Do you enjoy your work space? Does the space you have created for your teams bring out their best thinking?
Cluttered rooms obstruct clear thinking. For workshops I like to empty the room and organise tables into clusters to facilitate small group discussion. Now and again I will be asked to work with a pile of tables or chairs at the back or down the sides of a room and I always try to have them moved out.
This sometimes takes some work. Years ago, I was given the Council Chambers (Oh my!) at Tygerberg Municipality, in which to work. A dreadful room with a massive square U-shape of tables bolted together with microphones, speakers and buttons for voting. Man! Anyway I was halfway through unbolting the tables and unplugging wiring when an officious little man came in and blew a gasket. Well that time good sense prevailed and we ran our workshop on clusters of tables. And I spent time afterwards rebuilding the monument to officious self-importance.
The space we create for our work sends a very powerful message to the people who use it. Nancy Kline bears this out in her book “Time to Think”. “Place” is one of the Ten Components she defines for a Thinking Environment.
Thinking Environments are places that say to people “you matter”.
My experience of a local banking establishment was similar to Nancy Kline’s. The immaculate carpets, artworks and furnishings provided a similarly thought-stifling environment. And yet, a similar establishment with similar furnishings and artworks, had lots of natural light, a casual cafeteria and a totally different effect on my capacity to think.
Nancy Kline talks about St Luke’s the advertising agency in London and how the people who work there have designed their space to reflect their own spirit. I looked up St Luke’s and found a vibrant, site of a clearly successful organisation. Not a flash in the pan. Check out their blog; The Whole Buffalo
I work with large, medium and small organisations with people who work in cubicles, in coffee shops and in the open air. Each environment sends a subtle and powerful message to the people who arrive there to work. So what message does your environment send? How does your environment affect your thinking? What message does it send to your people? Who designed this space? How was it designed? What can you do to make it a great place to be?
How can you design your place to say to your people “We care about you?”
