Novel and Adaptive Thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based

Ask yourself these questions:

• When was the last time you had a brilliant idea at the place where you work?
• What precipitated that idea?
• When was the last time you had a brilliant idea while outside the place where you work (at home, on a walk, cycling, relaxing, in the garden)?
• Where were you when you had your best idea?

I know for myself that the answers to these questions are significant and point away from the workplace being a great place to think.

We’ve talked before about the changing work activities, particularly in the west, and the skills needed. This is leading to a concentration of jobs that require high-skill and abstract thinking. If it can be done by rote or by rule then it’s likely to be off-shored or automated.

The ability to see situations differently, to create unique solutions, to generate responses that are innovative has always been highly valued, never more so than now.

Brian Mathews, Virginia Tech tells this story:

How can we make the floors cleaner? That’s the question that Proctor & Gamble asked its chemists. Years of working on this problem, however, yielded no improved cleaning solution.

So Proctor & Gamble took a different approach and hired a design firm. Rather than focusing on chemical improvements, the designers watched people clean. Observations uncovered the real problem: mops. People spent more time cleaning their mops than they did cleaning their floors. The mop was an ineffective tool for the task at hand.

This insight led to the development of the Swiffer—a billion-dollar product line for Proctor & Gamble. The lesson learned is that innovation isn’t simply about asking the right questions; it’s also involves framing questions differently. Our approach to problems is affected by the manner in which they are presented. To the chemist, a cleaner floor was a scientific problem, while to the designer it was a human problem.

It’s vital that we are able to shift perspectives when we need to generate different types of results. If our thinking is too narrow then we may miss breakthroughs. How we formulate problems is just as important as how we solve them. In fact, our ability to discover and translate problems may well be the

There’s a joke that a consultant is someone who you pay to tell you what you already knew and charging you for the privilege. While there is a certain truth in the joke, there is also the reality that people can get stuck in standard ways of thinking about things and bringing in an external viewpoint can help frame the question more widely.

Bringing in someone external can only be a temporary fix though, the real challenge is in building cultures and working environments that reduces group-think and encourage adaptive thinking perspectives.

One group of people who have always been measured on their ability to be inventive and to constantly see things through a different framework are the artists.

The traditional home of an artist is a studio.

The Studio of the Future

What are the characteristics of a studio that makes it a place of creativity for an artist?

When I think of an artist studio I imagine somewhere with mystique. I’m not an artist and I’ve never really understood these places of creativity, but I recognise the results that they produce.

There’s a gallery of different studios here, to get you thinking.

As I consider it there are characteristics to the artist studio that might help us to understand how to build workplaces that support novel and adaptive thinking:

Flexible

Every artist studio I have ever seen has had a very limited amount of fixed equipment. Where they have been fixed it has been because of necessity; the furnace in a glass blowing studio can’t be moved easily.

Light

Light is significant issue for all artists, but not just because of the practical need to see what you are doing. Light has a massive impact on productivity and it’s become universally understood that working in a windowless office is both bad for productivity and bad for creativity.

Personal

Most of the studio spaces I can think of have a personal element to them. There is something of the individual artist embedded in the place.

Open

While not universally the case most artist studios are created to enable the most open space. There is often a lot of what you might call white-space.

Tidy and Disorganised

There’s a level of organisation to an artist studio that could be regarded as both tidy and disorganised. Artists don’t operate clean desk policies as a norm. There are often pieces of half-finished work and objects of curiosity in various places, but they are rarely a complete mess.

Quiet

The control of sound is just as important as the control of light. I talked a good deal about that last time. I haven’t really focussed, yet, on electronic noise that comes from all the gadgetry that we let into our lives, but I will. It’s enough to say, at this point, that concentration requires focus and we gain focus in quiet places. The present and future challenge to quiet spaces is our insistence on taking our gadgetry with us wherever we go.

Each of these characteristics enable artists to build different frameworks by which to see their art in many different perspectives. Contracts that experience to the experience outlined in 1987 by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister who wrote this:

When the office environment is frustrating enough, people look for a place to hide out. They book conference rooms or head for the library or wander off for coffee and just don’t come back. No, they are not meeting for secret romances or plotting political coups; they are hiding out to work. The good news here is that your people really do need to feel accomplishment of work completed. They will go to great extremes to make that happen. When the crunch is on, people will try to find workable space no matter where.

…

If you peek into a conference room, you may find three people working in silence. If you wander to the cafeteria mid-afternoon, you’re likely to find folks seated, one at a table, with their work spread before them. Some of your workers can’t be found at all. People are hiding out to get some work done. If that rings true to your organisation, it’s an indictment. Saving money on space may be costing you a fortune.

Does that read like it was written by someone sat in your office today?

While I’ve titled the workplace that we want for novel and adaptive thinking The Studio of the Future there is much about it that is ancient. We have always been most creative in certain places and these are places that inspire us. The other element about these spaces is that they make us happy, and that very important for productivity.

Many of these elements apply to what is acknowledged to have been one of the most creative workplaces of all time – Building 20 at MIT.

What was Building 20’s innovation secret? Architectural author Stewart Brand asked former occupants why Building 20 – of all the places at MIT, or in the world – had hatched so many innovations. Here’s what they told him: “Windows that open and shut at the will of the owner!…The ability to personalize your space and shape it to various purposes. If you don’t like a wall, just stick your elbow through it….We feel our space is really ours. We designed it; we run it. The building is full of small microenvironments, each of which is different and each a creative space.”

From The Build Network.

Some extras to help you think:

http://video.mit.edu/embed/6821/

Social Intelligence is the second of the future skills that we will need to create working spaces for.

Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions.

What has the social interaction between people got to do with work spaces though?

We all recognise spaces that are socially unintelligent, we normally call them words like impersonal and sterile. Organisations have recognised this too. It wasn’t that long ago when on entry to a bank you would be met by a set of dark wood cashier desks with a thick glass barrier. These would form a barrier to anything that went on behind, it would also form a barrier to any social interaction. If you wanted to talk to someone you would have to do it through the glass or make an appointment. At the appointed time you would be shown into a dark wood panelled office and discuss your finances over a desk with a person in a suit with very limited social interaction.

While this type of bank still exists in places the move to internet banking and other demographic changes has enforced a change that has made the typical bank configuration not that dissimilar from a coffee shop. If I do go into a bank, which isn’t very often, I will be met by a person stood by a table with a tablet on it. They will check my appointment and show me to a comfy seat, from there I will be greeted by someone who will show me to a small booth, with more comfy seats, where we will discuss the business of the day. The bank can no longer differentiate itself by the efficiency of the way that it processes my transactions, that’s a given, they have to compete for my attention and if I don’t like the experience I’m not going to give them my attention, my money follows my attention.

There are other places where a similar shift has, to a certain extent, taken place. If I go to see the General Practitioner (Doctor) I sit alongside them rather than across a desk.

The purpose of this shift is to help me to interact socially.

The Breakout Area of the Future

There have been many initiatives and management fads aimed at getting people to interact in their workplaces. We’ve had management by wandering around; stand-up meetings, two pizza meetings, walking meetings, the third place and many more.

Looking at the office in which I work most there is precious little social interaction. We’re primarily IT people so perhaps it’s not surprising, we do have a certain nerdy reputation after all. I’ve worked with most of the people who sit near me long enough to have seen them in different spaces, put us together in a restaurant and we’d interact quite socially. I know because I’ve seen it.

Even the simple step of moving a conversation to a table changes the way that people interact. The intelligence comes from knowing this and using this knowledge to change the context.

It’s interesting that we still call these places Breakout Areas, which suggests that they are the place where we take a break from the important activity that we should be doing. If we remind ourselves that the machines are going to be doing more of what we traditionally regard as work, then we have to start seeing these areas as the place where the real work gets done.

I was recently looking around a university with my daughter and the faculty building where she would be based had far more breakout area than classroom. It was in stark contrast to so many offices that I see.

In many ways we are only just starting to understand the true impact of spaces on our ability to interact socially. There are reasons why people prefer to have meetings in coffee shops, all of those things that we call ambience have an effect: lighting, noise, colour, smell, temperature. It’s not surprising that someone has written an application to create ambient coffee shop noise.

Looking forward this shifts is going to be even further reaching as we become globally connected and see our interactions with the smart machines becoming more sophisticated.

In the global connected business world we spend so much time with words and voices that we overlook all of the other gestures that our minds are processing constantly and mostly subconsciously. A massive amount of business takes place through written communication which strips away much of the social intelligence. Another lump of global business takes place on the phone, which strips away another set of social cues. Where we have people co-located we create office environments that place people at desks interacting with a screen on written communication and talking on the phone.

I could, like many, write a book on the comedy of conference calls and the inhumanity of it. Only today I was on a conference call while one of the contributors was in a noisy vehicle on his way to a funeral. The intelligent organisations are already recognising that there are more socially intelligent ways of working that produce better results. Organisations that look at it from a return-on-investment perspective will fail to invest, that will be a mistake.

Many of the person-to-person interactions that we currently undertake are already ready to be overtaken by person-to-machine interactions. Just a few years ago I would have phoned my insurance company at renewal time, now I go to a web site (or two) and interact with a machine. These interactions require little social intelligence, but the higher the levels of social intelligence the more I feel like I want to do business with this organisation. When there’s little to choose between insurance companies then they have to make want to do business with them in other ways. As I interact with a machine via a screen the dimensions of social intelligence being used are very narrow.

It’s rare that we interact with a machine and don’t recognise it as a machine, because it doesn’t behave in the same way as we expect a person to interact. There’s lots of change coming quite soon though.

For a long time we’ve built spaces that enable us to easily interact with the machines limited ability to interact – we wouldn’t choose a screen and keyboard. As the machines get better as communicating in more human ways we won’t feel the same need to place ourselves in these impersonal working locations, we will demand far more social interaction.

Some videos:

Over the last few weeks I’ve been flipping between dystopian and utopian views of the future.

Having set out on a series to think about the productive workplace I decided to focus on the activities that people might perform in the future workplace and chose a framework from the Institute for the Future.

This framework outlines a set of skills that people are going to need to be able to do in a world that has been significantly changed by technology and other social changes.

My intention is to write about each of the different skills that people are going to need and to think about the impact upon the place where they work.

The first skill is “sense-making”:

Sense-making – ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed

But why have I been flipping between utopia and dystopia?

We are just at the beginnings of a massive renegotiation of the line between people and machines. Increasing amounts of what we currently call knowledge work is going to be overtaken by various bits of technology, many people who do process work are already being affected.

If you take that thought beyond what we can currently see you start to veer down one of two paths – dystopia or utopia.

The dystopian view is highlighted by Sherry Turkle who is worried that “as we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other?” Anyone who has seen the film Wall-E has understood this dystopian view.

Andrew McAfee is more utopian in his view, though isn’t afraid of highlighting significant challenges that are coming:

The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news. This is the best economic news on the planet these days. Not that there’s a lot of competition, right? This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons. The first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we’re on where output goes up over time, while at the same time, prices go down, and volume and quality just continue to explode. Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that’s absolutely the wrong way to look at it. This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide. The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that, once the androids start doing jobs, we don’t have to do them any-more, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil.

and also:

So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, and I have every confidence that we’re going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging, abundant economy that we’re creating.

The reality will, most likely, be a combination of dystopia and utopia, but in both pictures of the future we are going to relinquish a lot of what we currently do to the machines.

That’s where sense-making comes in – seeing the deeper meaning and significance.

The challenge of the current age is summed up by Malcolm Gladwell:

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

In the age to come our challenge is going to continue to be understanding but the tools available to us to create that understanding are going to become increasingly sophisticated. As the machines understand more and more our role will be to find deeper meaning and significance.

Most understanding today is gained by analysing through screens. Much of this analysis is characterised by someone creating a spreadsheet containing a set of numbers that are likely to have come from an application. Those numbers will then be analysed through charts, calculations and formulas. Once a level of understanding has been created that information will be presented into either a document or a presentation. People will receive this material through a transfer system, like email. Quite often, the recipients will then talk it through in a meeting to gain meaning from the understanding.

Most people have thousands of spreadsheets, documents and presentations many of them very similar. The creation of this material will have taken many hours in the production alone. They’ll also spend hours arranging meetings and talking people through the material.

The workplace that supports these activities is one that supports the machines that are used to enact it. People need keyboards, screens, desks and meeting rooms because they are the means of production. That’s why we have the workplaces that we have.

The time spent on production is significantly higher than the amount of time spent creating significance.

It’s already possible to imagine a time where a suitably knowledgeable machine could undertake most of the material production. Certain material that we read through news organisations is already produced by algorithms.

If the machines are producing the material, what will we do? Our job will be to create meaning and significance. For the short to medium-term I image that we are going to continue doing that on a screen and keyboard. Meaning and significance comes from insight and insight comes from perspectives; a screen only gives visual insights and a keyboard isn’t a great way of manipulating something to gain different perspectives

While we work with screens and keyboards we’ll need our beloved desks, but at some point we’ll move beyond the desk being the defining feature of the workplace. Image a workplace with everyone wearing something like an Oculus Rift. Image sitting in your local coffee shop and people doing the same thing. I deliberately didn’t saying “sitting wearing” because may of the interactions may well require us to be moving.

The Library of the Future

The other element of sense-making is concentration and focus. People tend to concentrate best in an environment without distraction. For some that’s a place of silence, for some it’s a place with music or some other ambient sound. We may well, also, start to use sound as a means of gaining perspective. Visual distractions can also be an issue, but I suspect that this will be drastically reduced by wearable devices.

So we are going to need places which are far more flexible for the person than current corporate open-plan offices allow. Perhaps the best way to visuals this personal sense-making workspace as the library of the future.

The Engineers Workshop of the Future

Another vital tool for sense-making is person-to-person collaboration. Once we spend less time producing material and more time making sense of it we will spend more time collaborating with others to gain their insights.

In short; we will spend more time in meetings, but they will be very different meetings. If all the time and effort wasn’t used up creating the material for the meeting how would the meeting be different? What if the material was interactive and would allow for seamless scenario building and story telling? What if the material was multi-dimensional and even multi-sensory?

If meetings were that engaging would people be happy with being a voice at the end of a teleconference when others were standing in a room that allowed them to change the shape of the discussion by virtually replacing one thing with another thing? Will they be happy with being their via video even? They may be happy being virtually there as a robot that gives multi-dimensional views.

It’s not all about technology though. People will also collaborate using the tools that we’ve used for centuries – pictures and diagrams. So a meeting space will also have to support multiple different mechanisms for collaboration.

Will this use of space spark a new renaissance in the use of facilities that currently sit idle as people work from home; or perhaps it will generate a whole new set of virtual worlds where people collaborate? Either way it’s unlikely that these insight and meaning meetings will take place in a boardroom style facility with a projector at one end. These places will be more like the engineers workshops of old, full of trusted tools, inhabited by people with different skills, a place where people come together around a problem, a place for prototyping, a bit scruffy perhaps.

Some videos that you might find interesting:

The purpose of a workplace is to support the activities that need to be undertaken so that they can be done in the most productive way. Is it as simple as that?

In a sense, yes, I think it is as simple as that, what I don’t think is simple is an understanding of what those activities might be.

It’s clear from many workplaces that the view of activities is limited to two basic activities:

• Individual working at a desk – either in an open plan room or in a small office
• Teams meeting in a room

The other thing to note is that desks and meeting rooms are often kept very separate. Because of this the meeting room is somewhere that you go to for a planned interaction; it’s not an ad-hoc space. There’s often a special meeting room set aside for video conferencing, this is normally the loneliest meeting room of them all.

That’s quite a narrow view of modern working, it might fit some types of modern work where the activities being undertaken are primarily task based, but that’s not what the knowledge worker requires today or in the future.

In a world where people can undertake many of their activities from any network connection a workplace needs to offer more than the other places available if it is going to be used. That’s not to say that a workplace needs to be the best place for all activities, but it needs to offer something that the other places can’t or don’t.

Rather than focus on the current activities that the current workplace doesn’t support I thought I would consider the future activities.

As a framework for this thinking I’m going to use some work done by the Institute for the Future for the University of Pennsylvania Research Institute – Future Work Skills 2020 – where they identify key work skills for the future. We are going through a significant shift in the nature of work and people’s definition of a job will be radically different in the future, but it’s not easy to see what those definitions might be. The skills required in these jobs are, however, becoming easier to see as they are influenced by some significant drivers for change. They characterise these change drivers like this:

• Extreme longevity – increasing global lifespans change the nature of careers and learning
• Rise of smart machines and systems – workplace automation nudges human workers out of the rote, repetitive tasks
• Computational world – massive increase in sensors and processing power make the world a programmable system
• New media ecology – new communication tools require new media literacies beyond text
• Super-structured organisation – social technologies drive new forms of production and value creation
• Globally connected world – increased global interconnectivity puts diversity and adaptability at the centre of organizational operations

From these drivers for change drivers they then define a set of skills for the future workforce:

• Sense-making – ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
• Social intelligence – ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desire interactions
• Novel and adaptive thinking – proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond what is rote or rule-based
• Cross-cultural competency – ability to operate in different cultural settings
• Computational thinking – ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
• New-media literacy – ability to critically assess and develop content that uses media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
• Trans-disciplinarity – literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
• Design mind-set – ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
• Cognitive load management – ability to discriminate and filter information for importance and to understand how to maximise cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
• Virtual collaboration – ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

From this list, and the associated more detailed report,  a number of things that characterise the activities involved.

That will have to wait for another day though because I think that each one will need some space to explore them. As an example, though, here’s something to think about – social intelligence requires the ability to “quickly assess the emotions of those around them and adapt their words, tone and gestures accordingly”, to do that though you need to interact on a basis that communicates emotions, social interaction.

What are the social interactions of the future?

Will a conference call continue to be regarded as an acceptable social interaction? Is it possible to adequately discern emotion on a conference call?

Will a slide-lead presentation continue to be regarded as an acceptable social interaction? Does it offer the best level of interaction?