency and minimize negatively affecting other individuals in close proximity. I came away with a much enhanced understanding both of the impact of design decisions in the workplace, and how to design to more effectively enhance the occupant experience. We want the environments we create to enhance health and well being, and to align appropriately to an individuals work style preferences. Yes, this has dramatic affects on productivity, but first and foremost it supports more healthy work environments. Increased productivity is a nice result from this goal.

All of this seeks to challenge and change the reliance on the 1950’s metaphor of workplace design. This is a metaphor that needs to be cracked open as the places in which we spend upwards of 8 hours a day, five+ days a week are not designed to support us in our work or in our interactions. They are created out of economic decisions based on minimizing expense and gaining as much space efficiency as possible. They are created out of building practices that have stood largely unchallenged by research and health assessments. We have a responsibility as designers to hold ourselves to research based standards of performance in the environments that we create, to ensure that our designs are adding health and NOT detracting. To paraphrase Steve Orfield, we should look to the Hippocratic oath for inspiration and commit our work to “doing no harm.”

A colleague of mine has launched his blog at knowlesystem. His focus is honed and specific to the forces changing and shaping the world of architecture and design. Cool stuff. We have had an infinite number of incredible discussions and brainstorms on this topic, and this was suggested as a way to begin capturing this content, and involve others in the conversation. I highly suggest subscribing as there will be a proliferation of compelling content coming forthwith.

Congrats on the site, Stephen.

Another colleague introduced acmesiren a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to offer a more formal welcome and congrats to Nick as well. His blog is focused on finding and revealing what is new, cool and interesting in the world of experimental music. Also, very cool stuff. And a terrific resource.

Both blogs are featured in the schneiderism blogroll in the right column, which is naturally an incredibly high honor.

Think about this for a moment, why do most workplaces today look much like they did 10, 20, or even 30 years ago? How is it, with all of the changes in our society, in technology, and in the ways in which we work, the workplace still looks like a 1950’s cliche? It does not make any sense. The stasis that office and workplace design finds itself in cannot have a very positive effect on worker performance, happiness, or quality of life. Really, this is huge.

A big realization that I’ve had recently is beginning to understand the disconnection between the cycle of workplace renovation/investigation and how frequently work itself is changing. I know that facilities renovations are rare and infrequent largely because they are expensive, and most companies resist rethinking their workplace because of a combination of perceived expense, complexity, and fear. The sad result is that so many people are working today in office environments that reflect assumptions about the nature of work (and technology) that are even older, in many cases, than the actual employees.

My team recently toured a number of organizations recognized for having innovative and creative leadership and cultures, organizations that promote distributed work and enable employees to create their own optimal work patterns and methodologies. They provide their people with a diversity of ways in which they can work, with options. These organizations have had tremendous success in their respective industries, have hugely productive staffs, and generally exhibit a great culture and quality of life. Clearly, there are benefits to investigating the ways we organize around our work. And yet, most office remodels that occur are really just updates on the 1950’s model… some new carpet, new cubes, and maybe a kitchenette over there. The people that work in these “new” offices still have to deal with issues around thermal comfort, lighting, isolation, work interruption, and general discomfort. There is no psychology, no research backing the decisions made in most office rethinks. But what if there was?

Things are beginning to change, as there is some quality research out there that supports very smart changes to the ways we work, the strategies behind the way offices are designed. The good news is that we are seeing more and more examples of workplace layouts that are inherently flexible and open (in a good way) with mobile, modular furniture, terrific lighting, and reconfigurable working space. We are seeing more office design that takes advantage of new technologies and anticipates how technology in the workplace will be changing over time. We can remain optimistic, and the merits of reconfigurable, technology supported working space are becoming more and more accepted. This is partly because of the strength of the research that is out there, and also because almost none of us does precisely the same thing day after day, week after week, and most of us are sick of working in crappy environments.

This stop on the Innovation Tour was an absolute standout. We visited the recently re-investigated/reinvented/remodeled offices of Olson, an agency that has left the moniker of “advertising” behind and now bills itself as “the agency of the future.” They build “bonfire brands.” As much as I hate that phrase, it pretty much describes what they do… and they are definitely passionate about doing it. Perhaps the fire analogy is appropriate. Anyway, a big part of the Innovation Tour is digging deep into examples that support our Workplace of The Future initiative and to this end Olson seemed like it might be a really good visit. This initiative is about understanding how creative, collaborative cultures office. They push the boundaries, bend technology and organize to suit immediate needs. This flexible, ever-changing mentality is increasingly desirable in all kinds of companies, and our clients demand to know what are the newest, most exciting, technologically sophisticated ways to support innovation and collaboration in a company’s culture.

For specifically these reasons, Olson was a really good visit… primary being that as an incredibly creative enterprise they put a tremendous premium on an environment that fosters deeply a culture of collaboration, teamwork, intense creative focus and innovation. All of this, or at least 110% of it, is on behalf of their clients. Companies like Target, Nike, and Steelcase… they have an excellent and diverse client list. Olson opened for business in the early 1990’s, and it met with immediate success. The last few years have seen both incredible work and substantial growth, and now they are about 170 people strong. They are quick to credit their culture as the catalyst for this growth, and having spent considerable time and effort ensuring that as they grow, the culture remains intact. The culture of the agency is a labor of love. They go out of their way to preserve it. This is how they describe the environment and culture, in their words:

“It’s a swarming neo-village, featuring collaborative work tables, a town square, free range workers, and the means of virtual collaboration across the entire flat earth. All that and a dodgeball court in the alley.”

We spent nearly three hours meeting with them and touring their offices. How they describe it is pretty much what we experienced. There are no desks, or cubes per se. You are given a space, but it is not a deskspace in a traditional sense. It is a home base. A landing pad (or launching pad, depending on the time of day). Their employees are nomadic. They may start at their space in the morning, but they have a myriad of other ways to work… whether those be in quiet rooms to support concentration or in a number of collaborative work environments. Technology is distributed seamlessly throughout the space and everybody is on laptops, with a couple big workstation exceptions. You take your desk with you. Everything you REALLY need to get your work done on your computer, anyway. There are client work focused areas and capabilities focused areas, but these are temporary. The space is always changing, always evolving to suit the needs and requirements of the projects and the teams.

You have to wonder, though, in such a distributed and fluid environment… how do they actually foster a culture?

Tribes.

Olson created tribes in their agency, which are multi-disciplinary, diversely experienced, and cross-functional. Every new employee is assigned to a tribe, and the tribe shows them around, gets them introduced, and grounds them immediately in the Olson culture. Each tribe is responsible for organizing, promoting, and pulling off increasingly elaborate social events (there is an active competition for the best event…). These can happen spontaneously, or they can be an afterworkgrababeerandlistentoaband type of affair. It doesn’t really matter, the point is that everybody belongs, they are integrated, made to feel welcome and part of what could otherwise be a clubby, chummy and elitist atmosphere (as many agencies are, sadly).

What I came away with is the understanding that the way the space works for Olson is a product of their culture. They made decisions based on who they are and why they are successful, and organized EVERYTHING around that… instead of the other way around. Does it work… revenues say that it does. Growth would indicate it works. Their client’s seem enriched by the results. It works really freaking well.