The Innovation Correllation : Design Strategies for Fostering Creativity in the Workplace By Rhiannon Fleming Architecture Business Unit Summer 2013
All innovative organizations are not the same,
Zynga, SF
just as “Innovation Hubs” and “Creative Offices” are not one size fits all. Creative work, an inspired, tinkering, problem-solving, sometimes messy and really analytical kind of process, is still work. A “creative workspace”, “innovation center” or any other branded version of space purporting to be where innovation and creativity happens, may have lost sight that creativity is inherently a people-based happening. An architectural environment can be designed to support creativity, but it may not come in the forms that readily come to mind when we think of creative workplaces. It is too reductive and superficial to design workspaces for more traditional professions like lawyers and accountants one way and “just add fun” when the client is considered to be more creativity driven. Here at MKThink, we implement a strategic process for designing workspaces that involves really getting to know our clients’ needs. It is one thing to figure out through focus groups, surveys and careful observation how people work, but designers should try to understand the intricacies of creative minds, that are inherently the most valuable assets of any innovative organization. Creative work spaces function better if they were designed to foster not the ethereal concept of creativity, but the workflow and process of the specific people who create the ideas and products of innovation. The strategy for designing effective workplaces that foster creativity begins by effectively separating what is an affectation of branding within the space from the needs and workflow of the creative workers. If the design is process oriented, creative workers will be more able to harness their creative flow, be more productive and raise the overall level of innovation within an organization. The demand for sleek, cool, flashy and even fun-house style workplaces is growing as more tech companies dream of being the next Google and Twitter. Creative work is not just regular work with fun grafted on, so we, as designers, need to make sure we don’t impede that process with design assumptions that don’t fit. Not every organization has the culture of Google just as creative people are nuanced by as many personality types, work styles and creative processes as the ideas they create. That slide may not fit the culture of another organization as much as one person’s fun and inspiring creative environment can be another’s distracting and counter-productive nightmare.
Breaks are good for everyone’s productivity, so don’t lose the fun entirely. Not to outlaw the ping pong table, there is some value in the playroom style atmosphere that employers provide for creative workers. In The Mind at Work and Play, Englefield describes the creative mind as a layering, filing system of experience and information, ready to be drawn from, reorganized and made into new combinations of before unrelated concepts and, essentially, innovations. Creative minds are gathering facts all the time, prepared to make analogies and inspired snaps. In Snap : Seizing Your Aha! Moments, Katherine Ramsland explains that if people get stuck on a concept that isn’t quite working yet and they change their physical location and do another unrelated task or activity, they actually change the neural paths in their brains, allowing for the prepared mind of an inspiring moment. The act of throwing their bodies out of the rut will sometimes cause their minds to jump the rut as well.
Huffington Post
If creativity was only about flashes of inspiration, we could design nothing but playgrounds and arcades for our clients, but the real challenge is how creative people take these flashes of inspiration and make them into real, working innovations. Let’s accept that creativity is not always an extroverted, entirely collaborative undertaking Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking says one third to one half of the population (depending on the study) are introverts. Introverts are valuable members of a creative team because they are more likely to process a problem longer, with higher intensity and problem-solving than their extroverted counterparts, allow for external advice and feedback on work in progress more freely and make fewer rash decisions.
Conversely, they require spaces to recharge after louder collaborations and meetings. Small talk tends to distract and distress them more than it does extroverts. Introverts can also be strong leaders because they tend to be more receptive to the ideas of their team members, do and make conscientious and inclusive decisions about projects after processing all of the factors involved. Cain advocates for a bridging between introverts and extroverts. The two sides should no longer see each other as either shy and sensitive or loud and pushy, but find a productive middle ground where introverts can feed off the enthusiasm of extroverts and the introverts can shine by adding a reasonable amount of caution and diligence to the mix. Thus, we need spaces that allow for the quiet workspaces introverts need for recharging and engaging collaborative spaces for exchanging ideas with their extroverted counterparts without entirely coddling the needs of one type. Cain advocates for
introverts respecting, but challenging their comfort zones as well as extroverts listening more carefully to their more soft spoken peers. Workers are more productive when being at work is comfortable and engaging. There are two different ideals put forth in Gensler’s publication “Focus in the Workplace” and Perkins+Will’s Janice Barnes in “Not Your Parents’ Workplace: Thoughts on Designing For Innovation”, which I think are too polarizing. Gensler’s study explores the nature of work and the struggle to maximize the comfort and productivity of workers. The author states that “The workplace in any of its past and current iterations—open office, cubicle farms, warrens of private offices—has never been adept at supporting the delicate balance of intense focus and rich collaboration required by knowledge workers who aim to thrive”, which captures that any formulaic approach to workspaces will inevitably create unproductive work environments for at least part of the workforce. What Gensler advocates is a balance between the open, more collaborative spaces and those that support quiet, often solitary, focus work. It divides the work experience into four “Work Modes” : Focus, Collaborate, Learn and Socialize, while maintaining that
these modes have overlaps as well as integral connections between them. Allowing workers time to focus makes for more successful collaboration, learning can come from social and collaborative sources and the social situations can bond teams so that all areas of work become more rewarding. Continuing the argument about balancing focus time with collaborative time continues as Perkins+Will’s Janice Barnes writes that “The real opportunity for workplace strategy is to challenge traditional modes of thinking about focus and to find a means to build zest, bounce ideas and drive innovation” in her blog entry “Not your Parents’ Workplace”. She argues that knowledge based work has become too complicated for one person to work on alone, but by really energized teams of employees who “thrive from the mutual interdependence of a shared goal” in a “mutually interdependent team that was thriving in its own juice. It wasn’t quiet at all. Just the opposite, in fact; it was buzzing. It had zest. We want more of that because the level of personal engagement, team energy, and company innovation were mutually intertwined. They were winning”. Sounds great if all of the team members are wildly extroverted, multi-tasking team players with absolute conviction that all of their ideas will be heard without judgement or embarrassment, but it is important
Gensler’s “Focus in the Workplace”
to remember that some people would find that workstyle disruptive. That strategy sounds like the makings for mass exodus among the introverted members of these teams. Gensler’s approach sounds more slanted towards respecting the introverted, quiet-seeking types, while Perkins+Will’s argument suggests turning the workplace into an extrovert’s paradise. When did the workplace become a two party system? Designing an entirely open office or a cubicle farm is a homogenizing force and nothing kills creativity more than bland uniformity. An informed design would blend spaces effectively and allow for unprescribed access to the right spaces for each type of worker because the workers preferences were actually consulted.
Venables Bell & Partners, SF
Positive inner work life as a factor to productivity. In the The Progress Principle, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, the authors outline their extensive research into the “Inner Work Life”. By finding ways to get the employees of seven innovative companies to share their internal reactions to the daily events, both positive and negative, they discovered that the wins and setbacks of the employee’s projects had huge effects on how valuable and meaningful they found their work and hugely impacted their ability and desire to innovate. Sounds simple, but the nuances of how these employees viewed their managers and therefore how valued they felt their own work was had either bountiful effects on morale and productivity or sparked a collective inner coup against management, decimating their ability to think, create and succeed. Amabile’s work focused mainly on the effects of managerial tactics, but the spatial application is foreseeable in her results. If the decisions management made about the autonomy of the workers, the tone of feedback on their projects and the support systems necessary for producing the work had an effect on productivity because it caused changes in the emotions, perceptions and motivation of the individual employees, decisions made in the design of the workplace could have drastic effects as well. Workers produce more meaningful work when they are satisfied, satisfaction is directly influenced by inner work life, inner work life improves when workers think they are making progress so, the spaces where people work facilitating smooth project progress ties right in. If a space is designed in a way that communicates branding more than ease of use for workers, they can jump to conclusions about their worth versus the outward appearance an organization want to portray. Of the seven organizations she studied, Amabile found them either supporting, or not supporting the creative workers’ needs in their innovative process. Successful companies encouraged creativity and autonomy, allowing them the freedom to make choices in how they accomplished their workplace goals. Spatially, this could translate to having the right series of environments available and the freedom to choose the desired one at the effective time in project
Design Considerations
coders
graphic designers
variability of workers Organization culture image values
creatives executives
development and implementation. It was a chosen process and not a prescribed one, which was key to the autonomy and overall motivation of the individual. These satisfied, refreshed and motivated individuals were then able to bring back to their teams this zeal and the spirit of productivity was infectious. As a workplace design principle, the overall culture of an organization, the branding goals of the space and how teams and individuals accomplish their innovative goals must work in conjunction to provide spaces that are symbiotic to all of these things at once. Getting it wrong means getting in the way of progress.
Chiat/Day HQ, Los Angeles
Working within the confines of human behavior - an ethnographic approach instead of a prescribed approach In “Team spaces and Collaboration : Links to the Physical Environment”, a report by the Center for the Built Environment, researchers made interesting observations about the design goals of five workplaces in the Sun Microsystems organization. Their spaces were designed around the premise that new ways of working demanded a different approach. No longer were forward-looking companies organizing their spaces around the hierarchy of their workers, with private office square footages being decided by rank. The design trend was to break down the barriers between workers and management, encouraging collaboration, teamwork over individual work and the flexibility that technology could offer to work processes. In order to foster innovation, the design strategy was: To create spaces so that “collaboration and innovation is enhanced when there are a greater variety of physical spaces that enable spontaneous interactions as well as formal planned meetings” (CBE, 4). They also allowed for
Spatial Motivation by Task
Balancing Working Conditions
?
determine ideal working conditions and balance the needs of each type
Process is place-based, as creatives will gravitate towards the places that better meet their needs for each stage of a project.
Creative work adds a new layer of complexity to the workforce
interspersed “team spaces”, a work-anywhere atmosphere enabled by portable work tools like laptops and cell phones, and flexible, reconfigurable work spaces. This design concept was growing in popularity in 2000, when the CBE released their findings. The freedom to work anywhere, have constant collaboration in order to fuel the teams’ creative energy and flexible spaces seems like the autonomy Amabile advocates for, but, in practice, the spaces were prescribed for one use and utilized in another manner. They found that people were working in teams far less than they were doing solitary work and that teams meeting in the spaces adjacent to solitary work were hyperaware that they may be distracting their peers and became less effective in team meetings because they felt less free to speak. What the workers really needed was more spaces for closed door, planned meetings. They commented, “the differences between the deep structure of teams have important implications for spatial design, including co-location of team members, support tools, information sharing space, amount of space devoted to solitary versus group activities, the nature of boundaries and enclosure, and degrees of permanence versus flexibility of spatial configurations. For instance, in one study, a team based environment with layouts that permitted people to see others’ work had product cycle times 4.4 times faster than those with traditional layouts” (CBE, 5). If the designers for Sun’s workspaces had more carefully studied the actual team patterns before implementing a cultural shift, in deciding that teams needed more spontaneous interactions instead of designing to how the teams really worked, they
would have experienced better results. Keeping up the appearance of constant collaboration may have won out over the preferences of the workers and their ability to innovate. As a case study within a case study, the CBE compares Clive Wilkinson’s design for the Chiat/Day in Los Angeles and New York. Chiat/Day is critiqued for boldly breaking from established work patterns with its workplace design that intended to “reduce status distinctions, increase collaboration, build collective intelligence, improve quality of work, produce better/quicker products, raise the technology competence of employees and give employees the freedom to work wherever they wanted” (CBE,6). The employees were not allowed to have permanent work spaces and used lockers and red wagons to store and transport their paperwork each day to their work space. Sounds like autonomy again, but it wasn’t the mix of team rooms, private spaces, clubhouses and coffee nooks that affected the employees the most. While they did see “ increases in communication, better coordination within groups, sense of team spirit and increased access to employees at all levels in the organization”, the design did create problems. Because people were not allowed to use the same space day to day and their peers were expected to “police” people who got too “nested”, workers would arrive earlier and earlier in the work day to stake out the best spots. In addition, it was really hard to locate people since no one was allowed to be in the same place day to day. While Wilkinson’s design was a radical move against the status quo, he may have discounted the established work patterns present in their
organization and people’s varying abilities to accept change. Again, this may have been and extroverted decision that highly affected the more stability-seeking portion of the workforce.
Mozilla, SF
Be bold, but be informed: Strategies for discovery The ideal design for a creative workplace is as varied as its culture and its most important assets; the people who ideate and implement their innovations. How do you design for the unique needs of such a varied group of workers that may evolve in character and numbers over time? You ask a lot of the right questions, assume nothing that fosters creativity in one place is the right cultural fit for another, which may really be checking our designer’s ego, and taking a good, clear look at the people who do the day to day work. I advocate for a design strategy that combines a careful study of an organization’s culture and goals for the future, the branding needs of the space and, most importantly, a study of worker types, patterns and creative process. Our goal is not to get in the way of creativity, so a “first do no harm” approach is key, followed closely by a concerted effort to get to know the client. It is dismissive to merely make an effort to understand the an organization’s leaders, as the people in the open workstations equally, but arguably more, who deserve our attention. A large part of what makes an organization’s culture is the unique mix of its employees. A client described staffing their organization as “a war for talent” as achieving this balance is key to their future success. Good.co is a startup matchmaker of sorts between workers and employers, finding the psychological indicators present in workers and making assumptions, based on these indicators, what types of oranizations offer them the same cultural fit. With a sliding scale rating system, users can show their tendencies on a spectrum, with the combination of those spectrums resulting in their unique “archetype”. On the surface, they seem like more nuanced versions of Meyers-Briggs, accounting for introversion, agreeableness and so on, but really, they are questions that get to core values. Keeping it light, the questions range from “An Ideal vacation day is: A day at the beach or a day white water rafting?”, which would determine how adventurous a person is to “You would prefer: A signed contract or a standing ovation?”, which could determine if a person is motivated more by the thrill of a job well done or the thrill of recognition. This method could be applied to work process by seeing what factors spatially motivate a worker to perform part of their creative process in a certain location. The main points of interest would be the following spectrums: • Requirements for focus - from alone in a quiet room with the door shut, to hiding in plain sight by working in coffee shops or other public places, to a boisterous work environment mixed with their
Design Hierarchy
Workplace as Branding
Organization’s Culture and Goals
Core Creative Workers’ Process and Needs
The Good.co Method The website leads you through a series of questions that assess your motivations, strengths, work styles and personality type to get to your “Unique Archetype Blend”
Next, with the same spectrum sliding scale questions, they assess the company archetype that you work for and whether or not it is a compatible pairing.
These “Fit Scores” can be found by answering questions about the members of your project teams, companies you may be interested in.
team members and other co-workers. • Time requirements and balance between collaborative time and private time in order to process concepts • Size of teams that maximize collaboration, but their ideas don’t feel lost in the shuffle. • Preferred methods of communication with team members (email, spontaneous interactions, planned meetings, informal chats) Further investigation through pre-design surveys would focus on the creative process. A creative type becomes successful because they have a rigorous practice that works for them. If asked open-ended questions about their sequence in a one-time survey, it would make it clearer what types of spaces the worker uses and how often. If this is
the person that hides all day in any available phone booth and emerges for a scheduled meeting, offers significant improvements on a design, collaborates freely and then goes back to a hiding space to implement the updated version, it should be considered in the ultimate design. Going back to Amabile’s research that the subtle decisions managers make that affect workers will cause them to jump to all sorts of conclusions about the overarching themes of their employment applies to the built environment as well. If organizations make a concerted effort to design towards the specific needs of their workers, it will not go unnoticed amongst the staff. Morale, impressions and overall productivity can be boundless when a workforce thinks their management cares enough to value their needs and a satisfied worker will approach even their least favorite tasks
Organizational Strategies
Less about “conference room”
more about spatial motivators
proximities, overlaps, neighborhoods
or grouped by project
with more zeal if they feel they are valued and respected overall. I interviewed an eclectic range of creative workers from writers and visual artists to architects and interactive designers. While their creative process varied greatly, common themes kept emerging when they were asked about the intricacies of their practice. They spoke a lot about how they achieve the right levels of focus for the particular stage of a project. Interestingly, of the people who could or had to work outside of an office environment, some people would have different motivations for being in the same place. A writer loved working at various outdoor eateries and bar patios, but carefully chose ones where she could be anonymous, conversely an architect loved to talk to anyone and everyone at the brainstorming stage of a project in these same types of spaces with the feeling that any interaction could become an inspiration for a project. One interior designer wanders the multi-disciplinary studios in close proximity to her workstation with the idea that the more varied her impressions of others’ work is, the more informed her own designs can be. The really revealing insights came from an interactive designer working for a prominent Innovation Center in the Bay Area. He described, step by step, how he works back and forth between small teams utilizing group tables and whiteboards and individually, where he struggles to get enough work surface to jump back and forth between his
sketchbook, writing pad and computer. There even seems to be a friendly turf war going on as multiple teams vie for the best team spaces. Certain whiteboards are more valued than others because they are in better proximity and able to be claimed and unerased for long enough to complete their prototyping notes. This workspace was designed within the last few years specifically to foster creativity and innovation, but if they had these specific processes in place before the remodel, they didn’t get fully realized within the space. These interviews, which totaled only nine, provided valuable insight, but they can merely be anecdotal to determining the future design of creative offices. Assuming we could build a design around the needs of nine people who don’t actually work in the same space would be as dismissive as a ping-pong-table-equals-success approach, but it was amazing what I learned about peoples’ process just by simply asking. While the practices of these nine can speak to the particular nuances of their creativity, we really need a refined system for gathering the data within an existing organization and realizing it as a design strategy. I am wildly excited to see the innovations designers could foster by simply asking questions and making creative workplaces work with creative workers instead of making them adjust around our assumptions. -Rhiannon Fleming Produced as an MKThink Research Project
Stages of Innovative Organizations
most likely to benefit from ethnographic studies of their creative workforces
Emerging
• Small group of people • Not a lot of structure in place • Culture not defined • Offices are not highly designed
Growing
• More established, larger workforce • Culture defined • Identity and Branding somewhat developed • Workplace becomes a part of branding and identity shown to future clients and investors • There is a need to appear like they are continuously innovating, not just that they are benefiting from a great start-up product.
Established
• Very established and potentially very large workforce • Branding and Identity highly designed and integrated • Workplace becomes a large part of branding and identity • Highly interested in remaining innovative and using “anti-dinosaur tactics” to keep the market edge on the other, younger stages, of organizations
Diagrams by Teresa Amabile
Teresa Amabile’s work ties a positive inner work life amongst creative workers to their ability to feel like they do valued and meaningful work with fewer setbacks on their projects. Further, workers’ perceptions about their workplace will affect their ability to be creative.
Works Cited : “360.” 360 Research Resources Steelcase Amplify Your Innovation Quotient The New IQ Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Aug. 2013. Amabile, Teresa, and Steven Kramer. The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review, 2011. Print. Brown, J. S., and P. Duguid. “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation.” Organization Science 2.1 (1991): 40-57. Print. Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012. Print. Englefield, F. R. H., George Albert Wells, and D. R. Oppenheimer. The Mind at Work and Play. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1985. Print. “Focus On Focus - Workplace Strategy and Design - Gensler.” Focus On Focus - Workplace Strategy and Design Gensler. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Aug. 2013. “Gensler Releases 2013 U.S. Workplace Survey, Finds Only 1 in 4 U.S. Workers Currently Work in Optimal Workplace Environments | Gensler.” Gensler. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Aug. 2013. Ramsland, Katherine M., and Deborah Blum. Snap: Seizing Your Aha! Moments. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012. Print. Thomas, Douglas, and John Seely. Brown. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. [S.l.]: [s.n.], 2011. Print. “Not Your Parents’ Workplace: Thoughts on Designing For Innovation.” Ideas Buildings. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Aug. 2013. Icon credits in part to TheNounProject