Placing a name on something brings more meaning to it.  A name describes an object of interest, providing additional insight into what the object is.  For example, think about the sky.  The sky is a big entity that we can all associate with.  But give the sky a “name”, and a different understanding is gained:  blue sky, stormy sky, angry sky, sun-set sky.  Each name fills out of different image in our mind of the nature of the sky.

Finding an all-inclusive name for work has been a broad search in recent years.  We in workplace strategy have been seeking the right name to describe the evolving world of work we are living in today?   I turned to Google’s search engine to collect some data on today’s more common work names.

“Knowledge Work”:  1,880,000 results

Peter Drucker created the name knowledge work in 1959 to describe work based on using information to develop knowledge to gain results.  This name differentiated work that was primarily focused on products and goods.  The PBS study “The First Measured Century” stated that knowledge work (tertiary occupations) began at 21% of the male workforce (sorry females!) in 1900 and ended at 58% in 1998.  In 1900 20% of women held professional work.  In 1998 52% of women held professional work.

“Telework”:  1,660,000 results

According to Merriam Webster’s, an associated name to telework, “telecommute”, was first used in 1974.  In using the connector “tele”, the name pays tribute to the most commonly owned technology of the 1970’s – the television.  The television was a device designed to transmit vision over huge distances.  Telework, then, is work that happens over distance.  In 2010, the president signed The Telework Enhancement Act, which was intended to enable government workers to engage in more work at a distance, thus reducing costs.

“Smart Work”:  1,620,000 results

Smart work often is described as work to make ideas happen.  Scott Belsky writes in his “WorkSmart” blog in Fast Company that, “The greatest achievements happen in the overlap of three things: Your genuine interests, skills, and opportunities. To find success, work within your overlap.”

“Mobile Work”:  1,350,000 results

Mobile work has one core principle:  work results are not dependent on a single place.  The impact of mobile work on the workplace has been most dramatic in the past ten years.  Some estimates are currently quoting that there are 1 billion mobile workers in the world today.  We consistently see utilization measurements averaging as low as 35% in workplaces today.

“Alternative Work”:  668,000 results

Alternative work is most often used to describe protocols for work under variable schedules.  The U.S. Office of Personnel Management has published an on-line Handbook of Alternative Work Schedules.

“Distributed Work”:  477,000 results

In the 2002 book titled “Distributed Work” published by The MIT Press, the authors expanded the definition of telework to include the attributes of smart work.  The combination of diverse locations and a concentration on idea generation within distributed work is uniquely dependent of the use of technology. 

“Flexible Work”:  4,340,000 results

Of all the names for work, the name that leads them all is Flexible Work.  Such phrases as “work & life balance”, autonomy of choice, engagement & worker satisfaction, and overtime regulation are within the meaning of the name flexible work.  Of all the names given to the nature or work today, the name Flexible Work stirs that most change reaction.  A 2011 Fortune article states once again the challenges from the perceived losses of face time and visible long hours in the office resulting from Flexible Work. 

Workplace strategy has not condensed the nomenclature around a common name for work.  As companies of all types and sizes continue to develop their own uniquely branded names for the work that is actually occurring within their footprints, more names will surely be created.  There may be as many names for work as there are companies in the world. 

My opinion is that “Flexible work” is the best of the bunch, as it is the most encompassing of the basic migration of behaviors of work process.  And flexible OR agile space design is a good general term for workplaces that meet the evolving work processes and cultural needs of all companies at work.

I do not like “alternative work”, “tele-work”, “smart work”.  Each of these implies that there is an opposite version of work, which creates conflict.  It is a continuing debate with no clear end in sight.

Tags: Change, Communication, Learning, Lesson
Posted in Agility, Architecture, Futuristic, Innovative, Mobility, Trends, Workplace

The idea of creating successful partnerships can be illusive, but it’s power to translate basic research into practical applications is fundamental.  It’s often hard to know the difference between a collaborator and competitor, so there is a natural hesitation to share information.  However, in today’s world of increasing complexity the necessity for partnerships is greater than it’s ever been.  There exists an overwhelming body of evidence that complex problems are rarely solved by one person’s “eureka moment.”  Steven Johnston illustrates this point eloquently in his book; The Invention of Air.  Johnston focuses on the 18^th Century discovery by Joseph Priestly that the air we breathe is a combination of gases, primarily nitrogen and oxygen.  Many scholarly sources will credit Priestly with the discovery of oxygen, but the story is much more complex.  It’s true that Priestly was able to identify that there was an air purer than the air we breathe through a series of physical experiments in his laboratory in Leeds, but he inaccurately identified this air as dephlogisticated air and had a fundamental miss-understanding of the process he had discovered.  Luckily Priestly was well known as a frequenter of the English coffee house where he shared his ideas with a group called the Honest Whigs.  Steven Johnson contends that the English coffee house, and the culture created around it, fuelled what we come to call the Age of Enlightenment.  Priestly was a strong believer the concept of sharing knowledge to advance science, so when he explained his discovery to Antoine Lavoisier at a dinner conversation in 1771 he passed knowledge to a person with a much different skill-set.  This transfer of knowledge would eventually lead Lavoisier to more accurately name this substance Oxygen and discover the process we now know as oxidation.  Johnston writes:                                                                    

“Discovering that there was an air purer than pure air required qualitative analytical skills – an improvisational style – that Priestly possessed in abundance.  But defining the chemical composition of that air took a different toolkit, both mental and technological.”

The irony of this story according to Johnson is that by 1779 Ben Franklin, a fellow Honest Whig member, would negotiate to purchase 800 tons of French gunpowder for the struggling Continental Army.  This gunpowder was made with saltpeter directly from Lavoisier’s Laboratory which capitalized on the process of oxidation.  Johnson quotes Joe Jackson on the Battle of Yorktown:  “British solders complained that they could not get close enough to shoot colonials before they themselves were blasted from the garters.”  As architects we can  illustrate the importance of wide ranging functional space that supports collaboration, but the cultural mindset to share ideas must be encouraged at an institutional level and through actual stories of discovery rather than the eureka myth.

Tags: Behavior, Collaboration, Communication, Experience, Imagination, Inspiration, Labs, Learning, Research
Posted in Cool, Innovative, Lab Planning, People, Science, Technology/Innovation

We live in an amazingly connected world; a world where our ability to share ideas which will someday create great things far exceeds the wildest dreams of even the most creative minds of the previous generation.  A world that has been flattened by the internet has been connected by international travel and has been politically stable enough to build international relationships.  However, given the crisis mentality that seems to have gripped us and the profound and continuous change that this connectivity breeds you might be wondering if it is a good thing. 

You fear the internet might send your job to some far-away place.  You worry about the cost of filling your gas tank more than buying an international airline ticket.  You hear about the threats of terror somewhat regularly.  This constant connectivity can cause us to lose perspective and take a negative outlook about the state of the world in which we live.  Every now and then we have an experience that sharpens our perspective and reminds us of the great opportunities that exist in modern society. 

I recently read a fascinating book by Mandit Kumar:  Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality.  This is a book about the dawn of theoretical physics and the beginning of the atomic age.  It includes a twelve page timeline that starts in 1858 with the birth of Max Planck and ends in 2007 with the current puzzle of how pairs of non-local photons can behave predictably over long distances.  You might wonder what it could possibly have to do with politics, international collaboration and the building of relationships. 

The main plot of the story was not the part of the book that sharpened my perspective.  The fascinating sub-plot of the book that should be of interest to anybody trying to solve a problem that requires teamwork, was the story of the relationships between the dozen characters that led the focus of scientific discovery.  Nine pages of this twelve page saga occurred between 1900 and 1945.  If you take the time to plough through the subject matter you will realize that the incredible advances chronicled in this relatively short period of time would have not been possible to unlock by one person.  Even a person with the legendary intellect of Albert Einstein cannot succeed without the constant challenge and prodding of ideas from his peers.  As you begin to understand how long-standing relationships, respect and social engagement between this diverse group of scientists, you see the engine that propelled discovery and understand the necessity and the value of teamwork. 

Compare the collaboration tools, access to travel and the social and political state of the world between 1900 and 1945 to what we have today.  If you think we live in difficult times consider the following:

·         Forget the internet they wrote letters and had them delivered days or weeks later by steam ship

·         Commercial air travel was not available so if they met for a conference it took a real commitment of time.

·         These events took place during two world wars and the protagonists of the story were on different political and social sides of the conflicts.

With all the advantages we have today I suggest the next time you feel inclined to find an excuse about why you can’t collaborate with a colleague to solve a problem you might want to get a little perspective, role up your sleeves and get busy.  

In a world focused on action and results here are three questions that you might want to consider every day:

1.    If I hit a dead end when trying to solve a problem, what do I do?  Have you built a support network of trusted collaborators that can help you break-through?

2.    What keeps me from opening up to the insights of others?

3.    What risk did I take yesterday?  What risk will I take tomorrow?

Tags: Behavior, Collaboration, Generations, Inspiration, Strategy
Posted in Agility, Design, Futuristic, Generations, Innovative, People, Technology, Technology/Innovation, Trends

I recently had the pleasure of attending a two day Lessons Learned Workshop at NIH related to Biomedical Research Facilities that have been built in the last several years. In today’s complex world we architects are trying, harder than ever it seems, to meet the needs of our client with each project, but today, our clients seem to have many voices. The beauty of this conference was that all of the competing voices were in one place and had a chance to express their perspective in an educational setting. In the project world it can be an extremely delicate balancing act to place the proper emphasis on the right voice.

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Tags: Advice, Behavior, Biocontainment, Change, Collaboration, Labs, Leadership, Learning, NIH, pain, Programming, Research, Safety, Strategy
Posted in Agility, Architecture, Change Management, Design, Generations, Innovative, Lab Planning, People, Science

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6GEZtD3uFs

Tags: Books, Lesson, Video
Posted in Innovative, People, Tools, Workplace

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. 

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Tags: Books
Posted in Architecture, Change Management, Innovative, People, Tools, Trends, Workplace

Prior to the NCAA basketball tournament, I happened to catch the show Sport Science.  They were doing an episode titled “Does where you play effect how you play”  The show explored three factors that could have an impact on the results of a basketball game: sound, sight and space.  It struck me how well this tied to our firms belief in the impact architecture can have on the behaviors of people, just from a basketball perspective.  We generally look at the impact we have on people through the lense of workplace, higher education, science and retail design — why not basketball?  I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

Tags: Video
Posted in Architecture, Cool, Design, Innovative, People