Design - as in the design of new environments to work or learn in - is too often seen in isolation from the things that really matter to organisations. Tom Weaver looks at design and the role of space within the organisation, whether commercial or educational, and considers the impact on our day to day lives.
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Vision, Or the Lack of It
In 1993, IBM appointed a new CEO, Lou Gerstner, at a time when IBM had moved from being the dominant technology market player in the 1960s to a dangerously uncompetitive and unprofitable company during the late 1980s. As breakups were proposed, Gestner took the reins and almost immediately provoked worldwide attention when he famously told a press conference that “the last thing IBM needs is a vision”.
He later explained, “Vision statements can create a sense of confidence – a sense of comfort – that is truly dangerous, in and of themselves they are useless in terms of pointed out how the institution is going to turn an aspirational goal into a reality.” (Miller & Muir, The Business of Brands, 2004)
This is a problem that can too often be seen when designing new environments to work or learn in. The school sector, for many years during its PFI era of 1997 to 2005, often found itself accused of designing new buildings with little vision beyond building a new building that leaked less.
Many problems were identified with this time, not the least of which was the fact that schools were not particularly articulating change in terms of progressive learning techniques within their briefs, and that the impact of technology was poorly considered, being somewhat down the supply chain in the hands of the mechanical and electrical engineers.
Building Schools for the Future (BSF), launched in 2004/2005, aimed to solve much of that, and innovations like the NCSL BSF Leadership Programme were launched to support head teachers in becoming more educated clients. BSF gives technology nearly as much weight as design, and increasing emphasis is placed on building for emerging types of learning, such as personalisation, whilst retaining the ability to change and evolve over time.
Yet even in the early days of BSF, Gerstner’s famous words could ably have held true. School visions were proposed, and the sense of confidence induced meant little was done in expressing the strategies and processes by which these visions would be turned into reality. In the absence of coherent change strategies, more new “old schools” have been built, mainly with classrooms designed for teachers to stand in front of 30 children, organised in departments to meet a traditionally structured curriculum. Place had been changed, but not much else had. Design had happened in isolation to what really matter to the organisations at hand: the improving of teaching and learning. Change was restricted to quality on environment and, though worthy, as such was only surface deep.
IBM’s Gerstner went on to affect one of the biggest changes on corporate history, quickly resurrecting one of the world’s biggest companies into profitability and repositioning it as a provider of business solutions, as opposed to a manufacturer of technology. This required a significant but perfectly executed change programme: starting with internal culture, momentum started to build and massive structural and operational improvements were then made.
The positioning of IBM as a provider of business solutions was part of an overall strategy, and it was not until some time later that “V2”, IBMs new vision, was revealed, after in their 2005 annual report, Gerstner now claimed “what IBM really needs right now is a vision”. (IBM Annual Report, 1995)
The point is that though a natural design process may start with vision and work through to designing a place, in truth all these things may evolve in parallel and move each other on – they work in a system. Unfortunately most stakeholders in a design process do not see the broader context of the system and therefore to not fully follow through in changing all elements of their system during a redesign.
Where exactly does design fit into the bigger picture?
During late 2007, I was managing DEGW’s Project Faraday team, a project to redefine from scratch environments to learn science in with UK secondary schools, attempting to free stakeholders from starting with the concept of a lab and improving it, into starting with the concept of the best ways of learning science, and designing the spaces to best support that.
Simultaneously I was preparing for a new role as the Deputy Chief Operating Officer of a residential real estate investment company, for which my first responsibility was to lead the 120 person organisation through its first ever vision and strategy formulation, after nearly four years of trading. Prior to this point, the organisation had not particularly needed a vision or a strategy, as the energy and enthusiasm of its founding entrepreneurs and, later, its early executives, had allowed it to quickly respond to change and build scale.
Yet as the organisation grew and flourished it was increasingly apparent it needed a clear sense of direction. As Michael Watkins once said, “Aligning an organisation is like preparing for a long sailing trip. First you select your destination (the mission and the goals), and your route (the strategy). Then you figure out what boat you need (the structure), how to outfit it (the systems), and the crew mix (the skills). Throughout the journey, you keep an eye out for reefs that are not on the chart.” (Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days, 2003)
At the time, I was pondering on the output of a six year research study by Jim Watkins, published in his book Built to Last, the predecessor to the famous (and brilliant) management text Good to Great. Built to Last had analysed why certain organisations – like IBM – had survived and been profitable over such a long period of time. Much of its findings boiled down to a framework for a vision, including the timeless values and guiding principles of the organisation, combined with a stimulating and regularly evolving “big hairy audacious goal” and a clear understanding of what the organisation would look like when it achieved that goal.
As I was writing up Project Faraday, and reflecting on the processes we had gone through to reach an innovative design solution (that had taken the stakeholders on a journey that far exceeded their expectations and resulted in designs far more fit for purpose for their individual learning strategies), I started reconsidering a key DEGW diagram we had used at the beginning of the project.
People Process Place: DEGW, 1999
The diagram was a powerful one that struck at the root of DEGW’s design philosophy: that in order to design a place, you needed to understand process (what people do, day to day) and people (the particular stakeholders involved, and their organisational culture) and how these, too were changing. Only then could you manage change, at the intersection between people, process and place.
The debate in my head was an interesting one: was this too simple a story? Did it give equal weighting to all three of those items? And were we missing something in the design process?
Having seen firsthand the impact of having no vision in a design process, the gap was clear. Yet, where did vision fit in the context of this system? For, like Gerstner, I was concerned that having a vision might simply provide false comfort that change was occurring, and without the vision being plugged into the rest of the system, how could change really happen? Would we be designing in isolation?
The answer, for me, had equal ramifications both in my organisational visioning work and for Project Faraday. Change happened at a process level: the things we do day by day. If everything else changed, but not this, the change was only in our heads. People were critical, since culture is a significant enabler or disabler of change. And place was part of the story. Though from a design perspective it is a critical part of the jigsaw, in truth it is simply a tool that allows us to get on with process. Place, like culture, enables or prevents activities from occurring. The absence of a suitable environment to work from or learn from is as critical to effectiveness as, today, technology is.
With that in mind, how does vision really change a process? The answer is strategy: the steps to implement a vision which changes your day to day activities.
The Organisational System
This new concept of an organisation system is best expressed below:
The Organisation System: variant of diagram used in DCSF: Project Faraday, 2008
The whole system is a series of interconnecting cogs. Turning one (such as designing new space) affects the others.
Vision sets the direction for the strategy to implement, and gives people the “big picture” that motivates them beyond the day to day. Strategy is the planning that allows the implementation of the vision, and consists of a strategic route, base camps and tactics. Process is the biggest cog as it is what happens for the majority of the time: it is the day to day management and operations of an organisation, or, in a school, the teaching and learning. It implements the strategy.
People are the lifeblood of the organisation. This cog is the culture, attitude and skills of the staff that enable the day to day work to happen. The final cog could be termed “infrastructure”, and consists of Space (the physical location where people are when they are engaged in process) and Technology (the systems that enable day to day work). These will support or constrain the ability of people to implement process.
This all has an impact on results, whether that is making a profit, or giving someone the ability to be successful in their life. Naturally, the biggest wheel, process, has the biggest direct impact on driving results, but results (whether positive or negative) feedback to culture, infrastructure, vision and strategy.
As can be seen from this diagram, it is critical when involved in creating new environments for your organisation not to consider just the solution (the built environment and, perhaps technology) but the problem, to provide a holistic change approach that feeds all the way through from vision to strategy, to people to process, to space and technology.
Real life redesign
An interesting example is the creation of the new HSBC banking centres, within the UK. Over the last few years, HSBC has changed the layout and appearance of almost all of its 1500 UK branches, making them more open-plan and creating space for meetings, Internet access and coffee bars. Barclays are also following suit.
Source: jobs.hsbc.co.uk
The driver is getting customers back into branches, after years of focussing away from real estate solutions towards the internet (even with the launch of an internet/phone only banking division by HSBC, first Direct). As The Times noted, “it is at the counter, not on the internet, that the most expensive financial products, such as insurance and investments, are sold.”
In the context of the organisation system, it is clear there is a lot to change, not just the design of the branches. Driven, then, by a vision to increase the breadth of services sold to customers, many components would have to be changed in sync with the redesign. The strategy, backed up with targets and milestones, would be to attract more customers into stores and to increase their “browsing time”.
Culturally, the staff would have to accept and embrace a more front of house positioning away from the comfort of the back office, with many more staff in front of the protective counters of old. The need for “triage”, a meet and greet that directs you to the most relevant service, would be very new territory to the majority of staff. In fact, nearly all day to day tasks, or process, would be affected.
It has been highly successful, and one of the premier examples of a knowledge economy retail experience.
The Results
Have a vision. Make sure you know how to implement that vision within the strategy. Make sure everyone is driving that vision, culturally. Consider how it will change your day to day work. Then design the best environment to support that and achieve the results you require, whether it is a retail environment like HSBC, commercial workspace, or centre of learning. Remember that it is all a system and all these parts will impact upon each other. But once the machine of results starts turning, hopefully it will never stop.
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