Facing challenges such as COVID-19 and climate change requires easy collaboration across borders and disciplines. Jörg Boner and Patrick Frick lay out how the workspace should be reimagined to finally bring out the best in us.
Collaboration is our ability to co-create. Today, that ability is in high demand. At the same, it is becoming more difficult to cooperate, as we find ourselves privately isolated and politically polarized. The need for this cooperation stems from the new common challenges we face – COVID-19 and climate change being only two of the most pressing ones. For us to come up with solutions, we need to find new ways to combine the expertise of individuals in many different organizations. We need to find means of interacting across disciplines, hierarchies, geographies and sectors. And when it comes to addressing societal issues, we must reach out to different groups of belief and class.
This is a very different playbook from the past. It challenges us to rethink institutional boundaries – even more concretely, it requires us to reimagine the spaces of interaction, the places where we meet, as new theatrical stages. We believe that this is the context that shapes our thinking when it comes to conceiving workspaces in the future.
The importance of the common space
The good news is that we know a thing or two about what makes collaboration work. It can be made easier in three ways: (1) use a facilitator or facilitation team that (2) uses proven collaborative methods; and (3) operate in spaces equipped with adequate tools that enable interaction rather than hindering it. We have already developed vast expertise in facilitation and created a large body of proven processes or methods. However, the development of workspaces that are optimized for collaboration seems to be somehow straggling. Why is that? And why is this a problem?
‘Most workplaces have been designed to maximize efficiency regardless of the effect on the lives and spirits of the people who spend most of their waking hours at work,’ argues Rob Evans in The Collaboration Code. The office has its roots in the age of industrialization, which is why many workspaces resemble a factory. Over time the office started to evolve by parcelling out the factory floor into different zones like meeting rooms, community space or single workstations. Each zone had to be dedicated to a specific type of work or alternate purpose, and played a specific role in the production of goods and services.
Over the past 20 years, our offices have started to resemble our homes more and more. But regardless of the improved look and feel of an office, the underlying concept is still borrowed from the 19th-century factory model. And it has proven hard to reinvent. It is meant to produce linear work, and is supposed to support activities that are predictable, constraint in scope and task-focused.
Collaboration does not thrive in such an environment. Why? The factory floor is designed to separate us from one another, to divide us into parts of a value chain. And the concept of making the workplace feel more like home added the design principle of seclusion. Home is a place to which we retreat. It is a place where we live our private lives. And for many, the private is sacred. But working together requires the exact opposite. It requires us to leave our private space, our cubicle office, our place in the value chain, and step into a common space. It is in such a space where we meet one another; learn of each other's intentions and feelings. It is where life between us happens, where we imagine new possibilities. Both the factory floor and the home office take away that interpersonal exchange and encounter without which collaboration is severely hindered.
Therefore the challenge is: How do we repurpose and redesign workspaces so that they provide people with a common space? How do we start conceptualizing and building workspaces that facilitate the kind of collaboration required to answer today’s challenges adequately?