Physical Space: The Forgotten Factor

I happened to stumble upon some notes that I had in an old notebook  about a project that I had some involvement with while working at Bell Canada. It was about the development of Bell’s “campus” that was being built in the suburbs of Toronto. The idea was to collapse all of the smaller offices in and around the city into one big campus for the purposes of increased collaboration amongst employees. The assumption was that if everyone was located in a few buildings on the campus the company would be able to move more quickly, be more proactive, nimble and all of those other good things that companies strive for.

Our group became involved in the real estate discussions because as professional collaborators we thought we could contribute to the discussion based on our experience in designing for human interaction (albeit on an “intervention” basis) and in designing physical space to support those human interactions. In conversing with the architects, we learned some interesting things.

1. Research suggests that workers in large office environments tend to interact with people who are only within 150 feet (50 metres) of their own desk.
2. Up to 87% of knowledge creation is gained informally, through such means as social learning (water cooler wisdom), learning in the moment, communities of practice and other techniques. Information transfer occurs formally, through lectures, workshops and seminars.

* Farrow Partnership Architects

The conclusion I drew from this was that simple co-location does not even come close to guaranteeing increased collaboration amongst employees.

The conceptual solution that I had envisioned was threefold:

1. Apply architectural design principles that are used to build dedicated collaborative spaces to an entire office complex. It’s no secret that traditional cubicle farms don’t exactly lend themselves to lots of interesting conversations among inmates. While the initial dot-com boom accelerated the notion of a more “social” office space as a way of being more creative and productive, there are some deeper principles at play that go beyond free chocolate bars and a pool table. Innovation Labs has a whitepaper on the topic of designing collaborative spaces.
2. Train a network of specialized workers/facilitators/information synthesizers to be responsible for certain physical areas of each office floor. They would help to “design” the work that the employees are doing, facilitate small and large meetings, perform graphic recording, information visualization and other specialized tasks designed to tease out the collective intelligence of the organization. These types of workers would be part of a network of practitioners within the organization who are more in tune with the concept of social business design, the concept of which is now being put into play by the folks at Dachis Corporation. As a network of practitioners they would be in communication with each other and act as a “biological overlay” for the otherwise mechanistic organization. It is a lot to ask for a corporation to switch its mindset to being “social” but if there were networks of people within the organization acting behind the scenes to make this happen, wholesale revolution might not be necessary.
3. Implement the necessary Enterprise 2.0 software to enable knowledge sharing, insight generation, weak signal monitoring and other techniques that will allow the network of practitioners to bring the work from the rest of the organization into their areas of responsibility. They are acting as the eyes and ears to the rest of the organization (and the world at large) for the group to which they’ve been assigned. A further benefit of training these types of workers is that it adds a level of governance and risk mitigation for executives who see social media as being a risky endeavour.

I did my best to sketch out what this might look like at Bell Canada but it’s quite generic and could be applied anywhere. The idea is that with tens of thousands of employees it’s impossible to be co-located. With good design principles, implementation of a soft infrastructure based on principles of collaboration and a hard infrastructure of the right social tools it’s possible to realize a significant shift in how legacy organizations transition to becoming social businesses.