Such wonderful responses! I particular like the emphasis on the importance of *how* open plan offices are implemented.
I like to think about evolutionary processes. One common model in evolutionary theory is the fitness landscape, sort of a distribution of peaks and valleys, with some peaks much higher than others, the height corresponding to *fitness *according to some criterion (in standard evolutionary accounts differential reproductive success, but it could be anything including *work productivity *or *work satisfaction*). Each peak is a "local optima", the peak of fitness before the system needs to descend to some less fit state before it can ascend to an even more fit local optima somewhere else on the landscape/distribution. For evolutionary processes there is a big challenge to get from one peak to another. Presumably we've had a lot of time to co-evolve work styles and architectural systems to suit one another using closed-plan offices, leading to a kind of closed-plan office fitness peak. The ideal open-plan office / work style combo might have a much higher peak, but given the time we've had for the cultural evolution of closed-plan offices, maybe we should expect open-plan offices to struggle in comparison for some time, moving down in fitness before they can move back up to a new local optima that might be much "fitter" overall. I wonder how much this is a standard issue with cultural change from some long-standing tradition. Maybe I shouldn't have shared that out loud :), but a couple of the posts here got me thinking about this. On Thursday, November 21, 2013 10:56:29 AM UTC+1, Will Bennis, Locus Workspace wrote: > > > http://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/nov/18/open-plan-offices-bad-harvard-business-review<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fnews%2F2013%2Fnov%2F18%2Fopen-plan-offices-bad-harvard-business-review&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEKtU8vR-omH_T_hqzXQqQ-dHpVbw> > > Putting this out there because I suspect what gets posted is generally > filtered toward the "coworking positive". > > While cubicles are the worst, this article is about shortcomings of > open-plan offices more generally. > > Putting aside the obvious fact that even if open-plan offices aren't for > everyone, they're certainly preferred by many of us, my existing bias has > been that most independent workers would do better (in terms of > psychological health as well as productivity and work quality) over the > long run in a social work environment than in a private/enclosed office. > But articles like this make me wonder if that really is just my own bias. > > Most of the findings suggested are contrary to what I would expect for > independent workers, and I wonder how much the results here may be > contingent on working in an organization (where being in an open plan > office also corresponds to being lower in the work hierarchy and where many > of the people you're working alongside are implicit competitors). > > Thoughts? Where does this article go wrong (other than suggesting one size > fits all)? Does it suggest that ideal coworking space design would work > include ample opportunities for more private work and more isolated > collaboration? > > Will > -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
