Designing Workplaces like Cities

If the workplace is the micro environment, then is the city the macro?

Just bookmarking three great posts that look at the relationship between understanding the complexity of one type of social system – our urban environment – and social business design.

• What Urban Planning Can Teach Social Business Design by Gordon Ross (part 1) and Urban Planning to Social Business: Social that Scales by Thomas Vander Wal (part 2).
• Social Business isn’t About Companies, It is About Cities by Thierry de Baillon.

Also recommended, as an adjuct to these posts is the book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Dave Gray provides a summary of a key point in his The Connected Company post:

we don’t try to control cities, but we can manage them well. And if we start to look at companies as complex systems instead of machines, we can start to design and manage them for productivity instead of continuously hovering on the edge of collapse.

Cities aren’t just complex and difficult to control. They are also more productive than their corporate counterparts. In fact, the rules governing city productivity stand in stark contrast to the ominous “3/2 rule” that applies to companies. As companies add people, productivity shrinks. But as cities add people, productivity actually grows.

 

Image credit: A Balloon View of London (1851), Bloomsbury BY-NC-SA

The Rise of the 3rd Generation Organisation

The impact of the physical workplace on how we organise is a fascinating topic. For example the transformation of factories thanks to electricity and electric light changed how they operated. Modern offices, in the shape of skyscrapers, are an example of another development that has also affected how we manage. However, both the modernisation of factories and the creation of the modern office primarily depended on overcoming physical constraints to create physical structures. This in turn helped to define structures for work that we became familiar with in the developed world during the last century (lets call them 2nd Generation Organisations).

As the digital era continues, my impression is that intangible features are playing a greater role in defining the workplace environment and creating what I would call 3rd Generation Organisations. One trend that is starting to show what a 3rd Generation Organisation looks like is the shift towards Activity Based Workplaces (ABW):

As the name suggests the work space is organized by spaces designed to support specific activities… This loosely structured physical workplace is supported by work practices that facilitate it.

Note the relationship between space design and how work happens – this is more than simply creating a pleasant office space to work in and shouldn’t be confused with hot desking or hoteling either. I recently had the opportunity to see Commonwealth Bank’s Activity Based Workplace, built out on the edge of Sydney CBD. Its interesting to see how in practice IT plays a defining rather than supporting role in making their Activity Based Workplace possible.  In fact, urban planning consultants Urbis advise that:

During the 1990s, wi-fi didn’t exist, so flexibility was limited. Now, a successful [Activity Based] workplace must consider the IT environment to deliver productivity gains. ABW is fundamentally linked to technology and any ABW project will require significant investment in IT as well as the fitout.

The benefits of ABW appear to be a combination of soft and hard benefits:

• Employee engagement (better collaboration and productivity).
• Savings from more efficient use of space, less use of paper and lower building running costs.

Of course implementing an ABW is no easy task for a large organisation – it requires capital and motivation to make the change. Yet at the small end of town co-working spaces are becoming popular too, like Hub Melbourne. Just like their larger enterprise counterparts they are also enabled by access to mobile, social, Web-based and cloud information technologies.

It is easy to doubt the transformational impact of information technology in the workplace – including social software – but equally we shouldn’t ignore the symbiotic relationship to the physical workspace. It is the combination of the two that will actualy create a deeper systemic change to how we organise and will allow 3rd Generation Organisations to emerge.

Social Business Design is about the social transformation of work

My question is simple: if we are going to think about our organizations as cities, what can we learn from people who “design” cities for a living? Those “designers” are called planners and their profession is planning. Who are they? What do they do? How do they plan?

via thoughtfarmer.com

For those of us who are look at social technologies as being situated in organisations that we treat as complex human systems, the design of urban environments presents some interesting parallels with the domain of social business design. As introduction to this idea, Gordon’s post about his joint presentation with Thomas Vander Wal at E2Conf Santa Clara 2011 is well worth reading (and looking at). There is plenty of follow up reading in the post too.

Streetfilms – Social Innovation for the Urban Environment

via streetfilms.org

This is just one of many great films on the Streetfilms site.

Streetfilms has its roots in tackling transportation issues in NYC, but has grown and expanded to cover “complex issues like bus rapid transit, parking policy, police enforcement and the spatial inequity of the way our streets are divided” around the world, including Australia. These films are intended to both educate the public and influence policy makers by introducing them to new approaches and methods for making our urban environment more people and community friendly.

I think its also a great example of using rich media and the Web to help spread social innovation stories. Hat tip to Grant Young.