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In This
Issue...
 Is Anyone Out There?
Increasing A Good Idea's
Profitability
Internal Quality
Audits
Every Summit Beckons A
Conqueror
Finding
Your Way Home In The Workplace
Features...
Peter Block Column
Views for a
Change
Pageturners
Heard on the
Street
Sites
Unseen
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 Finding Your Way Home In The
Workplace
Multi-disciplinary Group Meets to Create Spaces That
Enhance Community
Think back to the
last time you sat on your living room couch plugging away
at a business problem. It was late and you were tired, but
happy to be in the comfort of your home. Wouldn’t it
be nice if you could take that comfort to work with
you?
According to a multi-disciplinary group
meeting over the past two years, you should.
Most organizations focus on space from only one aspect, be
it design, utilization, cost effectiveness, etc. and fail
to create innovative environments where even smell and
taste can enhance the vital connection between workers and
organizational profits.
The group will soon have a listserv and
discussion session on AQP’s Member’s Only
section (www.aqp.org) and the December issue of The Journal
for Quality and Participation will feature this
topic.
Be it ever so humble.... there is no
place like home. Not only is it where the heart is, it is
where many of us experience the joys and sorrows of life.
And with all the talk today of making work have meaning
beyond the dull routine of the Industrial era, how many of
our workspaces embrace the value of home and hearth? Not
many. The sad truth is that while organizations rush to
connect with employees on a deeper level, these efforts are
inhibited by the space that they take place in. And in the
24/7 world, space has become an issue for retention and
recruitment. The “with it” companies now create
spaces that encourage workers to come together in many
unexpected places. Picture a Thai restaurant or café
in the center of your work space—and if that is too
radical, a simple coffee shop with complimentary beverages
and bagels.
Since 1997 a group of architects, interior
designers, social psychologists, futurists, and human
resource and organizational development professionals have
been meeting to discuss the impact of space on building and
sustaining community. Most recently the group met in
Cincinnati, Ohio to share the latest thinking and discover
common ground around the design of space and the use of
environment to enhance highly interactive
communities.
What have they learned? Architects,
facility planners, manufacturers of office equipment,
meeting planners and end users each bring unique
perspectives to the issue. For architects the mindset is
around circulation, sightlines and matching space to
function. For facility planners, the major issues reside in
cost-effective use of space and the maintenance costs and
flexibility for the space as requirements change. Meeting
planners focus on the choreography of using the space, for
example, the relationship of the space to food service,
size and capacity of the room and access to transportation.
While end-users, those who will actually use the space, are
the least conscious of the effect of space on
performance.
The Cincinnati meeting was aimed at sharing
and consolidating these views and to finding methods to
make everyone more aware of the impact of space on the
individual and performance.
Jeff Austin, corporate strategist, First
Union, Charlotte, N.C., began looking at space as a result
of the increase in needs for telecommuters. “Today,
there is a fundamental shift in how companies work. A
tension arises between centralized versus decentralized and
flexible vs. inflexible,” says Austin. “We
honor and revere empirical knowledge, however the advent of
a more human, well-rounded knowledge is upon us. We are
discovering that empirical knowledge does not render truth,
only more questions.” So in the age of the knowledge
worker and collaboration among various disciplines, how
does space help or hinder these efforts?
“Many people,” says Betty Hase,
leading environments leader, Herman Miller, Las Cruces,
N.M., “think that space for collaboration means no
privacy. This is not true.” Hase discovered that her
clients would simply ask for a space for their teams
without considering the type of work the team was doing.
She learned many people mistake coordination or cooperation
for collaboration. Through extensive research Hase defines
collaboration as “when two or more individuals
interdependently work together towards an identifiable goal
with the exchange enriching the work of all members and
creating, by the end of the process, a whole which is
greater than the sum of the parts. The result is a new
creation that could not be achieved individually.”
Based on this definition of collaboration, Hase and Herman
Miller have identified a series of characteristics for
spaces that enhance teamwork. Such spaces are visually
stimulating, allow for visual display, provide for safe
neutral territories, enhance visual contact, allow for
control of access and ensure ready access to technology,
among others.
The ideal embodiment of these attributes might
very well be a hotel lobby. Fritz Steele, Ph.D.,
organizational and environmental consultant, Portsmouth
Consulting Group, Brookline, Mass., feels, “Hotel
lobbies are great. Many people doing many different things.
In fact, with all these different things happening, you
might think they would fight each other, but they
don’t. There is a party mentality and that helps
create a learning space. In short, play is where it is
at.”
Space Creates Behavior
As in play, our mind works on both
a conscious and unconscious level. Environmental
Psychologist Judith Heerwagen, Seattle, Wash., believes
that we do a better job designing spaces for the conscious
mind. The unconscious mind is associated with insight and
pattern identification. For example you cannot solve a
Rubik’s cube with only the conscious mind. Like a
hotel lobby, the unconscious mind allows you to pick things
up that you are not really aware of. The natural process of
creativity moves fluidly back and forth between the
conscious and unconscious mind. “Nature is going to
be more and more important,” according to Heerwagen.
“We did not evolve in a sea of cubicles. If we
understand what nature is about we will be much better at
designing spaces. What, in fact, is richer in design than
nature?”
What is missing, it appears, is a lack of
understanding of how space has the extreme power to change
relationships and behavior. In essence, space tells us how
to behave. Imagine meeting your best friend in a five-star
restaurant. You noticed the friend across the room and
quietly ask the maitre’d to inform your friend that
you are here. Now picture meeting the same friend at your
local pub. You stand up, wave and proclaim loudly that they
should join you for a beer. This simple illustration
carries powerful meaning. We do not think about space,
except in the most general of terms. Sue Mosby, principal,
CDFM2, Kansas City, Mo., points out, “How many
restrooms have you been in where the handicap stall is at
the far end of the restroom? Making the very people with
the most difficulty travel the farthest.”
It’s About Freedom For You and
Me
But there are examples of exciting,
conducive spaces. Some of the best examples are
children’s museums, which emphasize hands-on,
interactive learning which appeal to all senses; visual,
smell, taste, etc., according to Ed Krent, principal,
Krent/Paffett Associates, Boston, Mass. Some companies have
adapted these techniques for their own usage. For example,
the 30,000 square foot Oldsmobile Vision Center in
Rochester, Mich., is one example designed by Krent’s
firm. This next generation training center allows
participants to reshape corporate culture and
methodologies, learning new ways to communicate both inside
and outside the Oldsmobile division. The center includes
break-out salons for small teams and spaces for content
delivery, first person experience, and teambuilding places
that involve people from all over the organization in a
common effort.
In a very real sense, space is about freedom.
And according to Peter Block, partner, Designed Learning,
Westfield, N.J., “Institutions do not want to talk
about freedom. Our spaces should carry the message that
freedom is what I am put on this earth to experience. Every
room I am in should be an example of how I want the larger
world to be.”
And after all, that is home—a place that
is deeply connected to the individual. When we invite
someone into our home, we invite them into our lives. How
would the conversation change if the next time a coworker
invites you into their office for a chat, that you both
felt you were sitting in a family room? The real challenge
then is to change our conception of space as static and a
cost item. Perhaps one day soon, most workers will have two
homes—-both where the heart is.
July 2000 News for a
Change Homepage
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