Greg Lindsay's Blog

November 05, 2015  |  permalink

My Foreword To AECOM Strategy Plus’ 2014/2015 Annual Review

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AECOM’s Andrew Laing – the global practice leader for the firm’s Strategy Plus unit, formerly known as DEGW – asked me to contribute the foreword to this year’s Annual Review, which you can download in its entirety here. But I’ve taken the liberty of re-posting my thoughts on the future of work and the office below, some of which might sound familiar…

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As someone who hasn’t worked in an office in more than a decade, I possess a unique perspective on the future of work, especially as it pertains to Strategy Plus. You see, I’m an accidental savant who read Frank Duffy’s Work and the City as my primer in office design. When 2008 is Year Zero in your understanding of how to work, the following propositions start to make a lot of sense:

Workspaces create value, not costs. It should be obvious to anyone invested in innovation that realizing complex ideas demands collaboration, that collaboration requires communication, and workspaces shape how we communicate. They’re more important than any org chart. But try telling that to companies obsessed with “wasted” space.

If clients will only manage what they can measure, then measure it. Again, this is obvious. But it’s also maddeningly difficult – how does one prove the value of a coffee machine? Perhaps this is where sensors and “sociometric badges” will come in. The first test of a quantified organisation should be learning how its office works.

Your workspace should conform to you. Someone once demonstrated to me the 500 possible office layouts they’d generated for a client, who would pick one and keep it for at least a decade. This is nuts. Workspaces should continuously evolve to support workers – call it the real-time office.

Ecosystems need membranes, not walls. No enterprise is an island, as it belongs to an “ecosystem” of partners, suppliers, and customers. This is conventional wisdom for Harvard Business Review subscribers, but it rarely manifests in the office. Workspaces should be permeable, welcoming outsiders while freeing mobile employees.

Serendipity trumps efficiency. Those outsiders bring the potential for serendipity, i.e. unplanned ideas or encounters that result from the discovery of tacit knowledge – the hunches and expertise that can’t be written down. These moments and meetings are the seeds of something new and unknowable, and thus can’t be factored into metrics measuring efficiency.

The city is not an extension of the office. That’s reversing the relationship: the office is merely one island in a sea of places to work. Duffy knew in 2008 that we would never realise the full potential of mobile workers without understanding that the scale had changed. Seven years later, we still haven’t.

Free HR, FM, and IT! All of these changes are predicated on radically different roles for what are traditionally powerless back-office functions. Who should be working together, where and how are all strategic questions and should be treated as such.

But then again, you knew this already. What Duffy envisioned in 2008, Strategy Plus is creating today.

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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