Author: naomiorgdesign

Disruptive Technologies: advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute came out in May 2013. It's long, but fascinating. There's an executive summary if you can't find time for 170 or so pages.

Researchers considered over a hundred different technologies and came to the conclusion that, of these, twelve were likely to radically – perhaps completely – change organizational and working life. (The report has a lot of data to back up the points they make and a good reference list). However, rather than be dogmatic about their assertions they add the sensible reminder that 'By definition such an exercise is incomplete – technology and innovations always surprise'. They say that the technologies they reflect on 'are illustrative of emerging applications over the next decade or two and provide a good indication of the size and shape of the impact that these applications could have.'

The report should be read by every organizational design and development practitioner, not to mention business leaders and managers, for three reasons that I discuss below:

To develop or deepen insight into what is on the technology horizon

To assess the likely impact of the technologies on their organization.

To take planned action to develop their organizational capability to use the technologies effectively before it's too late

Keeping up with technology trends and planning/acting in relation to them should, in fact, be a continuous activity for OD & D practitioners but in my experience they do far too little of it. (See my blog piece on Business Savvy).

• To develop or deepen insight into what is on the technology horizon
• To assess the likely impact of the technologies on their organization.
• To take planned action to develop their organizational capability to use the technologies effectively before it's too late

Keeping up with technology trends and planning/acting in relation to them should, in fact, be a continuous activity for OD & D practitioners but in my experience they do far too little of it. (See my piece on Business Savvy)

What is on the technology horizon?
The twelve technologies that the Institute researchers think will have the most impact are:

Mobile Internet: Increasingly inexpensive and capable mobile computing devices and internet connectivity.
Automation of knowledge work: Intelligent software systems that perform knowledge work tasks involving unstructured commands and subtle judgments.
Internet of Things: Networks of low-cost sensors and actuators for data collection, monitoring, decision making and process optimization.
Cloud Technology: Use of computer hardware and software resources delivered over a network or the Internet, often as a service.
Advanced Robotics: Increasingly capable robots with enhanced senses, dexterity, and intelligence used to automate tasks or augment humans.
Autonomous and Near-Autonomous Vehicles: Vehicles that can navigate and operate with reduced or no human intervention.
Next Generation Genomics: Fast, low-cost gene sequencing, advanced big-data analytics, and synthetic biology. ('Writing DNA')
Energy Storage: Devices or systems that store energy for later use, including batteries
3D Printing: Additive manufacturing techniques to create objects by printing layers of material based on digital models.
Advanced Materials: Materials designed to have superior characteristics (e.g. strength, weight conductivity) or functionality.
Advanced Oil and Natural Gas Recovery: Exploration and recovery techniques that make extraction of unconventional oil and gas economical.
Renewable Energy: Generation of electricity from renewable sources with reduced harmful climate impact.

One of the significant impacts of the technologies is that the nature of work will change and 'millions of people will require new skills'. (See a good NY Times article for a discussion on this.)

Viewing work as one of four types helps clarify where the technology applications are having an impact. Most jobs have a mixture of the types and so in many jobs aspects of it are being replaced by technology whilst other aspects, for the moment, are staying the same. The four types of work are:

• routine and repetitive work – for example on an assembly line
• in person (face to face ) work – for example a doctor or a receptionist
• knowledge and data work – for example a software code writer or an academic researcher
• artisan work – for example a sculptor making piece

But think how things have been changing in the last few years in each of these categories. Take routine and repetitive work: many industries are introducing robots. Taiwan's Foxconn Group is one company that between now and 2015 plans to introduce (even) more robots into its workforce: one million of them by 2015, up from 100,000 in 2010 and 300,000 in 2011. Here's the advanced robotics disruptive technology at play.

How many hotel receptionists, traditionally in person work, have been replaced by self-service check in? The UK's Premier Inn, for example, has replaced its reception counter with self-service check in almost throughout the chain. This is an example of the internet of things coming into daily life.

The world of knowledge work is leading to many new and different jobs being created. Apps developers, for example did not exist a few years ago. Now oganizations routinely employ them (and their skills are in relatively short supply at this point). They use cloud technology – another of the items on the disruptive technology list.

3D printing is changing the face of artisan work. For example, fashion designers can produce one-off pairs of shoes, dresses, and accessories using the techniques. 3D printing is on the list the McKinsey report discusses.

In all four types of work the impact of technology applications is driving massive organizationally design and development challenge and opportunity.

What is the likely impact of the technologies on your organization?
Think about your own organization. If you have been with it more than two years what evidence have you already seen that the technologies are making a difference to the way work is done? How many of the twelve disruptive technologies are present in some form in one or more of the types of work your organization has?

Although details of the future of work are unclear it will without any doubt be very different from what it is now. Here's one example. Right now automobile manufacturers are testing driverless cars (the autonomous vehicles listed as one of the twelve disruptive technologies) with the prediction that they will be on public roads within 10 years. Now start to think through the implications driverless cars would have on your organization. If you employ drivers you may not need to do that. If you offer parking space you may not need as much (driverless cars are better at parking than humans!). If you operate on several sites you may save money by ferrying more people between sites in driverless cars, and so on.

The writer of an Economist article talking about the impact of driverless cars on work adds to the list above noting that among other things:

• That electronics and software firms will enjoy strong demand for in-car entertainment systems, since cars' occupants will no longer need to keep their eyes on the road.
• Bus companies might run convoys of self-piloting coaches down the motorways, providing competition for intercity railways.
• Taxi, lorry drivers and all others whose job is to steer a vehicle will have to find other work.
• Driverless cars will be programmed to obey the law, which means no traffic cops or parking wardens
• Driverless cars will not need driver insurance-—so goodbye to motor insurers and brokers.
• Autonomous vehicles will mean few accidents and so much less work for emergency rooms and orthopedic wards.
• Roads will need fewer signs, signals, guard rails and other features designed for the human driver; their makers will lose business too.

Clearly, a driverless car scenario is only one among many that would have an impact on the jobs people currently do, the jobs that emerge to support the driverless car industry, people's work patterns, social interactions, and organizational policies and processes. Notice too that driverless cars would impact not just work associated with vehicles and travel but work in many other spheres. So a technology that might seem unconnected to an organization might, in fact, have a profound effect on it.

How can you develop your organization's capability to use the technologies effectively?
The role of organization design and development practitioners is to encourage organizational members to look ahead and see what is coming on the horizon. Often the business people are too focused on the day to day matters to think carefully and in good time to make necessary design and development changes to stay competitive:

"When necessary, leaders must be prepared to disrupt their own businesses and make the investments to effect change," the McKinsey Global Institute's report's authors write. "By the time the technologies that we describe are exerting their influence on the economy in 2025, it will be too late for businesses, policy makers, and citizens to plan their responses. Nobody, especially businesses leaders, can afford to be the last person using video cassettes in a DVD world."

An article from Accenture, Six Ways to Make Volatility your Friend suggests four organziational capabilities to design in and develop to manage the world exemplified by disruptive technologies. It's difficult to argue with their four: anticipating, sensing, responding, and adapting. The article expands on these and offers a 12-point checklist which is a good discussion starter.

How is your organization meeting the challenge/opportunity of disruptive technologies? Let me know.

The room I was working in for four days last week had two notices that caused merriment to the organization design groups I was working with. One notice pinned to the smartboard said 'Do not write on this board', and the other said 'no hot drinks to be brought into the room'. There were a number of other notices in the public areas of the office all peremptory in tone, mostly beginning 'no .. ' or 'do not …" . The no hot drinks one led to discussion, speculation and conspiracy – we all wanted to bring coffee into the room. Why were cold drinks ok and not hot? Would a hot drink allowed to stand and go cold still count as a hot drink? Were people checking the waste bins to see if there were hot drink cups in it? What was the penalty for breaking the 'rule'? Why was it instituted in the first place? Would people whistle-blow if a colleague brought a hot drink into the room? Etc. (The no writing on the smartboard was fine because we didn't need a board to write on, although it was still a perplexing notice).

The time spent on the no hot drinks notice may seem like a distraction from the task in hand but it served as a powerful symbol of the type of organizational cultural stuff that grows up and no-one knows why, or how to make sense of it. Just in this small illustration people could see the range of questions and then ingenious work-arounds that people came up with in order to do something they wanted to do and couldn't see the rationale for not doing.

This is the type of thing that isn't typically tackled in organization design projects but it should be. The idea of tackling the informal with the formal is essential – which is why it was good to see a new model illustrating this in an article Organizing for Advantage that came out a couple of weeks ago. The authors discuss 'How to design a mix of formal and informal factors to advance your company's strategy.' This came as a heady relief to the organization designers I was working with who were totally frustrated by being handed an organization chart by managers and told to 'make it like this'.

I experienced a different type of informal organization design challenge earlier in the week working with a multi-national team. It's always annoying to me when stereotypical national characteristics seem to emerge because I think stereotyping misses the richness of individuals and of a culture, but they clearly emanate from something – why is the 'typical' English person so much the character ably described by Bill Bryson in Notes from a Small Island?

A recent HBR article How Culture Shapes the Office drawn from Steelcase research using Hofstede's cultural dimensions seems to suggest (again) that there are national differences in the way people view the world. As a sidenote my book Corporate Culture: Getting it Right has a chapter on whether culture can be measured by tools such as the Hofstede one. I am not convinced that they can be more than a general indicator. However, putting that view slightly to one side it seemed that in the team I was working with their differences lay not only in the national lenses but also in the professional/expert lenses through which team members were – a little one-dimensionally – viewing the new organization design i.e. as the organization chart.

Tasked with a target of simultaneously maintaining, streamlining and expanding services (a phrase I came across in a Soundcloud job advert but which admirably describes the current challenges of most organization design work) the team was finding it hard going – which was how I got involved in helping them find a way forward. So our first task was to draw back from assumptions and preconceptions, and establish some common ground around the principles of achieving the target. The second task was to move thinking away from the organization chart (which, as I said, they equated the design) towards a more wide ranging thought that an organization design is the outcome of complex interactions between a range of formal (explicit) and informal (implicit) elements. This time we worked with the Nadler and Tushman congruence model (newer version) (also see my tool of the month June 2013).

By the end of the day we had established some principles for proceeding which they all (6 different nationalities and professions) appeared willing to adopt and make decisions against. It was lovely to hear the team leader express surprise that what had previously seemed impossibly difficult and riddled with conflict – perhaps because the task was being pursued from a structure/headcount/quantitative approach – now seemed do-able in an amicable way – because this time around the task was approached from a qualitative, cultural informal angle.

So my week's work served to reinforce my notion that organization design must integrate the formal and informal aspects of organizational life – a thought that I pick up in more detail in my forthcoming book – Organization Design: Engaging with Change, coming out towards the end of this year.

What's your view of the need to integrate the formal and informal components of organization into a design project? Let me know.

In the way of things as soon as I started to think about self-designed jobs several relevant items flung themselves into my path. Once I read that this sort of event is called 'reticular activation', for example, when you read a word you haven't seen before and look it up you then see it constantly ever after and can't imagine why you didn't notice it before.

The topic of self-designed jobs came my way as I was working on my conference presentation – The Future of Work for The Economist Talent Management Summit and in particular the three types of work that Robert Reich talks about in his book The Work of Nations. He describes three types – routine, person to person, and symbolic analytic (knowledge work). Someone suggested a fourth category to me of 'artisan' which I go along with.

And then I read the Fast Company piece by Baratunde Thurston 'Kids Incorporated' . He remarked that he 'met the 16-year-old son of noted South African businessman Andile Ngcaba. He and his dad were on a break from their tour of U.S. colleges; Ngcaba wanted his computer-programmer son to see what full-grown developers do at hackathons. (Important lesson: We eat Korean food and drink beer.)
As we talked, the young Ngcaba told me he met a person at a school who kept talking about how graduates get jobs. "And I thought, What is this obsession with getting a job? You make a job!"

Making a job might be the future of work. Think about it. I feel that making a job is not the same as having an idea and then finding venture capital in an entrepreneurial type way. Making a job seems more like a gradual evolution from something that is seeded somehow in a person's interests and hobbies, and generates from that.

Exploring this idea with various people over the last few days I heard several delightful stories. Like the person who taught people with learning difficulties and then realized that one of their major hurdles was negotiating public transport. She now does full-time (paid) work as a travel trainer and advocate for travel training for people with learning disabilities.

This same person has twinned herself with a Nigerian school for children with learning disabilities. She's raised money for bunk beds, bedding, equipment and so on. Essentially making herself a second job.

A participant at the conference told me that he is moving to Switzerland as his wife has got a job there. He is not sure what he is going to do himself, but he has various interests he thinks he might work with and see where they go. He identified with the phrase 'making a job' when he heard me talk about it – it's something he's rather excited about.

Then today I was watching the Crossover dance company rehearsing for a performance they're going to do. It's a multigenerational company established by Cecilia McFarlane who 'formed the company in 2003 and is the artistic director. She is an Oxford based independent dance artist with an international reputation for her work in the community.' Formerly she was a Senior Lecturer in Arts in the Community, Coventry University – a 'real' job that I'm assuming she 'got'. Out of this she has become an independent – having made herself a different job. Perhaps in response to retirement or redundancy – though that is surmise.

Talking with a friend we were saying how difficult it is to make a job within the existing framework of organizations. Jobs are framed by job descriptions, performance management systems, reporting lines, grades/levels/entitlements, reward structures and so on. This leads to several issues, among them – lack of accountability (it's not in my job description'), failure to connect things going wrong or right and act on the findings e.g. Staffordshire NHS, and inertia in the face of change – a classic is the lag of organizational IT compared with consumer IT.

If people had more autonomy to make their own jobs in organizations then there might be more engagement? I just read an article on employee engagement that that offers 'Ten Vital Steps' to 'rev up' employee engagement. None of them are to do with encouraging employees to make their own jobs within an organization.

Have you made your own job within an organization? Do you think that the future of work is making a job or getting a job (within or without an organization)? Let me know.

On the plane I was reading about Starbucks and their 'leap of faith'. The article opens with the paragraph

'In late March, as Starbucks was preparing to introduce its first offer on Groupon, the daily-deal service, the coffee chain's chief digital officer, Adam Brotman, realized he had no clue whether the gambit would pay off. … We do not want to sit on our hands,' Brotman says. 'If we feel excited about something, we'll get it out there, learn our lessons, and correct the mistakes. It's not always the most stress-free way to launch, but it's the fastest. … We don't think it's okay if things aren't perfect," Brotman says, "but we're willing to innovate and have speed to market trump a 100% guarantee that it'll be perfect."

What I find useful in the piece is the notion of trade-offs. Here it is speed to market over 100% perfect. The thing is that surfacing the trade-offs isn't that easy and then making the decision to play the trade-off isn't easy either.

This came to mind today as we were looking for a place to eat in Aldgate, London, this evening. We passed two pubs both shut, walked on past the Indian curry places because we'd had a lot of curry recently, and then were stopped by someone standing in a restaurant entrance who invited us in. It looked as if it was still being constructed but he was a nice guy and said the food was Turkish so in we went. Our trade off? Welcome and immediacy over possible food disappointment.

Indeed the place is still being constructed. Today was the first day of being open and there were lots of glitches e.g. at the end of the meal they said the card processing machine was coming tomorrow which meant a quick walk to the ATM, several menu items were not available, but these were then traded-off for us (well me, fascinated by how organizations operate) for excellent service, full explanations of what was going on, good food with beaming kitchen, waiting and management staff coming to ask us what we thought and a rather warm feeling of being in at the start of something that has potential. The owner (ex-physicist from Gallipolli) told us it was his last great adventure.

The trade-off for him – I'm guessing – was a kind of soft opening. He stood in the doorway seeing who he could encourage in and learned from what was going on ready for the full launch later this week (business cards, menus, credit card processing, menu fulfillment, all coming tomorrow – or at some point soon).

Earlier in the day I'd spent time discussing the trade-offs to be made in thinking about new office space. Were we trading off real estate savings for staff motivation? Were we trading off restricting the amount of square footage we looked for in order to force innovation and more efficient ways of delivering the products and services? We didn't come to decisions on these specifics but in discussing them we did come to some decisions on a way forward and how we would offer this for discussion to the wider office staff.

The same notion of trade-offs came in another article I read on the plane. This one on private companies running Swedish hospitals. Here the trade-off is on efficiency over hotel style amenities. St Goran's is the medical equivalent of a budget airline. There are four to six patients to a room. The decor is institutional. Everything is done to "maximise throughput".

The thing is that generally trade-offs are not being made in isolation but in a context of a number of other factors in the system that may or may not be brought to the discussion. In the Starbucks case 'speed to market' is being made in the context of customer expectation, desire to be a market leader, testing the technologies, risk to reward of making the trade off, and so on.

In organization design projects it seems to me that far too little time is spent on thinking of the trade-offs, and making conscious decisions on why they are being made, and what the possible consequences or outcomes might be. This brought to mind I piece I noted from Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow on the topic of decision making:

Whatever else it produces, an organization is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions. Every factory must have ways to ensure the quality of its products in the initial design, in fabrication, and in final inspections. The corresponding stages in the production of decisions are the framing of the problem that is to be solved, the collection of relevant information leading to a decision, and reflection and review. An organization that seeks to improve its decision product should routinely look for efficiency improvements at each of these stages. The operative concept is routine. Constant quality control is an alternative to the wholesale review of processes that organizations commonly undertake in the wake of disasters. There is much to be done to improve decision making.

What's your view on trade-offs, how they are decided, and the impact that more conscious trade-off decisions would have on an organisation's design?

Sparked by the topic 'Substituting traditional symbols of power and status e.g. corner offices, for new symbols of power and status (and why this matters).' The action learning group I am working turned the discussion into one on performance and motivation incentives. This surprised me a bit as the three questions we'd been posed were:

1. How much is workplace associated with hierarchy/power/status and is this important to the client's business performance?
2. What questions and approaches would help us understand our clients' emotions around status/power/space?
3. How can the workplace support our client in developing a defensible point of view around power/status.

But what they'd picked up on was a line in one of the pre-read articles Is open-plan working really the future for lawyers? Meet the evangelists "Obviously there are firms that have open-plan offices, but it's something that we're reticent to mention early on in the recruitment process. It's not a selling point. I've never met anyone who says that they actually want to move into an open-plan office. Having your own office – that's an incentive."

This type of extrinsic incentive – pretty much the blunt carrots of motivation: office space, spot bonuses, promotions, titles, end of year awards, working from home, access to natural light, etc. led to discussions on whether they had to feel 'fair' – who gets what and why was a thread followed.

This is a huge issue in a company I am currently working with. In that culture discussing your pay and benefits is not a cultural taboo as it is in some organizations. What this leads to is people openly comparing their remuneration packages and the work that they do and then feeling that their package isn't fair in comparison to someone else's. It's a managerial headache to handle these types of conversations in the absence of a clear framework that explains why there are differences. The differences are related to industry sector, market rates, and various other factors which are all explicable but not clearly communicated. (In fact, they are not explained or communicated at all).

In a similar vein, people in the learning set talked about the communication or not of the fairness of incentives. In this case they picked up on job titles and the risk to reward of being awarded the title of Senior Associate or Principal. With the titles come some responsibilities and expectations but it is not exactly clear what these are. 'There are transparency issues and concealment'. People didn't know whether being awarded the title would be a personal incentive or disincentive to their performance. Nor were they clear on what the stick would be for deciding not to accept the title.

Moving on, but keeping with extrinsic incentives, they noted things like 'if you're a known expert user of technology you get rewarded with more up to date stuff', and 'if you're on a special project then you get a room for the project – collaborative space that's yours'. Similarly, in architecture offices 'pin-ups' – boards where work is displayed – are a 'badge of honor' and people felt that it is important to manage these types of extrinsic incentives in a way that is explicable and consistent. They would like to know why whole departments are not visible on the boards and why we choose to celebrate some work and not other.

They pointed out that extrinsic types of incentives are dropped when times get tough – incentives like travel to have face time with a client, training and development, conference attendance – yet they are exactly the types of things that would actually help improve performance in difficult times. See an article A Recession for Perks on this topic.

Then, more intriguingly the conversation turned to intrinsic incentives – the types of things that are individually motivating. Stuff that in the RSA Animate, Drive – on motivation – relate to what Dan Pink calls the incentives of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Client face time was one of them. This is 'perhaps the most coveted commodity in our business [architecture]. It's a significant currency in the way we work and has a huge impact on individual staff morale.' For any architect or designer being able to meet face to face with the client gives valuable insights. Who gets to this face time, and why, is a topic of interest and speculation.

Other intrinsic motivators mentioned by the learning group were things like access to partner time – again, who gets this and why? The degrees of access people have to certain individuals becomes both an intrinsic motivator and a source of power. In open plan offices the spatial relationships people have with each other can be a form of incentive – proximity to networks and sources of information, for example, can be performance motivators – you get the information you need to do your job more effectively by being able to listen in on what's going on. Someone described this being within earshot as 'purposeful positioning'.

This led to an exchange on team spaces. They appear to be equitable but there are 'zones of high information and low information'. The space around some individuals is 'charged with info'. People talked about some zones which were de facto 'clubs' – getting access to them is an organizationally sensitive issue with 'a ton of complex stuff embedded in space' and it is these 'subtle things that we are not talking about'.

Equally people felt there is an inherent motivation in feeling that you are doing well. People want to be able to make a difference and be involved in successful things. Regular feedback on performance is an incentive for some people (but not others) which led to the point that intrinsic incentives are individually determined. In fact I had dinner with a friend last night and she mentioned she was applying for another job because she felt oppressed by the amount of positive feedback she was getting from her supervisor. It felt over the top to her.

So the discussions on incentives this week have led me to wonder if intrinsic incentives can be designed into an organization and further whether spatial arrangements make a difference to them. This discussion is taken up in an article The Four Intrinsic Rewards that Drive Employee Engagement. Although it implies that intrinsic incentives can be designed into an organization I think that may be up to challenge.

My reward expert colleague thinks you may be able to design in an environment where the intrinsic incentives were able to germinate and flourish without intervention. But he is basically of the view that most organizationally designed incentive programs – particularly those based in monetary gain and extrinsic incentives – have a negative rather than a positive effect. They result in dysfunctional and competitive behavior as people vie to demonstrate the desired behavior to get the award. He is blunt in saying he has never seen an extrinsic incentive plan that hasn't had adverse effects. He'd like to see an organization that has moved from an extrinsic plan to intrinsic plan with successful outcomes. Is that yours? Let me know.

What information would you share with co-workers, managers, the wider world? Does it make a difference whether it is personal information – like your salary, or organizational information? Would you share all or nothing or some stuff (what and why this?) Without going into the ethics and morals of releasing information (as in Wikileaks) the action learning group I'm learning with had a good discussion on radical transparency the other week.

The discussion was sparked by the Ryan Smith Qualtrics CEO blog piece on radical transparency.
And you can watch/hear him talk about it here. His view is that 'the idea of everyone knowing everything, could actually be a major driver of increased organizational performance. [He] believes that the biggest reason companies fail is because people lose focus and get off track. It's particularly true of young, fast-growing companies driving to meet stretch revenue goals and keep their investors happy. Qualtrics didn't want to fall into that trap so the company made the bold decision to make all employees' performance data available to everyone in the company. By doing so, Qualtrics removes the distractions, fears, and negativity that sap concentration. The entire workforce has access to a host of information about the performance and practice of each employee.'

The group of us were debating three questions:
1. What is the value of radical information transparency in developing business performance?
2. How can we help architecture and workplace design clients determine their point of view on this?
3. What can we do to help clients' built environment reflect their information transparency requirements?

What is the value of radical information transparency in developing business performance?
The discussion picked up on the point Ryan Smith makes about performance data and particularly about having transparent and clearly communicated individual performance goals. Someone suggested that if we all knew each other's performance goals then we would be able to support each other better in achieving them – it would be likely to lead to a more co-operative and collaborative environment. This is a view supported by Niels Pflaeging, in a provocative paper Why management is quackery. And what leadership for the 21st century must really look like. He states that " The effectiveness of leadership lies not in any individuals so much as in the collective social process – in community "

Picking up on this someone pointed out that new and flatter organizations can be set up to be transparent from the start, but hierarchical, more mature organizations would have a hard time dealing with the notion of transparency. Without a certain and defined purpose in wanting transparency, and purposeful goal setting around achieving it then it would be difficult. Look at the piece on Transforming Health Care Through Radical Transparency and you'll see how one company is reaping the value of purposeful transparent data. In this instance there is clarity on what the organization is aiming to achieve in adopting radical transparency.

Another person noted the fear element around disclosure of information. He felt that trust is an essential pre-requisite of transparency. Trust – in the validity and reliability of the data, trust in the way it will be used once it is transparent, and trust in the motives of the people who are presenting transparency as 'a good thing'. There's a useful and interesting HBR article Trust in the Age of Transparency that picks up on some of these points and mentions a number of books on the topic. The article closes with the statement that 'Truth be told, customers won't really trust you unless you're transparent. But if you become transparent, your competitive advantage proves transient. Margins plummet, and you're forced to innovate. That's how they get you.'

How can we help architecture and workspace design clients determine their point of view on this?
The role of architects and designers in relation to designing radical transparency into the built environment was interesting. One person noted that initiating a discussion with the client on their principles and philosophies of radical transparency would be useful to have in the early stages of a design project, and it is not a conversation that is typically had. Intrigued by the idea that we could be helping clients make a more profound (and valuable) cultural shift if we pushed the conversations towards the trust and transparency topics one person felt that being able to tell our own stories on our journey towards it would be very helpful. He was a team member on the Ohio Health Riverside Methodist Hospital Neuroscience Institute and Bed Tower project and told a compelling story about the way trust and transparency was fostered and gradually developed between the several organizational teams working on the project.

Another participant was of the view that 'transparency creates junk' and helping clients think through what filters they would apply to reduce 'junk' would be helpful. This turn of the debate moved back towards what information should be transparent and why. The feeling was that relevant transparency of information has to be personal to each individual and immediately available – in this sense it has to be what someone suggested as 'incredibly fluid – running in channels'. It seemed as if we were discussing a form of personalized twitter feed where you select what organizational information you want to know about. In this instance individuals are applying their own filters. In terms of organizational radical transparency perhaps similar principles could be applied?

What can we do to help clients' built environment reflect their information transparency requirements?
The last question, related to the built environment, is about designing in both the visual display of information as well as the reflection of the concept of transparency as a principle of the business operation. Look at the article in Business Week on viz walls for one take on this: 'viz walls' [are] banks of high-definition monitors that companies can use to display and manipulate vast amounts of data in one place, [they] are moving from the province of futuristic movies and TV shows to actual companies'.

The issue here for designers is what form of information display, actual or conceptual, brings both discipline and purpose. What are the trade-offs in presenting some information and not other information. If you're interested in more detail on this angle look at the Pew Internet Research paper The Future of Big Data or if you'd like a more filtered version of the paper look at Information Week's 10 Big Predictions about Big Data. As one of the participants noted radical transparency brings choices in how to present the information.

As you read the paragraph above did you make a choice on whether you wanted to read the more detailed, original information,(Pew Internet Report) or the interpreted Information Week one. Which did you choose? Why? Let me know your views on radical transparency and how organizations should design for it.

Space as a strategic asset was last week's question. I got it three times in different ways but they are focused on the same idea – how do we know what space we'll need in the future, and then how do we use it to get best possible performance from the space and the people in it? Here they are:

1. In the last week we've been approached on the subject of domestic companies (in China) looking to make significant change to how they use space as a strategic asset of the business.
2. Wondering if you have any info or articles on how companies are responding to contraction and expansion in their real estate portfolios? Efficiency and cost effectiveness – while also maintaining great environments?
3. A client is looking for benchmarking metrics which would tell him at what point in eroding away his vacant space (flexible/soft/surge space) should he look at options to build or lease more space or look at significant consolidation.

The interesting things about the questions are the challenges and opportunities they imply. Although framed as workplace/workspace issues they are also about the design of the organization and the external trends and context that the business operation has to respond to as it develops and delivers its business strategy.

Thinking of space use as an integral part of the business strategy to drive things like competitiveness, sustainability initiatives, workforce performance improvements and cultural change, offer avenues for innovation that are typically outside the realm of corporate real estate but would demonstrate the value of including it as a strategic asset rather than as solely a cost to be borne.

Looking for benchmarks, metrics, and case studies can offer useful pointers and ideas but only within the context of the overall business strategy. Take the example of business growth of 12% per year. This may not need to involve any change in the square footage of space available. Deciding not to increase the space could help drive a business strategy around people's performance, technology optimization, and process improvement, and thus competitiveness. Here are some ideas:

People: In many organizations the number of retirement eligible people in the workforce is growing. It is useful for the organization to keep the knowledge base, but often neither the retirement eligible people nor the organization wants the arrangement to continue as a full time position. Introducing flexible working hours and/or part time working frees up space.

Accenture has two useful reports on the aging workforce, both suggesting that GDP and organizational productivity increases when older people are retained. See The Seven Myths of Aging and Get Ready for the Silver Economy. This latter report notes that: An aging population poses new questions for businesses. Commercially, there are opportunities to be realized, but for employers, it's evident that a fresh approach is now required as notions of retirement begin to change.

In terms of the role of the employer, the responsibility for businesses lies in learning how to tap into the knowledge and experience of older workers. The aging population is proving both a boon and a burden for companies and the way in which they perceive not only their customers but also their employees.

It is not only older workers who would like flexible working hours or different work-life balance. Changing this aspect of the employment deal could be a beneficial strategy for both employee and employer and have a positive impact on the space requirements. The UK's John Lewis Partnership, for example, says:

Partners [it is an employee owned company] are also looking to us to provide greater balance between their lives inside and outside of work. More than 50 per cent of our Partners work less than 30 hours per week. Our Partnership policies support flexibility to help Partners balance their work and home lives:

• all Partners have the right to request flexible working
• we allow compressed hours to allow Partners to manage their commitments
• we allow home-working, subject to role restrictions
• short weekly contracts are available
• sabbatical and extended leave options are available
• where Partners are in term-time education, we support their educational commitments by encouraging holiday period employment
• one week of paid study leave per year can be taken by Partners studying for a managerial or professional qualification related to their work.

Consider how introducing or extending a variety of work patterns could impact the use, type, and amount of space an organization needs.

Technology: Advances in information and communication technologies mean that workers can be mobile, and work from any location. Instead of opening up more space, work with the idea of making more of the workforce home based, internally mobile, or both. (Internally mobile means no individual allocation of desk space but booking via a hoteling system or free addressing where people sit in any available spot).

The benefits of better/different technology use include more efficient use of space, energy savings (commutes, building heating and lighting, etc), and employee/customer satisfaction.

A CIO blog, talking about Millennials, observes:
The Millennials, born between the years 1981 and 2000, are 85.4 million strong, outnumbering even the Baby Boomers, according to 2010 statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. Attracting the brightest among them requires understanding and, yes, even catering to their desires. A big part of that is giving them technology freedom.
Millennials don't want to unplug from work on the weekends and after-hours like their older counterparts, and so they want technology that keeps up with this lifestyle. They're driving today's big tech trends, such as consumer tech and bring-your-own-device, or BYOD, which naturally blends work life and social life.
But it isn't only the Millennials who want the technology freedom to work from anywhere. "You can absolutely devolve into an argument of you-are-young-and-you-don't-get-it versus you-are-old-and-you-don't-get-it," says a Silicon Valley mobile manager. "But people who are the most creative and open-minded are going to adopt the coolest technology, regardless of how old they are."

Space as a strategic asset questions
The CI Manifesto for an Agile Workforce offers six challenging questions that real estate and facilities managers could pose to their business colleagues. Discussing them in an open-minded, creative way would pave the way to a business strategy that encompassed space, people, process, and technology in an integrated, performance enhancing, and scalable way.

1. How are the ways we work right or wrong for our current and predicted strategy? (What is happening in the context that should make us rethink what we need to be doing and how to do it?)
2. Why is work defined in jobs? (Are there other ways of thinking about the way we do our work that would make us more flexible and efficient and help us think differently about space requirements?)
3. Why can't workers be employed by more than one company? (Do we have to have full time employees? Could we outsource or contract work? Can we do shift work keeping our existing space open for longer? Can our employees do some of our work directly for us and some of it via other employers or as self-employed?)
4. Why is most work divided into 40 hour chunks? (Can we be more flexible in the way we think about doing work?)
5. Why can't workers retire at 40 and resume work at 60? (Are we thinking about our workforce in the most innovative and efficient way? Are there ways we could use it differently?)
6. Why do we have to go to the office to work? (Where else could the work be done?)

A recent article in the Huffington Post illustrates the US Government Agency GSA making use of space as a strategic asset. (I worked on this project for two years).
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In what ways do you think space and workplace can be a strategic business asset? Let me know.

I've had an instructive almost-three-days with my mother this weekend. She's 96 and lives independently in her own flat with no household support beyond a young woman who comes to clean her place for 2 hours once every two weeks. She seems to do well enough in an environment that she's used to. The Tesco metro is across the street, she is close to bus stops, the temperature in the house is set to maintain a steady agreeable warmth, and so on.

Nevertheless there are things she can't do well: open screw top jars, change light bulbs, bend to get things from the bottom of the fridge, walk outside without the aid of a cane or a walker, see small print, or hear in the presence of any background noise.

She wanted to visit Ireland where she was born. And that's what we did. Although I have spent time with her traveling (we went for the weekend to Paris last year) this time I was acutely aware of the design aspects of aging and started to wonder about this for both older people in the workforce and for older people who have left the workforce.

At the start of the UK's 2010 Parliament a briefing paper noted that '10 million people in the UK are over 65 years old. The latest projections are for 5.5 million more elderly people in 20 years' time and the number will have nearly doubled to around 19 million by 2050.

Within this total, the number of very old people grows even faster. There are currently three million people aged more than 80 years and this is projected to almost double by 2030 and to reach eight million by 2050. While one-in-six of the UK population is currently aged 65 and over, by 2050 one in-four will be.'

This type of profile is reflected in much of Europe, Japan, and the US. It has significant consequences for public services and for healthcare.

The UK briefing paper explains:

'Much of today's public spending on benefits is focussed on elderly people. 65 per cent of Department for Work and Pensions benefit expenditure goes to those over working age, equivalent to GBP 100 billion in 2010/11 or one-seventh of public expenditure. Continuing to provide state benefits and pensions at today's average would mean additional spending of GBP10 billion a year for every additional one million people over working age.

Growing numbers of elderly people also have an impact on the National Health Service, where average spending for retired households is nearly double that for non-retired households.'

Within the workforce a paper by ACAS The Employment Relations Challenges of an Ageing Workforce again talking on the UK workforce concludes, 'There has been much discussion about the significance of engaging and retaining older workers. However, there is little evidence of UK employers taking proactive steps to achieve this goal. With the removal of the default retirement age (DRA), changes in state pension age and the continued ageing of the workforce this is set to become an increasingly important organizational issue. If the UK economy is to fully benefit from the skills and experience of its older workers, a larger proportion of organisations will need to adopt age management policies and practices which are effectively communicated to their workforces.'

The situation is similar in other countries as David Bloom and David Canning, report in their HBR blog How Companies Must Adapt for an Aging Workforce. Their conclusion is that 'In designing the organizations of the future, the private sector -— with appropriate public-policy support -— should anticipate, rather than passively await, this trend toward longer lifespans and older employees. While some adaptations lie on the more distant horizon, others can be undertaken right now, to the benefit of both younger and older employees -— and of the company itself.'

It seems that there are many challenges inherent in this whole aging population thing and it's difficult to boil them down. But this weekend has thrown into relief two questions for me:

1. How do I keep myself working for as long as possible in order to a) financially support my mother should she, at some stage, need more care than she can afford b) financially support myself predominantly from my own resources when (if) I get to a post-paid-employment era?
2. How can designers make functional living easier for people who are aging to retain dignity, respect, and independence as they age?

Take the first one related to the older workforce. This means rethinking all kinds of fairly standard traditional workplace policies including working hours, career paths, performance standards, space and equipment adaptations, skills development, and a host of other expectations around management, expertise, and cultural norms. Some companies are making great strides here. The US AARP has a program (two year intervals) to identify best companies for older workers and there are often fun profiles of 'oldest workers'. But, as yet, these are the exceptional companies.

Take the second question – designing for functional living. There is a body suit called AGNES developed by the MIT age lab that younger designers can wear to feel what it is like to be elderly and a similar one called the Age Man Suit. 'Consisting of ear-protectors that stifle hearing, a yellow visor that blurs eyesight and makes it hard to distinguish colours, knee and elbow pads which stiffen the joints, a Kevlar-jacket-style vest which presses uncomfortably against the chest, and padded gloves, the Age Man Suit, which weighs around 10kg, has been custom-made to simulate the physical consequences of old age.'

I can see my mother with all these symptoms except she is not wearing a suit. That is her life. I've watched her struggle in an unfamiliar environment for three days:

• Signage is small or unreadably placed (airline departure displays)
• Doors are too heavy to pull or push open
• Outside surfaces are uneven making falls likely
• Stairs don't all have railings or grab rails
• Public announcements are indecipherable
• Meal portions are too large (and she is denied the kids' menu one because she is not under 12!)
• There is insufficient public seating in many places (walkways into the airport terminals for example).
• Car doors don't open wide enough to swing legs around comfortably
• Restaurant lighting doesn't allow for menu reading

And the list goes on. I didn't think to check whether our accommodation had grab rails in the shower, or self-controllable heating, or an elevator to the floor her room is on. (No it didn't have any of these). I am keeping a note of things like that now.

So what am I concluding from the brief research, observation, and my own experience?

• I must use my organization design and development skills to encourage employers to look at innovative workforce policies regarding a broader age range of employees.
• In working with architects and designers I need to be encouraging them to remember they too are aging and will experience gradual failings in sight, hearing, balance, and muscle strength. Given the predicted workforce demographics they should design workplaces with this in mind.
• On the basis that one individual can make a difference I will start lobbying for specifics – like passenger assistance from London Heathrow's bus terminal into the check-in area. At present it is only available from the check in area to the aircraft.

Are you aging? What workplace or design improvement would you like to see? Let me know.

Collaboration is one of those frequently used words. People talk about 'collaboration space', wanting to have a 'collaborative culture', and encouraging 'collaboration'. But when it comes to defining and measuring 'collaboration', there's somewhat of a pause. What is the business outcome of collaboration? Is it a new product or service, enhanced productivity, greater process efficiency, happier employees, more satisfied staff, or something else altogether. I haven't yet found an organization that is crystal clear on what it wants to achieve at an organization, work-team, or individual employee level from 'collaboration'.

Neither do we have much clarity on what contributes to collaboration. Is it the design of the workplace, the technology used, the cultural attributes of an organization, the type of work that is being done, or all of these or some/none of these?

So when this week, at my place of employment, we kicked off the first of a series of four action learning sessions the opening topic was 'collaboration'. 'Action learning is a dynamic process that involves a small group of people looking at real problems and opportunities, while at the same time focusing on what they are learning and how their learning can benefit each group member, the group itself and the organization as a whole'. We have set up the group (of about 15 people) with the primary objective of developing some tools and approaches that support our clients in making actionable connections between organization design and workplace design to increase organizational performance. A secondary objective is to try out these tools and approaches on ourselves as we transition to new office space.

The way we have structured the action learning set is that each session has a short piece of pre-work – something to read, listen to, or watch – on the topic, and two of the set members kick off the discussion, and then facilitate it. The collaboration pre work was a 20 minute RSA video/podcast presented by Ben Hammersley, a technologist on Tomorrow's Work. Why Yesterday's Expectations Are Ruining Today's Future,

The action learning thing yielded some immediate lessons a) not everyone had done the pre-work b) we leapt into solution mode rather than being reflective, provocative, and innovative c) we hadn't made it clear to participants what the objectives of the sessions were so there were mixed expectations. Even so, I think the discussion yielded some great results.

The participants were predominantly architects and designers. They are often asked by clients to cut the costs of real estate and one way of doing this is through radically reducing the number of offices and cubicles and replacing these with hot-desking, benching, hoteling, or similar.

The action learning session participants themselves work in an open plan environment though they tend to have assigned seating. And the discussion immediately started to center on their experience and feelings of working in this environment. Ben Hammersley fairly early on in the talk made a potentially contentious point that 'open plan offices freak you out'. He said (without quoting sources so I'm not sure what the evidence is) that people working in open plan offices are a lot more stressed than those with own offices, and their sickness and absence rates are higher.

Although no participant specifically admitted to being stressed and freaked out there was an involved discussion on where focused work got done. For the most part it seemed to be off-site in the evenings or at weekends. Some people came into the office on Sunday when that day only the unspoken rule is 'no interruptions or disturbances'. It seems that on normal work days if you are in the office then you are assumed to be available to whatever or whoever is around. It turns out it is not a place to 'work', unless you are in a team where there is a specific task to be done that requires interaction. Additionally there appears to be an unspoken rule in this particular office that working off-site during normal office hours is not the done thing (unless someone is on a client site) although it is not expressly 'forbidden'.

One of the participants, having watched the podcast, started to manually track the interactions between team members to see if she could work out what the interactions were related to. Her insight was that although people sat in notional 'teams' the interactions seemed to play more to work flow and process (that cut across teams). There's a useful HBR article, The New Science of Building Great Teams, on the use and technology of sociometric badging for doing this type of mapping and there are other social networking analysis tools that do similarly. Some examples here and here.

Another raised the intriguing point that clients ask for 'quiet' or 'focus' space to be designed in, but when he thought about people working in coffee shops, in airports, on buses, and so on he wondered whether quiet spaces were what enabled 'work'. He asked whether it was more about 'rules' and expectations. No one in a coffee shop is expecting another customer to wander up, interrupt, and start chatting. Although the environment may be noisy, the expectation is of uninterrupted focused work.

Someone else noted that in the workplace the expected speed of response to emails, questions, instant messages, etc puts an unreasonable demand on the urgent rather than the important. He reminded us of the 'tyranny of the urgent'. This was a concept that Stephen Covey brought into the mainstream and gave it the name "The Urgent/Important Matrix" in his 1994 business classic, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". You can see the matrix explained here. Echoing this urgent/important idea, Hammersley made a lovely point that the current tendency in offices is to 'stay on top of things rather than getting to the bottom of things'.

People who'd watched the pre-work remembered this point and started developing thoughts around how information is shared and how decisions get made. Someone wondered whether having people around all willing and able to voice opinions on stuff was useful or not. This led towards suggesting that there has to be a person ready to facilitate, guide and help everyone get to a resolution on a problem, topic, or opportunity. The ready availability of people to input (is this collaboration?!) led to an unstructured day for many people. So the question arose – how can you collectively and/or culturally design in structure, focus, and important work in an open workplace environment? And is collaboration more about supporting each other in doing this and less about being available to offer opinions, being constantly available, and responding instantly to the urgent because open space makes this easy?

The question remains for us to experiment with as we discuss our own office move. Your views are welcome.

In a few weeks (43 days according to the website countdown clock) I am speaking at the Talent Management Summit 2013. This is billed as asking the right questions on talent management:

• Is your business prepared for the way we'll work in the future?
• Does your organization have the right people to succeed in the future business landscape?
• What are the talent requirements of tomorrow's business and how can we meet them?
• Much has been written about the need for a mobile, agile workforce, but what does this mean in practice, and how can we measure it?

and 'will consider the questions from a broader perspective – taking in the economic and political context and emerging macro trends for society and business … as talent is no longer an issue confined to the HR department but is rising to the top of the agenda for senior executives across the board. … This reflects the importance of talent for competitive advantage in today's global knowledge economy.'
The effect of the countdown clock was to focus my attention on the questions and to make me wonder what I'm going to say. Then I remembered that in my recently published book Organizational Health I have a whole chapter on business trends and fads and included in the discussion a list asking readers whether they thought something was a trend to act on or a fad to ignore. The list reads:

B corps., behavioral analytics, big data, data reduction, data visualization, biomimicry, clean tech, collaborative work spaces, cradle to cradle, crowdsourcing, design thinking, gamification, green jobs,
positive psychology, neuro (marketing, economics, etc.), no offices/hoteling, co-working, outsourcing, post PC era, prediction markets, results only work environment (ROWE), self-managed teams (erosion of hierarchy, end of leadership), social advertising, social data, social media, sustainability, virtual and remote working.

At the time of writing, almost exactly a year ago, I was simply posing a question. Now it seems I'll have to place a bet on what I think is an actionable trend and what organizational leaders and talent managers need to be alert to as they build capability for the future of work.

So my current list boils down to six items. Each of which I'll take a brief look at here. They're not in any order of importance. And it's interesting how in a year the landscape has changed so some of the items I'm now thinking are business trends that need to be planned for (I don't think the six are fads) weren't on last year's list, but each has an impact on the way talent management is approached.

Robotics: I've been reading many articles on robotics recently and the one that caught my eye most was 'Your alter ego on wheels'. This talks about the advent of 'remotely controlled telepresence robots that let people be in two places at once'. From a talent management perspective this raises several points about the skills needed to manage a virtual team member, space requirements to accommodate robot colleagues who are trundling around offices, the protocols around interacting with telepresence robots both from the remote user angle and the on-site people. The article makes the point that 'Proponents of the technology say that by placing a remotely controlled embodiment of yourself in another location you can nurture your contacts, increase your influence and assert your authority.' It will be fascinating to find out if remote workers will now be able to do this more effectively than on-site workers.

Workforce of one: Three years ago the book Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management Through Customization, was published. This was summarized in an Accenture booklet that advocated HR practices capable of addressing each employees needs and wants within a 'structured, rules-based framework that allows for flexibility'. Recently there was an FT article talking about an unlimited holiday policy which is an example of a customization approach. A different tack on the workforce of one is that everyone is self-employed. Sites like Mechanical Turk and Task Rabbit are examples of offering work to requesters of work – the requesters being self-employed. The notion that people are less willing to be bound to an organization and more willing to sell their skills and knowledge to a range of offerers I think will increasingly be of interest to talent managers.

Network mapping and mobilization: Various ways of mapping networks are becoming more prevalent. The Wall Street Journal picked up on socio metric badges in an article 'Tracking Sensors Invade the Workplace' it reports that 'Sensors worn on lanyards or placed on office furniture record how often staffers get up from their desks, consult other teams, and hold meetings … businesses say the data offer hard to glean insights about how workers do their jobs'. For talent management this kind of data used appropriately could be enormously valuable. Mobilizing social networks for recruits, referrals, comments and endorsements through sites liked Linked In is also changing the way talent management is done. See the article LinkedIn Is Disrupting the Corporate Recruiting Market.

Gamification: is a developing area for talent management. A coursera program on the topic led by Kevin Werbach, from Wharton School says that 'Gamification as a business practice has exploded over the past two years. Organizations are applying it in areas such as marketing, human resources, productivity enhancement, sustainability, training, health and wellness, innovation, and customer engagement. Game thinking means more than just dropping in badges and leaderboards; it requires a thoughtful understanding of motivation and design techniques. ' Not being up in the field of gamification and what it offers puts talent managers at a disadvantage. If you're not sure where to start look at http://www.gamification.org, or Deloitte's article The Engagement Economy

Behavioral economics: Research into behavioral economics is fast being applied in business. Google, for example uses some of the nudge techniques (see the book on the topic). 'Explains Jennifer Kurkoski, who has a PhD in organizational behavior and runs a division of Google's HR department called People Analytics, "When employees are healthy, they're happy. When they're happy, they're innovative." In pursuit of that healthiness, happiness, and innovation, Google has turned to "nudges": simple, subtle cues that prompt people to make better decisions. Behavioral economists have shown the idea works, but Google has taken it out of the lab and into the lunchroom. This is a sampling of the encouragement you'd get during trips through the company's eateries-and naturally, Google is measuring the results.' In this Google example you see behavioral economics applied to talent management.

Continuous radical change: Developing organizational capability to manage large scale continuous change beyond the specifics above is critical. Take the talent management challenge in the decision made by United Technologies to downsize its workforce at a point when it is doing exceptionally well. The comments on the blog piece about it are worth reading too.
Samsung, earlier this year said. "In the first quarter, demand for smartphones in developed countries is expected to decelerate." The company highlighted its uncertain outlook by breaking from its usual practice of giving a target figure for capital expenditure in the current financial year. It said only that it would "respond to the market's ebb and flow with a capex plan that is flexible in manner", and that capital investment would be similar to last year's $21.5bn. Developing the individual and organizational capability to handle uncertain conditions as those that face Samsung is a critical talent management task.
Technologies are changing types of work. Apps, for example, are replacing workers in some industries but simultaneously new jobs (e.g. apps developers) are being created. Keeping pace with, if not predicting, very rapidly changing work/role requirements is another talent management challenge.

So here are my six. I have a couple of others up my sleeve if these are old-hat. What do you think are the trends that talent managers should be looking at? I'd be glad to hear from you.