September 2005

A Free Monthly Newsletter.

This Month's Headlines

Click on any Headline to go to the full story.

This is our personal note welcoming you to the September 2005 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This time around we're highlighting our new Business Community Centerssm venture, as well as pointing you to our newly active weblog.

The summer has been anything but slow for our Future of Work members - and the fall promises all kinds of new activity. Check here for announcements about seminars, presentations, and other more personal news about transitions and new members. We're especially pleased this month to announce that WDC has received a grant to plan the launch of a new industry association focused on promoting distributed work - something we're clearly deeply committed to.

We've been talking and writing about "third places" for the last several years. Now we've put our heads together, and with some help from our friends developed a new concept of what we've come to call "Business Community Centers." This article is our first public description of Business Community Centers and a declaration of our intention to turn our ideas into reality.

This brief article by our friend Rich Falcone grew out of a recent conversation between Rich and Charlie. Once Rich understood our concept of Business Community Centers he got very excited about extending the concept to the international sphere, where many people are working in a truly remote environment and many companies find it prohibitively expensive to provide adequate facilities and support services.

We've heard from several readers this month, with very provocative things to say about ideas and issues they read about here in the recent past. Please see what Rob Cenek and Tom Jackson have to say, and send in your comments for next month's issue. We're doing all we can to make the newsletter a true community forum.

This new section replaces and combines "The Future is Already Here" and "Research Notes," two of our more popular regular sections. Here we provide several quick summaries of recent notes we've already posted on the Future of Work weblog. In each case we also include a live link to the original post on the blog. And we encourage you to become a regular reader of the blog, where we are posting notes, case studies, and links to other important websites almost every day. It's that currency of real-world examples that you are clearly looking for, and here's where you'll find it.

We end each issue of Future of Work Agenda with a personal perspective - our chance to comment on issues and developments in the world of work that we find important and interesting. This is our "editorial" page, where we enjoy offering our opinions and predictions about what's happening (or should be happening) in the world of work.

From Jim and Charlie

As we seem to say every September, wha' happened to summer? That supposedly slow, lazy time has managed to slip by us once again.

But we're glad to be back in the fall season, when the days begin to cool off even as they get shorter (at least here in the northern hemisphere). More importantly, we're back in touch with all our Future of Work corporate members and getting ready to convene with them at our semi-annual members roundtable meeting, this time being hosted by Herman Miller at the company's corporate headquarters in Zeeland, Michigan.

It's going to be an exciting meeting, filled with future scenario planning, discussions about measuring workplace effectiveness and workforce needs, and welcoming our newest corporate members, Boeing and Forest City Covington. We're very pleased that our corporate program is growing in both breadth and depth.

But we also have several developments to report to our wider community (that's all of you reading this newsletter). First, we want to give you some quick feedback on the reader survey we asked you to complete back in July.

Your responses were candid, confirming, and creative (hey, that alliteration was genuinely accidental).

Most of you are pretty happy with the newsletter as is, so you won't see a lot of change. But we are tweaking the format just a bit. First, while most of you think the newsletter is just about the right length, there was a significant minority concerned that it was getting too long. So we're going to work twice as hard at scrunching it down, and will dial back some of our "regular" sections, like the Book Reviews, which many of you didn't think were all that valuable. We'll still do an occasional review when we find a book that we want you to know about, but we won't force it every month.

And in our biggest shift, we're going to combine what we've been calling "The Future is Already Here" (it's been your favorite section) with "Research Notes" and call the new focus on current and future real-world stories "Best of the Blog."

What? Where did that come from? Well, the biggest - and most satisfying - New Thing for us this summer has been the explosive growth of our Future of Work Weblog - we're now averaging almost 4000 page views a month on the blog, and adding new posts and links almost every day. The new Best of the Blog section here in the newsletter will provide you with a summary of the best posts from the preceding month, along with live links right to the blog where all the details will be there for you to read whenever you want to.

But please don't wait for the newsletter to tell you about the blog just once a month. Get online regularly and read our posts as they appear (some are profound, some are funny, some sad, and most - we hope - are useful reports on what's happening out there as the future of work unfolds before our very eyes).

Now for our other "news" of the month. The feature article, Business Community Centers^TM, is our "coming out" announcement about a new venture that is consuming much of our time and attention these days: the development (and impending implementation) of a new business concept that promises to transform our personal vision of the future of work into a very tangible reality.

Many of you have heard us talk about "Third Places" and Business Community Centers^TM as the "next wave of office innovation" for some time now. Well, we're finally taking some of our own advice. Just as we tell our clients and members, "Don't just talk about it, do it," so we're now focusing on actually creating the future of work. We hope you find the concept appealing, and we'd welcome your thoughts and suggestions. Just remember, you heard about Business Community Centers here first.

And as usual, we've also got several important Announcements for you, as well as some provocative Letters to the Editor from Rob Cenek and Tom Jackson.

And of course it wouldn't be a newsletter without a rant (we call it "In Our Humble Opinion" to make it sound more professional). This month we decry the tendency of so many organizations to make major commitments of money and staff time to organizational change efforts without having solid, objective data about current conditions, needs, or possible consequences. It's a little like scheduling brain surgery without having a CAT scan first. There's a lot of wishful and magical thinking out there, and we'd like to put an end to it.

So, on to the rest of the newsletter. Enjoy! And please let us know what you think.

Announcements

Work Design Collaborative Receives Grant to Launch New Industry Association

We are very pleased to announce that WDC has received a grant from the Gaines Family Foundation to create a new industry and professional association, tentatively called the "Distributed Work Industry Association" (DWIA).

Jerry Gaines, Trustee of the Gaines Family Foundation, says, "Our Foundation wants to encourage corporations and individuals to rethink where, when, and how work takes place. We believe companies can reap enormous cost savings by embracing more distributed ways of working. And working from home - or close to home in a satellite office - can have a highly positive impact on families and communities. Just think of the reductions in traffic congestion, air pollution, and use of high-priced gasoline - to say nothing of the increased productivity stemming from spending less time on the roads."

With guidance from the Gaines Family Foundation, WDC will spend the next several months interviewing industry experts, developing a draft charter for the new association, contacting prospective member firms, and recruiting an initial Board of Directors. The association plans to develop industry standard productivity measurements, influence state and federal regulations that help or hinder the growth of distributed work, and provide professional development programs for industry leaders.

Anyone interested in contributing to this effort should contact Charlie Grantham at charlie@thefutureofwork.net or Jim Ware at jim@thefutureofwork.net.

Gloria Young To Make Two Public Presentations This Fall

On October 8, Future of Work member Gloria Young, Chief Legislative Administrator, City and County of San Francisco, and Eric Richert, Sun Microsystems, will lead a session on "Alternative Service Delivery/Collaborative Workspaces" as part of the Mobility, Productivity & Flexibility session at the California League of Cities' Annual Conference in San Francisco.

And at Information Today's KMWorld & Intranets Conference in San Jose, California, on November 16, Gloria and Lynne Williamson, also of Sun Microsystems, will present the learnings from a joint telecommuting project that provided the ability to work in a dispersed virtual environment while accessing critical business documents through the Internet and the City of San Francisco's intranet to ensure continuity of the city's business during normal business and during extraordinary situations and circumstances such as disasters.

For more information about either of these presentations, or the underlying project that Gloria has been leading (with support from Sun), please contact Gloria directly (Gloria.L.Young@sfgov.org).

Yuji Shibuya Becomes a "Free Agent"

Yuji Shibuya, a small business/individual Future of Work member, left Nomura Research Institute America recently. He has established his own company, HYS Associates, based in Orinda, California. The business focus of HYS Associates is research, consulting, and executive education. Current customers are mainly Japanese multi-national financial/manufacturing companies inherited from Nomura, and Yuji is enjoying expanding his business/customers as a newborn free agent. He also stars teaching at Los Medanos College as a part-time mathematics faculty member applying his background of a PhD. in mathematics from Michigan State University and a Doctor of Science in mathematics from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He can be reached any time at: yshibuya@earthlink.net

Betsy Burroughs offers a Unique and "Moving" Workshop

Betsy Burroughs, president of FutureCatalyst, defines Third Places in unusual ways. Her favorite is taking Amtrak's one-day train trip from San Francisco to Yosemite and back. The May 5, 2005, issue of Worthwhile Magazine included a story about it.

Betsy also conducts a workshop using this trip as a base. And she was the first to do it, back in 2002. We've done a planning session with Betsy ourselves, and highly recommend it! Her next workshop will be on September 24. For more information, go to www.futurecatalyst.com/yosemite.

Knowledge Infusion Webinars

Future of Work member Jason Averbook announces two free webinars on human capital management being offered by his company, Knowledge Infusion.

Workforce Analytics: 10 Steps to Drive from Vision to Reality
Presented by:
Jason Averbook, Knowledge Infusion and
Brian Kelly, DoubleStar, Inc.
September 13, 2005
11:30 am Pacific
Register at: http://www.knowledge-infusion.form25.com/wfareality

Performance Management: How to Rapidly Mobilize and Execute for '06
Presented by: James Harvey, Knowledge Infusion
September 15, 2005
11:30 am Pacific
Register at: http://www.knowledge-infusion.form25.com/rapidpm

Feature Article: Business Community Centers

By Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

One of the most striking findings of the Work Design Collaborative research program in 2002-2004 was the discovery of a demand for a "third place" work location for the creative class of knowledge workers. We believe that as many as 20 million people will want to work one or more days a week in these kinds of facilities by 2007.

In fact, we wouldn't be surprised if that many people are already working one or more days a week in third places right now. Just think about your own work patterns; how often do you "log on" from a coffee shop, an airport hot spot, a hotel lobby, or some other location well removed from both your corporate office and your home office?

The concept of third places seems to be missing in most current discussions of workplace design. "Third place" is a term first used by author Ray Oldenburg way back in 1989 (The Great Good Place (Paragon House Publishers, 1989). By that he meant places that are not living areas and not "offices" per se. Third Places are typically smaller facilities (10,000 to 14,000 square feet) where people gather for a variety of reasons and to do a variety of different things. "A Starbucks on steroids" is a good image.

Third Places are clearly an adjunct to traditional "corporate" offices and home offices. Our research shows that workers of the future will most likely be spending approximately 40% of their time in corporate facilities, 30% in a home office, and the remainder in a "third place" (actually, that will most likely be a variety of third places over the course of a week or a month).

We believe these new workplaces will rise in usage and become very common over the next several years for a number of reasons:

• Organizations want to move away from a fixed-cost structure to variable cost models in order to reduce capital requirements and risk, while increasing their agility and responsiveness to changing environments;
• Remote and mobile workers do not have adequate alternative meeting places, office services, or technical support that are either affordable or convenient to their residential locations;
• Home-based independent workers also need and want more support and services because their home-based workspaces are limited and they generally have almost no useful meeting space. And like mobile workers they also have a need for office services and technical support.

Existing workspace offerings typically do not deliver everything that is needed at one location (that is, to meet all his or her needs a worker must go separately to a variety of different places like Kinko's, Staples, the UPS store, Starbucks, hotel conference rooms, and so on).

For us, third places are locations where people might spend part of a day, or perhaps two, or a maximum of three, days a week working. But even within these new kinds of social environments there is plenty of variety.

We believe there will be urban third places that serve local communities of working residents. There will also be suburban locations situated at the intersections of major transportation routes. And there will be rural locations that will function as "outposts" for major metropolitan areas.

We expect that most third places will take on the characteristics of the communities in which they exist. In the Wild West of the United States they might look like "work forts," while in Europe we have already seen "work castles." But "Third Places" can't just be anywhere or be designed and built based on models of traditional office facilities.

Business Community Centers

As we have explored the growing interest in these "Third Places" we have developed a third-place vision that we've come to call "Business Community Centers," or BCC's.

In our minds a BCC is a membership-based organization that provides its members with access to workstations, and other office amenities on a shared, as-needed basis. Think of a health club, or a golf club; as a member you don't generally own the facility or equipment outright, but rather share it with the other members. Each of you uses the equipment (or golf course) only occasionally. But this shared-cost/shared use approach gives you access to far more, higher-quality equipment than you could ever afford on your own.

Thus a BCC provides a part-time, off-site shared working environment primarily for residents of a local community and its surroundings who are either remote employees of larger organizations or are self-employed professionals or small business owners.

A BCC would be designed for use either by people who choose not to go to a distant corporate facility one or several days a week, or who as small business owners, sole practitioners, and/or "free agents" need part-time access to a workplace infrastructure and community on a cost-effective basis.

In contrast to what is offered by traditional office leasing and rental organizations, BCC members would pay for space and services only as they need and use them (there would be a base-level monthly fee required to maintain membership). This business model produces much lower costs for individual members, yet ensures high usage of the space, which in turn provides equity investors and lenders with profitable returns on their real estate and facilities investments.

A BCC provides its members with a variety of technologically advanced amenities such as conference rooms, workstations, IT technical support, wireless broadband Internet connectivity, back office administrative support, and informal café-type facilities - all in an ergonomically-designed environment and complemented by on-site professional development and business development activities and assistance. The real "secret sauce" of this model is that many of those providers of specialized business development and support services would themselves be members of the very same Business Community Center.

It is our vision that each local BCC would be locally owned and managed, with guidance and consultation (as well as some support services) being provided by a national management company formed to promote and guide the development of individual local BCCs. And those local BCCs would be networked with each other in a way that would provide all the members with access to each other, enabling them to operate as each others' suppliers and customers in a focused electronic marketplace.

And, in the spirit of full disclosure, we are currently in the process of forming that national management company precisely we can promote and support Business Community Centers around the country. And we are actively discussing the BCC concept with several different commercial property developers and local economic development groups at this very moment with the goal of launching one or more of them in the very near future.

We've decided it's time to stop talking about the future of work and begin building it. Stay tuned, it's going to be a wild - and exciting - ride.

Bonus Article: Business Community Centers: An International Perspective

by Rich Falcone

The need for corporate enterprise to develop and sustain profitable business in a multinational framework has become essential to survival and growth. Companies no longer have the luxury of a serial approach to geographic market development. In the past, it may have been prudent to establish a local market beachhead, expand regionally, and nationally.

The number of companies delivering products and service has grown dramatically. Growth is essential to survival, and international markets are key to growth. Information technology, transportation advances, trade agreements, language development, education, currency changes, etc have all contributed to opening markets and simplifying trade.

The next paradigm driving growth is not a product suite; it's a powerful international buying community. This phenomenon creates an immediate need for companies to establish satellite market development offices in many locations around the world. Companies have three kinds of satellite knowledge workers located on foreign soil: those who are local and native to the international community being served; ex-patriots relocated to the target international location; and the visiting or temporary knowledge workers traveling abroad.

Establishing real market presence overseas is not as easy as hiring a candidate, identifying space, and signing a lease. And certainly, most international markets can not be served simply by signing a reseller or distribution partner. International expansion carries risk in time, effort and cost. But, as with any investment, risk and reward go hand in hand.

Business presence in foreign continents is often best served in a distributed fashion. In Europe and Asia, for example, business law, history, and cultural influences drive local acceptance quite different from American State-to-State coverage. A representative in Benelux may not fit the market culture in Italy. An executive in Scandinavia may not be well accepted in France. Certainly, natives in China are challenged to have positive selling impact in Japan; just as Korean representation may be hard to succeed in China.

In short, if Europe and Asia are targets for market penetration, one should not assume that a single point of centralized control can be effective. Professional and personal cultural issues are the single most critical aspect of international market development; and these are the issues most often underestimated by companies seeking to expand abroad.

So how does a company establish effective representation and a productive environment for knowledge workers in an international venue? And how does that company create an atmosphere that fosters the kind of relationships and cultural intuition most necessary in foreign business climates?

The largest of companies quite simply lease all the space they require, and staff offices with local and ex-pat resources for every discipline. But this tactic is overwhelmingly costly, time consuming, and does not truly address the need for community relationship development.

The commitment to international markets must be made, but it can be made with a variable cost mechanism. Small to mid-sized companies utilize several types of "shared executive office space" with services ranging from secretarial and telephone coverage through meeting rooms and video conferencing. But these services are rudimentary tools for household business chores.

Business Community Centers [as described in the preceding article] can provide the professional environment a knowledge worker needs; the support services necessary for operation; sources for local legal, accounting, and health care, as well as a hub for involvement in every aspect of the local international community.

Further, these centers (farthest away from the core of the company's infrastructure) are a professional and personal oasis ....a business home that can be utilized in a variable cost structure. With Centers in every major market location, companies can scale their presence with the dynamics of their goals.

This model fosters cost control and shared economies of scale, and also facilitates a company's ability to shift time, energy and resources quickly toward the markets with highest potential. Most importantly, and this cannot be overstated, the international business community center is already a "community." It is a dynamic entity that draws the collective influence of "people" in an environment that fosters and shares contacts, counsel, service, acquaintance, and cultural intuition.

Corporate enterprise, local government and education, and commercial developers should take heed and give real priority to consideration of alliances that will allow them to provide mission critical services in a business community model that will attract nearly every kind of knowledge worker. The benefits are clear, and the trends are gaining momentum. "Going International" is a must; having a variable cost mechanism and the availability of local, mission-critical services is integral; and planting knowledge workers in a true foreign oasis will embrace and build partnerships that cannot be fulfilled otherwise.

Rich Falcone (rfalcone@axismarketsolutions.com) is a recognized leader in marketing who focuses on high-tech industries. He runs his international virtual business out of Scottsdale, Arizona.

Editor's Note: While this article focuses on the value of Business Community Centers in the international business sphere, we trust it is clear to our readers that the same logic applies to smaller cities and communities right here in the United States. We're seeing plenty of examples of vibrant domestic business communities that include both distributed workers employed by remote organizations and local entrepreneurs.

Reader Responses: Letters to the Editor

This letter was triggered by the article "Some Questions Begging for Answers" in the July issue.

Generational Differences

Your comments relating to the new workforce really point to how much the average worker's values have changed since the 1956 publication of William Whyte's Organization Man. Unlike the "organization man or woman," the typical worker today is no longer willing to be subservient to the corporation in exchange for security and a sense of belongingness. Employees "work to live," not "live to work." Notwithstanding the so-called yuppie "indiscretions" of the 80's, this trend has been on a pretty predictable and steady trajectory for years.

Discussing generational differences is prime cocktail party talk. There is both a certain amount of mystery, as well as a certain amount of sense making by being able to attribute, explain, and categorize patterns of behavior in the workplace. Dr. Morris Massey's work, and that of others, has been very helpful in better understanding behavior in the workplace, strong evidence is appearing that workers of all ages possess many of the same values, and desire much of the same from their employers.

For example, research by Jennifer Deal of the Center for Creative Leadership suggests that older and younger workers have similar values, including family, integrity, love and self-respect. Her research includes some other startling findings, including that younger workers today change jobs no more frequently than they did 20 years ago [emphasis added], and there are no age-related differences in the number of hours worked by employees.

Similarly, Sirota Consulting recently published a book entitled "The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Employees What They Want." One key theme in the book is that the vast majority of workers, regardless of generation, want to be proud of the work that they do and their organization. Further, they yearn to be treated fairly, and value harmonious relationships with co-workers.

Your opinion that all ages in the workforce have similar needs really resonates for me. I certainly believe that broad social mores change over time, but certain human drives remain constant through the ages, including the need to be loved, appreciated, and respected. While leadership is much more than just doing "doing what comes naturally," it seems as if we have a tendency to make the whole subject much more enigmatic and complicated than it needs to be.

Rob Cenek
Founder, Cenek Company, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
www.cenekcompany.com

Revolution at Work

The following note from Tom Jackson was stimulated by our recent reposting of "The ReFormation of Work" text (in three parts) on Corante's FutureTense blog. We also posted the entire ReFormation of Work article on our own Future of Work blog, at this link.

To fruitfully examine "the future of work" in the sense of its structure, relationships, and purposes, I believe it is necessary to first return to fundamentals. When you know what you want the tools can be found.

Work is an individual's primary connection to the planet. Jobs are the economic plug-ins to the economy. In fundamental or purposeful work one is usually pulled to expand capability, knowledge, and understanding while serving a rightful function and feeling valued. The closer the work itself is to natural needs and values, the more rewarding and useful it is inherently. (Having said that, in this note I use work interchangeably with jobs because vocabulary is limiting here.)

Today, more than half of the working population seriously dislike their jobs and would get out if they could. Where would they go? They don't know. An elite 5 percent controls the wage income of about 75 percent of American families and more than one in four of the working population is broke and piling on debt.

As employers consciously deskill and dumb down jobs and their employees to expand profit for owners only, they seriously damage the resourcefulness of the entire population. The practices of democratic capitalism, corporate power and the free market system are out of whack and need to be challenged. Individual independence needs to be strengthened.

Technology offers a separation from physical and temporal considerations, and, with people centered leadership, the possibility of shifting from employer centered work to employee centered work. To accomplish this however requires new structures of resources, governance, and, I believe, a shift in the purpose of work from the standard of living (what you own) to the quality of life (what you value). Designing the interactive value equations and relationships of collaborative work is the easy part. Grappling with an economic and governmental system that fights [against] worker independence is quite a different challenge.

Many have overlooked the problems blue collar workers have had throughout the entire history of labor unions. That's why they are in revolt. Shortly you may face the same dilemma: fight or eat.

Tom Jackson
Equinox Interactive, Brighton, Massachusetts
www.highperformers.com

Best of the Blog

As noted above, this new section will replace our "Future is Already Here" and "Research Notes," which in the past have been the place where we reported on real-world stories and research that points the way to the world of tomorrow. Our Future of Work weblog now reports those kinds of stories almost daily, so from now on we'll include a summary here in the newsletter of the best or most intriguing stories from the blog since the last newsletter.

Please get in the habit of reading the blog regularly - bookmark it, or if you have an RSS news reader, subscribe to it. And please contribute as well. We're more than happy to reprint your stories, or to consider featuring you as a Guest Writer. We believe we're creating a unique knowledge base of what's going on out there today, and what's going to be going on tomorrow. If you want to learn about the future of work, our blog is the place to go (along with this very newsletter, of course). Just click on each headline to visit the original blog post.

An Experiment in Distributed Business (July 26)

This is truly one of the most intriguing ventures we've run across in a long time. It's a living experiment in creating an "open-source" business completely on the web, with a group of complete volunteers providing their ideas, input, and guidance to the formation of a for-real, profit-oriented business.

Here's an excerpt from founder Robert May's description of the idea:

The Business Experiment is a site meant to explore three concepts: wisdom of crowds, open-source business, and the distributed nature of work. The goal is to have the registered users of this site collectively start and run a real business. Business plans will be written. Financing will be sought (if needed). Employees will be hired. Systems of accountability will be put into place.

The Hard Cold Realities of Excess Real Estate (July 26)

This is a touching story drawn from the San Jose Mercury News about an empty office building that has wonderful amenities but no occupants. It's symptomatic of the incredible overhang of commercial real estate these days. Companies just don't need as much space as they used to.

The ReFormation of Work (July 29)

This blog post is actually a reprint of an article we published several years ago, defining 23 "Theses" about what work in the future will be like, Our purpose has been to stimulate conversation and debate, and it's done exactly that.

Preparing Your Kids for the Future (August 2)

I was going to title this note "Preparing Your Kids for the Future of Work" when I realized that would be far too narrow a description for Shoshana Zuboff's latest insightful commentary in Fast Company.

This one is all about the skills kids need to succeed in the future, and the dangers of "overscheduling" them now - and depriving them of the opportunity to learn how to take care of themselves.

The Future is Already Here - in Hermiston Oregon? (August 7)

There's a terrific column in the August 7 issue of the New York Times about the future of wireless Internet access (at least one possible future). It's by Nicholas Kristof and it's called "When Pigs WiFi."

I think this quick quote captures the spirit of the article beautifully:

...Hermiston [Oregon] is actually a global leader of our Internet future. Today, this chunk of arid farm country appears to be the largest Wi-Fi hot spot in the world, with wireless high-speed Internet access available free for some 600 square miles.

WiFi Update (August 10)

My note the other day ("The Future is Already Here - in Hermiston Oregon?") prompted our friend and business colleague Miguel Guevara of Madeira Ventures to send me some fascinating information about the Columbia Rural Electrification Association, (Columbia REA) based in Dayton, Washington.

The REA, like a few other rural coops, has added Internet access to its offerings for members.

Another Driver of Change: Gas Prices (August 21)

Just as we predicted several months ago ("In Our Humble Opinion: What Will a World of $5 Gas Be Like?"), the current spike in gasoline prices is beginning to have a visible and measurable effect on telecommuting.

In Our Humble Opinion: Do It with Data

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

We're flat out frustrated. And we're wondering whether the gene pool that produces business leaders needs a healthy shot of Clorox and a new filter.

Whoever came up with the phrase "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" deserves one heckuva big prize. Lately we've been bumping into a whole bunch of architects, planners, office designers, and facilities managers who are doing just plain weird stuff (even when they mean well) without any factual or analytic basis for their decisions. For Pete's sake, even a farmer takes a look at the almanac and sticks his nose outside before deciding when to plant or harvest. That may not be much data, but at least it's something.

So here's the question: Why do so many so-called "professionals" insist on designing and building work environments without the benefit of any objective understanding about people's actual behavior (not what good ol' Earl tells you over lunch in the cafeteria)?

(In fairness, we do know some folks who actually pay attention to the way work spaces are actually being used (or not used), and who actually ask the "inhabitants" what kind of space they'd like, but if those folks were in abundance we wouldn't be spouting off like this.)

But back to venting. Why do people always seem to assume that new and different is better? Here's an analogy (we like to think this way): would you let a doctor (that would be us - self-styled professionals - by analogy) perform brain surgery on your precious head without taking X-rays and CAT scans?

Would you trust a brain surgeon who told you the guys who make the neat little saws that cut holes in your head have got a spiffy new gadget that's led them to recommend drilling even more skull holes? We sure as spit hope not. But then again, if you did, they might find a great big Zen void right inside your skull. Come on people, wake up!

Here's another tale. You know that old saw about what the word "assume" really means? If you can't figure it out, email us and we'll give you a slightly profane answer. Anyway, back at the ranch: come along for the ride (there we go, mixing metaphors again) and share an experience with us.

We're sitting in a meeting with a group of senior folks discussing how people work around their place (they have a Big Dream about using a new work environment to "change the culture" - a noble but frankly dangerous idea). Someone pipes up and offers the observation, stated as a fact, that folks are afraid to work anywhere but in their Dilbertville cubes because their managers wouldn't think they were working unless they could be seen sitting in their cages (as you might expect, "cages" is our term, not theirs. There's a great zoo analogy somewhere there, but we digress).

OK, so these people are convinced it's not worth including any informal work areas in their major facility re-design because of this perceived cultural bias against getting out of the cube.

Well, to make a long story short, we got up, left the meeting, and were escorted through the company cafeteria on the way to the front door. Guess what? We walked by not one but two teams of people sitting in the cafeteria (in mid-afternoon) with papers spread all over tables, laptops aplenty, talking to one another, drawing all over the work papers, and (ready for this?) clearly making decisions about product launches and advertising budgets. Sure looked like work to us!

Just to be very explicit: In Our Humble Opinion, it's worth examining the way people actually use space, and asking them what they want, before you go reconstructing it in some kind of blind faith that everything will just work out the way you want it to.

Once more with feeling, Buford, just in case you missed it: design from data, not speculation, assumptions, or plain old-fashioned ignorance. Get out there and ask questions, make systematic observations, try experiments (and collect more data). And if you must, read the academic literature. You know, someone out there has probably tried some of the wild ideas you're playing with. Yep, out there in some other organization. You just might benefit from their experience. But hold on Bruiser, we've got another rant coming up about the "not invented here syndrome."

So what kind of data do you need? At a bare minimum you need hard facts about how people work (where, when, with what tools, and with whom) and their preferences for working (including all those places outside your own corporate facilities where a whole lot of real work actually gets done).

Organizational effectiveness metrics are also nice. Happy workers are cool, but if that isn't being translated into business performance, you're dead. Without organizational effectiveness factors, it's like saying, "I don't know where we're going, but boy are we getting there quick."

Lastly, you need some financial performance metrics. Are you making money? Are you beating the stuffing out of your competition? Are you ahead of your customers? If you are, maybe a major change isn't needed. And if you aren't, maybe you've got some ammunition for launching that much-needed major change program.

Here's one last example - of how to do it right. Our friends at the General Services Administration (that's Kevin Kampschroer and the gang of Kevins - inside joke) have ten different data collection protocols they use to understand needs and opportunities before taking out their design sticks and doing anything. And - get this - they actually go back and do it again after the new work environment is up and running, to see if they (and the end users) got what they wanted.

Wow, holy cow, it can be done! Yes it costs time and money Ethel, but let's go back to our doctor story for a final point. The next time you're getting checked up, ask the doc to just guess your blood pressure and potential allergic reaction to drugs, and then give you some medication for whatever the hypochondriac symptom du jour is. Think you'll be just fine? Would the doctor do that? Of course not Bunkie!

You don't tinker with your body or your car, and hopefully not even your retirement investments, without having the benefit of a lot of detailed data describing the current situation and identifying your future needs. Then why do so many knuckleheads in management continue to make major investments in work environments without verifiable data? It's God's little mystery. Maybe the answer lies somewhere inside the DaVinci code.

And coming soon to a newsletter near you: what kinds of data we like to collect, what it means, and what difference it makes to decision-makers. But that's for another time.

Please direct your comments to comments@thefutureofwork.net. We'd love to publish your reactions and suggestions. And thanks for listening.

This issue of Future of Work Agenda was produced by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham of the Work Design Collaborative. We encourage your comments, suggestions, and submission of materials for possible future publication. Please contact us at:

Charlie Grantham, charlie@thefutureofwork.net, +1 928 771 9138
Jim Ware, jim@thefutureofwork.net, +1 510 558 1434

To subscribe to Future of Work Agenda, register on our web site. Please pass this newsletter on to other interested individuals and encourage them to subscribe as well. The newsletter is free, and will remain free as long as possible.

To end your subscription, send a message to newsletter@thefutureofwork.net and write Unsubscribe in the Subject line.

For republication rights, contact Jim Ware at jim@thefutureofwork.net.

 Future of Work | 966 Creston Road, Suite 150 | Berkeley, CA 94708

©Copyright 2005 The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.