What's Next ?   Dr.Francis Duffy/Founder Despina Katsikakis/ Managing Partner Worldwide Francis Duffy Despina Katsikakis DEGW, a world leader in office design and consulting, has designed many leading-edge offices, some of which were covered in ECIFFO 34 and are still fresh in the memory of our readers. In this issue, the first in the 21st century, ECIFFO interviewed Francis Duffy, Founder, Despina Katsikakis, Managing Partner, Worldwide, and Andrew Harrison, Director of Research & Methods, focusing on the future of the office and the current challenges it faces. At present, it seems that there is a gap between the supply side and the demand side in terms of facilities. For example, even if the client wants to change its organization, the outsourced staff deliver only routinized conventional services. On the other hand, developers, looking only at costs, cannot do good buildings. And, on the design side, the star system has not diminished. But changing an organizational culture requires a lot of collaboration and a very different kind of service. You must give equal value not only to space but to IT and human resources and approach them in a systematic way. This requires lateral connections inside the organization, which doesn't happen naturally but has to be fought for. In order to achieve this change, it's important to understand what is required and what is different from the previous situation. In other words, there must be survey work and in the process of research there must be mass democratic involvement. A Building Broadcasts Messages Sent by Organization We can learn from the success stories. Boots The Chemists is a very good example. Its main objective was not the buildings but the new culture. And indeed it served as a very good tool to reconstruct its organizational culture. This sort of thing can only be possible when conditions are ripe and the supply side can respond to that kind of demand. We at DEGW offer not only design services but also change management as well as research. We organize communication programs so that people understand what's happening. There is nothing stronger than the physical environment to broadcast and sustain a message about cultural values. The architecture says, "We want to be open," "We want to value our customers." An organization changes when it is in some crisis or there is some sense of urgency. I was in San Francisco last week, working on the headquarters office for Charles Schwab, the retail stockbrokers. If they keep growing, possibly to four times as large as they are now in the next two years, they have to find ways of reinventing their culture instantly, because they are going to have to hire new people. The only way to transmit their culture is not to move people around but to have a physical structure which says, "This is the culture of Schwab." Architectural design becomes strategically very important. In Knowledge-based Economy People Should Interact at All Levels A whole new generation of workforce are much more comfortable to exist in virtual communities. That is putting a lot of challenges on office environments, because it is no longer about the office being contained within a building. We are doing a new project called "The City Is the Office." You can say one quadrant of the whole working environment could be the home and another quadrant can be trains, planes or cars. The actual office is simply one of those quadrants. However, developers and providers still think on a bricks and mortar basis. They don't think of multiple environments. So suddenly you have the demand side needing a seamless framework and the supply side struggling to provide a very fixed asset. What we did with the BBC was to look at how to attract people and where and how they wanted to work. In order to create spaces more closely linked to business, we did ten pilot projects across all the different business areas. What is important is that our project started not from a building but from helping create a vision about what the BBC would be in 2020. You first start by visioning the organization and testing certain assumptions against the space, the change management that needs to happen within a culture and the different technology solution that needs to be implemented. All the work we have been doing for Accenture (previously Andersen Consulting) is moving to a whole new generation. It's called New Generation Flexible Workplace. It has started breaking down the boundary of just looking at office environments being supplied by developers or real estate agents. We are looking at things like joint ventures with universities. From Seeing to Trusting-A Shift of Human Management Accenture has a joint venture with the United Airlines to use part of UA lounges as their offices. This is a very interesting scenario, because suddenly you are creating nodes within transports. Transport providers become more than transport providers. What we talked about at Accenture is how you manage people, how you need to make a transition from seeing people to believing that those working at homes or in distant areas will deliver what they need to deliver, without actually seeing them. What's important is a combination of trust and the ability to train people to be in more power. Face-to-face Interaction Increases As a Network of People Increases Our network of people is increasing daily. You can achieve certain amount of communication through technology, but there is a critical moment when you actually need face-to-face interaction particularly for creative idea generation. Therefore, the more we use IT, the more face-to-face contact we have. In near future, workers will be given a laptop and a mobile phone and that is your office. The computer system brings you everything you need. If you need a space, you simply book it. If you need to travel, you book it. You start from the lifestyle and then develop the different nodes of physical environment that individuals need to access. In all the projects we are doing, we establish what the appropriate mixing in an organization is, and what the appropriate cultural tolerance is. But you can't look at an organization in which everyone is working in the same way. What required are to set degrees of freedom of territoriality and to create the right infrastructures for services to support all the degrees of change. (an excerpt from ECIFFO 38 March 31, 2001)