A friend asked:
>I head the infrastructure and facilities division in my
>organization. One of the things I am looking at currently is to develop a
>whole new building (20+ stories) for our employees. We've embarked on the
>Learning Organization journey for a few years now and think that we should
>design our building to be an LO enabler.
Design of physical space seems mostly based on efficiency for the
production of current work. It's well known that co-location helps
collaboration (e.g. in the Chrysler Tech Center). But, in a learning
organization, we're interested in long-term relationships, contact,
stimulation, and diversity, not just today's output.
When I designed office space for my company, one of my strategies was to
use "traffic generators" to create informal contact.
Here's the story:
Some years ago, as a high-tech entrepreneur, I had to design new offices
for our company.
Our company, like most, was organized into managable departmental units.
The obvious way to use office space was to put each department in one wing
or one floor of a building, so they could get their work done. When we
maximize their working contact, it's very easy to isolate departments from
each other.
I remembered Tom Allen's research from the 60's and 70's that physical
distance has a great impact on communication. The conclusion I remember is
that people in nearby offices will tend to talk, but that separation to
another wing or another floor... Well, they might as well be in Europe,
the fall-off in informal communication with distance is rapid and nearly
complete.
We wanted to keep up as much communication between people in different
departments as possible. Our business required a lot of creativity; we
thought isolation in silos could be deadly. We wanted to avoid the
pitfalls of a "big company" as we grew.
We were to occupy three floors and two wings in the new building. What to
do?
The solution was to cut internal staircases up/down the three floors.
Then, we identified things that everyone used which could be centrally
located, drawing as many people as possible to a central place in order to
force people into contact, instead of letting these things appear in each
department. That is, we centralized the "traffic generators" to cause
informal contact.
One example was coffee and soft-drinks. We located these centrally, not
because this was the best way to brew and distribute coffee... But because
coffee would draw people together. (In our company, everyone got their own
coffee.)
Our list of centralized things was:
- Coffee and soft-drinks
- Mail boxes (instead of delivering incoming mail to departments)
- Drop boxes for outgoing mail, interoffice mail, etc.
- Office supplies (instead of supply cabinets in each department)
- Copying machines (big, high speed, self-service machines, instead of
smaller copiers in each department)
- Printers (faster, nicer printers instead of print-servers in each
department)
- Company literature, marketing materials, technical manuals, article
reprints
- Current magazines and newspapers
- Comfortable seating area -- we made the central area a nice place to
hang out.
This seemed to create a lot of waste:
- wasted steps as people walked to these facilities
- wasted office supplies (open shelves lead to more usage)
- wasted space for "hanging around"
- wasted time for "hanging around"
I don't have data, but I'm convinced that the informal exchange between
departments was much, much greater in value than all these "wastes."
(The list would be different today. In the past 20 years, technology has
made some of my centralized traffic generators impractical. What are the
"trafic generators" today?)
Part of my inspiration was from Prof. John Little, an important mentor. As
head of one of the departments at the MIT Sloan School, he told me, "I
knocked out a wall, threw out the file cabinets, and put in a couch and
coffee table. Now, all the grad students eat lunch here and hang out
together. Sometimes, faculty join in. It's had a significant impact on the
quality of this department."
Richard Goodale mentioned the Union Carbide HQ building which was
designed, it seems, in the name of efficiency to enable people to go from
their cars to their departmental offices without the bother of seeing
anyone else. This is the opposite of my approach... I think they were
optimizing the wrong thing.
I think a building for a learning organizaiton should support human
contact with as much diversity as possible, consistent with getting the
job done.
-- Rick
--Richard Karash ("Rick") | <http://world.std.com/~rkarash> Speaker, Facilitator, Trainer | mailto:Richard@Karash.com "Towards learning organizations" | Host for Learning-Org Discussion (617)227-0106, fax (617)523-3839 | <http://www.learning-org.com>
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