“…There I found an excellent Steelcase Workplace Report titled: “HotHouse Environments: Fostering Breakthrough Innovation,” which presents the findings of two years of surveying more than 1,500 corporate executives, facilities managers, and design professionals from various industries on these questions: How can the workplace affect the way people work… and how satisfied they are? What keeps them from sharing information and being collaborative?” Steelcase also has an e-zine called 360, where I found this article based on the HotHouse research: “Unleashing Hidden Creativity: Does Place Matter?“. Both are worth reading…”
Cool. By way of Corante: IdeaFlow, who have an interesting set of write ups on a recent innovation convergence conference.
I think workspace design is a critical issue in the education process. Organisational learning and people development needs to recognise that there are a series of factors that promote (or usually) inhibit effective learning. And by effective learning, I guess I mean fostering a sense of creativity and collaboration. When I first walked into an office space in the US, I was gob-smacked at the cube farm that confronted me. Towering (6 foot) 3 1/2 sided blocks with desks in. I’d read and seen this, but I didn’t really think this was a standard reality. Ugh. Total quiet and non-collaboration – in fact people would email each-other across the office. There was little real sense of community and collaboration, and certainly a feeling of shared learning didn’t even enter into it. Contrast this to the UK (/european?) model of open workspaces, low, if any, dividers between desks. People interrupt each-other, share ideas and just, well, they actually just talk to each-other!
Interestingly, the flip side of this is that potentially, no productive work gets done – especially when dealing with work that benefits from serious flow state – like programming. I think Joel on Software and Peopleware both talk eloquently about this, although they advocate private offices and natural light, not darkened cubes.
And of course, tearing down cubes won’t revolutionise working practices and collaboration on its own (but it’s a start!), there are wider cultural considerations. I wonder if any companies reward/penalise their people (starting from the top), on demonstrable knowledge sharing?
My current client has potentially a neat solution to the callcentre education issue. They have these distinct, quite natty areas called learning zones, with nice big plasma screens, lots of toys etc. It must be quite a nice grind from the daily pressures of callcentre work to spend half an hour playing within this environment – immediately a delightful and pleasurable frame of mind has been established around the activity of learning.