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

At our house we don’t call ourselves “human beings”.  Instead we call ourselves “human becomings” because change and growth is so constant and ever present in our lives.

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.

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Tags: Change, Communication
Posted in People, Tools

 I am allergic to unproductive meetings.  I tend to break out in a rash and need to leave immediately to seek relief.  The author Scott Hunter is particularly poignant in describing the problem with meetings.

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.

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Tags: Communication, Imagination, Learning, Meetings
Posted in People, Workplace