Space & Place – Using the physical to influence the psychological
November 2, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
One of the great challenges in galvanizing a team to achieve new levels of creativity and innovation lies in the intersection between the tangible and the intangible. Missing from the thinking in the realm of innovation and product development is the way in which space not only influences, but directly informs, the quality and productivity of innovation and product development teams. So often the space in which people reside is an afterthought or, if it is considered at all, it reflects organizational hierarchies or norms of behavior defined by functional expertise. In many cases it fosters a silo-based mentality that destroys collaborative solution-seeking activities. Space and place directly prime us to be innovative, or not…
The smell of mystery…and successful innovation
One of the classic uses of space as a way to buoy innovation occurred at the aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) with the formation of their Skunk Works®. It was the height of World War II and Lockheed had been asked to work on a new jet fighter. Given the project to develop Clarence L. “ Kelly” Johnson hand-picked engineers and manufacturing people and housed them in a windowless office with hand-me-down furniture in Burbank, California. Each new team member was cautioned that design and production of the new jet fighter was to be carried out in strict secrecy. No one was to discuss the project with anyone outside the four walls of the facility. The physical space essentially became a clubhouse of sorts (not the first time an innovation team would find that moniker applied.)
The Greeks get bent out of shape
Yet, the manipulation of space in order to evoke a mood, feeling or even inspire is nothing new. For as long as humans have altered the landscape with structures we have used that alteration to influence and change behavior. Sometimes this is conducted overtly. Sometimes and perhaps more commonly this is executed covertly. Take the Parthenon for instance. This Ancient Greek structure sitting above the city of Athens was the crowning architectural element of Grecian society at one point (perhaps even today). It inspired awe with its massive perfection. The only problem is that it wasn’t perfect – at least not in any straight-lined geometrical sense. The Parthenon’s architects and builders understood that if they did not employ entasis, a process for curving straight lines into convex in order to give them the appearance they are straight (yes, really), their crowning achievement would appear to be collapsing in on itself. Not such a stellar way to inspire the masses, right? They understood that if their audience was to see perfection the building must not be “perfect”.
The creatives run amok
Even when we attempt to directly address space as a fundamental support to innovation practices we can misstep. Chiat\Day (now TBWA\Chiat\Day) was at the vanguard of the advertising business in the 1990’s – they were the creators of such classic campaigns as, Apple’s “1984” and “Think Different” and the $30 million Reebok campaign, which centered on the rivalry between decathletes Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson. The founder, Jay Chiat, wanted to unleash creativity in his Venice Beach office (strangely enough, also in California – apparently a hotbed of physical space-related innovation). Key to doing that was Project Chrysalis, a think tank designed to propel the agency away from its current restraints of time and space.
Chrysalis developed the blueprint for the industry’s first “virtual” office, a fully portable, organic workplace that broke with traditional concepts of office use and featured state-of-the-art communications technology. His vision for a virtual office was realized in 1994 as a “clubhouse” (see – back again!) designed by leading architect Frank Gehry to unleash creativity – agency staff were given only portable equipment, cellphones (aka. “bricks”), laptops and the edict to work wherever they wanted as the mood struck them. The intent being to “free” them from the confines of the physical space. Instead of reveling in their new-found un-tethered freedom the staff took to arriving early, commandeering space, and fighting pitched battles over the limited space available. With no personal space to anchor them, everything became a clamor to claim the personal and for some, way too hard. Needless to say the experiment was scrapped.
Today the TBWA\Chiat\Day facility takes a different approach. It is a miniature town with a mix of both “public” and “private spaces” with places to gather and bump-into each other. It even has a Central Park. The opportunity for the “water-cooler” conversation on a wider scale is writ-large across the organization. It is much more conducive to collaboration and creativity, because it is both unlike any office space you might experience, but so familiar in that it draws on very real archetypes. Main Street and the village square are both represented.
The cutting edge of physical systems
One of the most interesting developments in use of physical space to foster and promote specific behaviors and feelings is a marriage of the work of Maturana and Varela, two Chilean biologists, who coined the term “autopoeisis” in 1972, and the work of noted architect Christopher Alexander in the development of what he termed, a “pattern language” in a book he co-wrote with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, with writing credits also to Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel for describing physical space requirements to meet specific needs. The marriage of these concepts is coming to fruition in the work of a graduate student at MIT by the name of Neri Oxman. She has created a body of work around the concept of materialecology:
“…an interdisciplinary research initiative that undertakes design research in the intersection between architecture, engineering, computation, and ecology. As such, this initiative is concerned with material organization and performance across all scales of design thought and practice. As such, it seeks to promote and define a design research agenda which is ecological in nature, in ideology and in material practice; it aims at embracing the evolving elements of change in both (and indeed related) social constructs and environmental descriptions of the ever changing built environment. materialecology undertakes research in advanced digital applications for architectural practice and pursuits – their contribution to a design paradigm promoting generative design processes.”
In this one area of practice, the implications of an holistic approach to the design and creation of space through a multi-disciplinary approach offers not only a framework for supporting innovation, but a frame of reference for what innovation could and should be in vibrant innovation cultures: open, immersive, divergent, exploratory, collaborative, generative, envelope-pushing, and synergistic.
Key questions anyone seeking to foster an innovation culture through the manipulation of physical space should ask themselves are:
Only after consideration of these questions then, and only then, should we step into the breach and begin our work.
Do you see what I see? – on being “primed”
July 24, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Do you see what I see? Yes…and no.
In an earlier post I described an experiment to demonstrate an aspect of priming, termed fundamental attribution error.
It should be noted that the process of attribution has some inherent cultural bias in that more individualist cultures (such as Australia or the United States of America) seem to be more easily influenced by the observed behavior than the setting. In more collectivist cultures (such as Japan or Thailand) where conformity to social norms is a key attribute, the tendency is to look for more environmental and group interaction social cues when assessing reasons for behavior. In both situations we are primed to make up stories to explain why people are behaving in the manner we observe.
This concept also supports an inherent cognitive bias, that of group attribution error. In that case group members appear more likely to attribute the decisions of their own group to its decision rules, while they tend to attribute the decisions of another group to its members’ attitude. “We followed the rules. They cheated.” An interesting perspective on this cognitive theory is how it is being influenced and modified by pervasive “always-on” and “always-connected” technologies. More on that in a later post.
MRI Head Scan/iStockphoto
In this single cognitive theory we see the seeds of how we are “primed”. Being primed describes the preparation for action that comes from participation in organizational systems and in life in general. We need to act, in fact are compelled to act by social necessity. We are primed to learn at a young age. We are primed to engage with others, when we mirror the social interactions of our family. We are primed to make friends and romantic attachments. We are primed to search for meaning and joy. So much of this priming is subconscious. Yet it informs everything. What we perceive, what we do and what we say. Even who we are.
Another interesting aspect of priming is that it exists without an inherent value bias. It is neither good nor bad. Priming simply happens and it is ongoing. Whether we recognize it or not.
With the odds stacked against us in terms of the exercise of our free will how do we combat our hard-wired tendency to go with what we think we know? Well being primed is also an intentional act. We can directly address the way we are primed and the way in which we help prime others so that we can realize the changes we seek. Much in the same way an athlete may mentally prepare for hew event through training and coaching we can also prime ourselves to perceive and respond differently. What we need to understand are the forces at play that are creating perceptions; our self-perception, our perception of others and our perception of reality as we experience it. In understanding those perceptions we can choose to influence them, change them and, yes, eradicate them in the face of better data (or better perceptions!) It is concerned with finding those perceptions that reinforce or hold the greatest sway over how we think, feel and act. When found, it is about challenging them in a systematic and meaningful way to create a better outcome. The end results: better organizations, better innovations and better value creation.
Seeing the world around us
July 23, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · 2 Comments
Our experience of the world is a strange and unique thing.
The perspective we bring to our interpretations of events, the actions of others, and what we witness are essentially personal fictions. For each of us they are as concrete and real as the chair we may be sitting upon and the phone into which we are thumbing text messages. The only trouble with that is that it is a dubious reality. Our experience of our reality is a manifestation of our attention (Where), focus (What), action (How) and interaction (Who/What). Due to constant shifts in those four parameters our reality shifts and, fittingly enough, it seems the reason for this is that we are hard wired to keep telling ourselves lies.
Really.
To explore this we need to take a slight detour into the world of cognitive theory so we can begin to understand what we are up against when we try to change our own behavior, let alone the actions of others, or an organization’s culture. A striking example of our inability to see the world as it is can be seen in realm of attribution theory. The “fundamental attribution error” (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) is a cognitive theory that describes how we are driven to use our perception and assessment of personality-based explanations of observed behaviors, devaluing the situation in which we observe those behaviors, in assessing the motives, capabilities and behaviors of others. In this context a person behaving pleasantly, treating others well, may be considered a polite and considerate individual regardless of the fact that they may only be behaving in this manner because of social etiquette demands.
I had an opportunity to observe a clear example of this bias as part of a presentation on managing risk and uncertainty during the last day of a the delivery of a three day training program. I had read of a simple experiment designed to demonstrate fundamental attribution error and was keen to try it in a live setting. I asked the program attendees to write down a question related to their own area of subject matter expertise. A selection of questions related to the risk associated with their expertise were to be asked by ten randomly selected participants and answered by me. Before beginning the process of answering the sampled questions I asked the group to decide how many questions they thought I would answer correctly. The average was seven. The group then selected the first person to ask a question who, after I had failed to provide the correct response, selected the next person from the group to ask a question and so on until ten questions had been asked and answered. The end result, one out of ten was answered correctly.
Why the difference between expectations and outcome? It’s a matter of how they had been primed over the duration of the course.
Where you stand is also how your seen
Essentially, the group made a fundamental attribution error based on their experience of me as a subject matter expert leading their program for three days. I had been the primary provider of their learning experience, guiding and teaching them, and at times successfully fielding quite challenging questions. As a consequence when asked to “test” their perception of my capabilities they extended my personal demonstrated subject matter expertise to an understanding of their own.
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