An open floor plan and other design features (e.g., high-traffic staircases, atriums that connect departments) that encourage accidental interactionsI don’t care what any analyst says about how much money can be saved by packing people into a sixty-square-foot workspace. You can never underestimate the power of an environment that potentially inspires people to do more. It doesn’t matter what business you are in, either.
Our marketing agency has its roots in Silicon Valley, and we wanted to be one of the best creative marketing agencies in the world. As we grew and opened more offices, we paid careful attention to how our offices and workspaces looked. What was the literal and “unconscious” message we were sending to potential clients and, more important, to our employees? The same. The best creative stuff in the world happens here. When you have people aspire to do the best creative work, they are inspired to do the best creative work.
As Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, wrote in his book, Creativity Inc., with respect to Steve Jobs, “What’s our most important function? It’s the interaction of our employees. That’s why Steve put everyone in one building. He wanted to create a place for people to always be talking to each other.”
You may have a limited budget, but you do not have a limited imagination. There are three core things in a physical space that don’t have to cost a lot to make it a more creative space:
1. The Ceiling: Open it up and go as high as you can. No ceiling tiles.
2. The Floor: Use wood or polished cement for flooring. No regular carpet.
3. The Walls: Splash some color on the walls. Put up a six-foot clock and scrabble mosaic.
With a creative space, you create a sense of opportunity or destiny for employees. They “feel” they are supposed to be creative and innovative. So they push the boundaries and the creative envelopes. Why? Because they feel they are supposed to.
Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation, wrote in a blog post that a well-designed workplace may be beneficial, but it’s not an essential factor. The long history of innovation, in the centuries before electricity and elevators, shows how much creative work can be done without regard to workspace design. A huge percentage of innovations took place in environments that fail most of the standards for “creative workplaces” or “dynamic work environments.” As examples, Berkun points to any company (Google, Apple, HP, Amazon, Disney) and any band that started in a garage (Nirvana, The Kinks, Creedence Clearwater Revival). The Wright brothers worked in a bike shop, and the Internet and the Web emerged from ordinary academic research labs, and so on. Put simply, Berkun writes, a good team will be productive in a cave. A bad team will be miserable in the most creative space in the world.
A good leader of any company should want to provide the best possible creative environment for employees. But the primary reason great work happens might have little to do with the creative characteristics of workplace design. Some people achieve great work in very ordinary and unremarkable settings. The reason might have more to do with a sense of mission coupled with strong leadership and culture.
A key element of a “creative” workspace is its ability to cause “collisions” between employees, hopefully from multiple departments of the company. At a startup, you probably don’t have this problem because your space is likely small enough so that everybody runs into everyone all day long. But if you manage one department among many or if you lead a large organization, you should be focused on creating more interactions between employees from multiple departments. Research shows that the higher the number of interactions, the higher the potential impact on the company’s bottom line. If you don’t encourage or facilitate these interactions, people may not move from their “areas,” making everyone exiles together.
The 2010 Ernst & Young study “Connecting Innovation to Profit,” as cited by Psychology Today, concluded that “the ability to manage, organize, cultivate, and nurture creative thinking is directly linked to growth and achievement.” The American Psychological Association has also connected creativity to company growth. In one study, a group of employees in Orange County, California, participated in creativity training. According to the study, “Eight months later, the employees had increased their rate of new idea generation by 55 percent, resulting in more than $600,000 in new revenue and $3.5 million in savings from innovative cost reductions.” But don’t just focus on creativity; create more employee collisions.
In his seminal 1977 book, Managing the Flow of Technology, Thomas J. Allen was the first to measure the strong negative correlation between physical distance and frequency of communication. The “Allen curve” estimates that we are four times as likely to communicate regularly with someone sitting six feet away from us as with someone sixty feet away, and that we almost never communicate with colleagues on separate floors or in separate buildings. So, how do you get people from various departments or with different skill sets colliding?
Steve Jobs famously redesigned the offices at Pixar, which originally housed computer scientists in one building, animators in a second building, and executives and editors in a third. Jobs recognized that separating these groups, each with its own culture and approach to problem solving, discouraged them from sharing ideas. The solution was one building with a central atrium, designed to encourage employee collaboration. Perhaps the animators could introduce a fresh perspective when the computer scientists became stuck; maybe the executives would learn more about the nuts and bolts of the business if they occasionally met an animator in the office kitchen or a computer scientist at the watercooler. As Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of Jobs, the Pixar building was designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” Jobs said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” The front doors and main stairs and corridors all lead to a central atrium, where a café and employee mailboxes are located as well.
Jobs ultimately succeeded in creating a single cavernous “office” that housed the entire Pixar team, and John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, declared that he’d “never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.” Let’s take a closer look at the core elements of the Pixar workspace:
Promotes Unplanned Collisions: One important element of the Pixar campus is its large atrium space. Steve Jobs believed that unplanned employee interactions and collaborations were vitally important to the company culture; this atrium space was to act as a melting pot of meeting spaces. He even wanted the atrium to house the only campus restrooms to force such collaboration.
Mixes Different Departments: As a part of the Pixar campus, Jobs envisioned the atrium bringing the different departments together. Animators could talk to storyboarders. Sound technicians could talk to computer scientists. And everyone would be pushing each other on toward their goal—but doing so in an environment where employees see fresh faces and have interactions that spark new creative ideas.
Encourages Employee-Designed Workspaces: Pixar’s employees decorate their offices to their own satisfaction. In terms of decoration and style, employee office spaces are a sight to be seen. Some are small house huts; others are shared spaces. John Lasseter’s office is filled to the brim with toys—clearly not your average executive office. If you were to walk around downstairs in the animation area, you’d see that it is not your normal office space, either. People are allowed to create whatever “front” to their office they want. One employee might build a front that’s like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaii. Lasseter believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity. I would agree.
Offers Reminders of Successes: Creating a work environment that people enjoy working in can be one of the most challenging aspects of modern office design. And surely one of the most memorable features at Pixar is the many characters, big and small, that find their way around the campus. Outside you’ll find a huge version of Luxo Jr., while within the atrium you’ll see the cast of The Incredibles and Monsters Inc. Why? Sure, it adds some brand value to a campus that otherwise might seem plain, but for a company like Pixar, whose employees work for many years bringing their films to life, I think it represents a connection to and love of their work. There can be no greater feeling than walking around the workplace and being reminded of the great work you helped to produce—as well as seeing the smiles of the many visitors as they recollect the ways each movie touched their lives.
You may not work at a “Pixar-like” company, but look at what the collective leadership at Pixar has created. The company’s leaders have actually designed a workspace that moves projects along more creatively and probably faster than if all these people worked in separate buildings. How many of us have worked in companies where people from one department never even met people from another department? Do we know or sense that a loss of productivity or opportunity has to be associated with that kind of environment? Research and experimentation is starting to prove how valuable increased interactions are between employees.
One pharmaceutical company wanted to determine if an increase of collaborations between sales and various departments would increase sales. So the question executives asked was, “How can we change our space to get the sales staff running into colleagues from other departments?” In this case, the answer was coffee. At the time, the company had roughly one coffee machine for every six employees, and the same people used the same machines every day. The sales force commiserated with itself. Marketing people talked to marketing people. Researchers talked to researchers. And so on. The company invested several hundred thousand dollars to rip out the coffee stations and build fewer, bigger ones—just one for every 120 employees housed in more central locations. It also created a large cafeteria for all employees in place of a much smaller one that few employees had used. In the fiscal quarter after the coffee-and-cafeteria switch, sales rose by 20 percent, or $200 million.
No matter what kind of company you are in or what kind of new company you plan to create, it’s important to remember how critical habitat or workspace is to your company mission. You don’t need to be a space designer to understand the benefits of your employees having more interactions and possible collaborations, whether to solve problems or to generate new products or services. Here are the key elements that make for a collaborative creative habitat:
An open floor plan and other design features (e.g., high-traffic staircases, atriums that connect departments) that encourage accidental interactions
More common areas than are strictly necessary; multiple cafeterias, other places to read and work that encourage workers to leave confined offices
Emphasis on areas that hold two or more people, rather than single-occupancy offices
Purpose-free generic “thinking” areas in open-plan spaces, which encourage workers to do their thinking in the presence of other people, rather than alone
It’s kind of amazing how the first three elements of the CreativityWorks Framework—mindset, environment (leadership and culture), and habitat—are so closely intertwined. We tend not to really understand how we, individually, can impact creativity and innovation, but, like most things, we can break it down into understandable pieces of knowledge. And with that knowledge comes the power of understanding that we truly can make a difference in how a company becomes and remains innovative on purpose. We can purposely engage creative, diverse people on a common mission in a great environment.
Before we go into brainstorming, the fourth element of the framework, in Chapter 6 we’ll review the importance of dynamic teams.
In the late 1940s, two psychologists and one sociologist began to wonder how friendships form. Why do some work “strangers” build lasting friendships while others struggle to get past basic platitudes? Some experts, including Sigmund Freud, explained that friendship formation could be traced to infancy, where children acquired the values, beliefs, and attitudes that would bind or separate them later in life. But these three researchers pursued a different theory. The researchers believed that physical space was the key to friendship formation; that “friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood.” In their view, it wasn’t so much that people with similar attitudes became friends, but rather that people who passed each other during the day tended to become friends and later adopted similar attitudes. They conducted a study using a unique working lab environment at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the results were fascinating because they had very little to do with values, beliefs, and attitudes. Rather, friendships had everything to do with people’s close proximity to each other and their level of interactions. People within sixty feet of each other had a greater likelihood of becoming friends. This idea that proximity and interactions created friendships went on to affect the founders of Pixar, Google, and Facebook as they all built their offices and campuses to not only evoke creativity but to create as many interactions as possible during the day between their employees.
The company workspace should not be a drab place for people to work until they go home. It should be a creative place designed for people to create, solve problems, and work together in a shared “neighborhood” while on an innovative mission. At a minimum, figure out how to increase the frequency of employee “collisions.”