When giving a talk recently to our regional conference for the American Institute of Architects, I shared how interesting our human reaction to change is to me…the irony that though it is and has been constantly part of our lives since the day we were born, people hate change. 

It was then that I saw a hand shoot up in the audience, and Charlie a colleague of mine said, “I really disagree with that.  I think people love change.  What they hate is the process they have to go through to make the change happen.” 

After reflection, I had to agree.  I liken Charlie’s idea to a family vacation to the beach.  We all love to go to the beach.  We like the change of scenery, how it looks, the way it smells and makes us feel different from our daily life.  Give me two weeks and I will want to stay there.  What we don’t like is the drive to the beach – the process of getting there.

As architects, designers and facility professionals, whenever we show up change is happening and when we take on a project, even more significant change to people’s lives is about to happen.  We have found that if change is collectively discussed and communicated to those most impacted by the change, EACH OPPORTUNITY for change to the physical environment is an opportunity for a positive change in the organization.  Here is a simple way to think about the process of change for a better experience.  

EACH change communication OPportunity needs to be…

Early- Rumor moves faster than truth.  Get your message out early before misunderstanding based on fear can pick up steam.

Accurate –  Accuracy is the foundation of trust and trust is essential to effective change communications

Consistent – Deliver the communication with consistent frequency, format, thematically building one on the next to create a story about the change over time.

Honest – Honest builds trust.  Based on a foundation of accuracy, honest is necessary to dispel fear

Often – Small chunks of information that address specific pains that the workforce is in with a frequency that keeps the information in front of the conversation.

Open – Be accessible and create a two way dialogue so that questions can be answered as they come up.  “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Work with this or your own method to help others understand the importance and need for change and EACH OPPORTUNITY will help move your organization to a higher level of satisfaction and effectiveness.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge” Albert Einstein.

Like Tim Brown from IDEO, we have found that it is more effective to initiate the act of design by taking design out of the hands of the designer and putting it in the hands of those most impacted by the design.  On a recent project we were faced with a challenge that changed my method of initiating, envisioning and conceptualizing a project in collaboration with those it impacted the most. 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAinLaT42xY

The challenge was put to us by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center when they asked us to create a new experience for the child patient, their family, and their caregivers in the design of a new satellite hospital. The essential ingredient in the process of putting design into the hands of those most impacted it was to find a way for children to be active participants in the design process.   

To do this, we created a process tool we call “Imagine.” In this case,  where we utilized narratives to lead children through a series of visioning sessions to uncover the qualities of their favorite places, the places that make them happy, feel good and most importantly not scared.  We then worked with the kids to do sketches or “ideagrams” to diagram or “draw what they saw” while listening to the narrative.  The process, taking no longer than 30 to 40 minutes opened a new way of working together that fully engaged the creativity of the children.  We then worked with the children, core project team and parents alike to apply those favorite qualities to the design of new space and the experiences they would have when receiving or giving care.  In his terrific book Inner Game of Work, Timothy Gallway puts it this way.

“It is more effective for a golfer to “see” the trajectory of his golf ball rising into an arc against the sky, then falling onto the green and rolling into the hole, than it is to say to himself, “I want to hole this shot.”  Likewise, if your goal is better teamwork with your colleagues, it contributes to mobility to envision what that might look and sound like.  When you use pictures, sounds, and words to project a desired future state, more parts of the brain are involved in the goal setting.  This increases the likelihood that more of your brain will be used in the process of fulfilling the goal.*”        

When we used this process with parents as well as kids we found it worked equally well if not better than what we were using to engage adults in collaborative design thinking.  We use this method today with a wide variety of groups, including business and community leaders complete with crayons and construction paper.  Though occasionally we find, especially serious executives, skeptical of the idea that you can do effective work with a crayon in your hand, this has tool has made the sometimes ethereal process of visioning immencely practical, leveraging the power of the imagination.

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Because of what typically happens…people mostly hate meetings. What happens: as soon as someone presents an idea, everyone else listens to see whether or not they agree with what was presented. Since it’s pretty unlikely that they do, someone invariably makes the idea presented wrong or unworkable and presents their contrary view.  

Once this is done, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and the meeting turns into a series of conflicting points of view, with everyone arguing why their solution is the right or best one.

We will often schedule meetings to solve a particular problem or make positive progress on an issue facing a team.  It may be necessary to brainstorm to find a solution. The challenge is how to collaborate productively in meetings to achieve results.  It helps to be aware of how we frame issues and leverage the power of creative imagination by learning to listen differently.

For example, when you start a meeting set a simple ground rule.  As part of the agenda have the group commit to a different way of interacting.  Suggest that in this meeting we will “suspend judgement” and listen in a new way to help build positive action and results.  Again Scott Hunter…

…The alternative presented here totally stops this from happening and typically results in an outcome that no one could have predicted. The alternative is to have everyone in the meeting put there attention on whoever presents the first idea and manage their internal conversation to be: “what would that make possible?     

When people do this, they just naturally start seeing possibilities that didn’t previously occur to them. So it’s not unusual for someone to then offer another idea that would build on the first, leading to someone else offering still another idea that builds on the first two, and so it goes.

If you are allergic to unproductive meetings leverage the power of the imagination by suspending critical thinking for the moment, replacing it with opportunity thinking.  Keep imagination alive and create results by listening for possibilities.

We often create predominantly open environments with organizations that want to increase collaboration in their culture and work process. Open, in this case, means personal assigned space is open and accessible to increase communication and tacit learning.  The need to balance employee preferences for enclosed individual spaces (offices) with work patterns that improve team performance always rises to the top of the “issues” list. I like what Frank Becker has to say about reconciling these competing needs (personal and organizational)on page 29 of his book Offices at Work. 

The reality is that small-scale, team oriented open plan clusters designed as an activity-based workplace strategy have a myriad of benefits.  More expensive, less flexible enclosed offices/spaces undermine interaction and render tacit learning nearly impossible.  Yet the vast majority of people, in just about any job and at any level prefer having their own fully enclosed office.  Finding the right balance between satisfying employee preferences and work patterns that benefit the team and organization (not just the individual) is truly a wicked problem; it has no easy answers.

The challenge is how to make the 180 degree change from closed to open, requiring change from one work method to the other, where the group has determined that working together is more effective for the success of the organization.

Frank Becker’s comments on the future of the closed office are especially helpful here, from page 29 of his book Offices at Work, with reference to a study from the University of Michigan.

“In the face of corporate America’s vaunted commitment to productivity, one might expect the lure of the enclosed office (or enclosed cubicle) would have faded long ago. I’ve seen little convincing evidence the people working in a private single occupant enclosed office are more productive than their counterparts working in an open office. Indeed, in one of the few recent studies with hard performance data (based on actual output rather than self reported measures of performance) University of Michigan researchers on software development teams in terms of both quantity and quality of code written, was almost twice as high for teams working in a shared “war room” compared to individual workstations. This is attributed to an enhanced level of free flowing communication and interaction between the programmers in team space.”

Sometimes metrics that matter are best captured on something other than a spreadsheet.

We are thinking about ways that we can make measures for organizational improvement associated with workplace change more effective by making them more visual.  The idea is to help people see their work in order to understand it better and make quicker more tangible changes in their behavior, similar to the way a dancer, a diver, a tennis player or a golfer might use visualization to improve performance. 

Tim Gallwey, the author of the Inner Game of Work put it this way.

  “…if your goal is better teamwork with your colleagues, it contributes to mobility to envision what that might look and sound like.  When you use pictures, sounds, and words to project a desired future state, more parts of the brain are involved in the goal setting.  This increases the likelihood that more of your brain will be used in the process of fulfilling the goal.” *

Instead of the standard pre and post occupancy evaluation (which is valuable to the change process anyway), what if we use a more visual measure.  What if we do time lapse video from a stationary birds-eye view, work activity in a current space prior to a renovation or physical workplace change.  We could then set the camera in the same spot and show work and social activity in a new space for comparison.  This would be especially valuable if the same group from the old space is moving back into the new space.  It would be great to visually see the change in movement, behavior and collaboration that results from the change.  We could then use this kind of practical ethnography as a way to visually portray what other survey content tells us, and make change more tangible in this fast paced, media driven world of work.   Sometimes metrics that matter are best captured on something other than a spreadsheet.

 *Inner Game of Work, W. Timothy Gallwey, Pg. 126-127

 httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErAfQBi8gzU