BoS2015 Kristine Woolsey - Solve the Right Problem
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BoS Conference Lightning Talk. An architect explains why space matters.
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BoS2015 Kristine Woolsey - Solve the Right Problem
- 1. Solve the Right Problem workplace strategy that works You will participate! You get a chance to think/write at slides 5 and 14. The slides go fast! Be ready. Even though this is a lightning talk KristineWoolsey.com Behavioral Strategy TheClearing.com Senior Principal workplace strategy thru September 2015 MAYA.com Director of Creative Environments beginning starting October 2015
- 2. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 2 is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment that benefits everyone. B. F. Skinner in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior The ideal of behaviorism “ “
- 3. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 3 CORE PRIME Copyright © 2011 The Primes, Inc. All rights reserved. As Is To Be Environment Stake Strategy
- 4. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 4 Enacted Result strategies, systems, and structures. Desired Objective strategies, systems, and structures. CULTURE
- 6. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 6 “Diversity beats IQ for creative problem solving e very time” Scott Page, Professor, Researcher
- 7. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 7 12,000 employees x 5 min lost productivity effective loss of 135 employees technology individual human productivity time things you can do peopleyouknow Engineering Serendipity at Apple:
- 8. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 8 Sococo.com Community: 1. Membership 2. Mutual dependency 3. Reinforcement 4. Shared experiences Atlassian Portal Co-Merge Coworking Beasley Law Firm
- 9. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 9 Community: 1. Membership 2. Mutual dependency 3. Reinforcement 4. Shared experiences Appointment Plus Sony North America
- 10. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 10 PCA Skin Existing view and proposed workstation layou t
- 11. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 11 Physical space creates group Lowered panels creates connection Compensation reinforces group Rearranging increases learning Common break allows relationships 2006-2012 Employees increased 61% Global Distribution 100% Training time down 31% Revenue up 78.99% PCA Skin – new breakroo m
- 15. KRISTINE WOOLSEY 15 kristinewoolsey.com Behavioral Strategy MAYA.com Human Centered Design TheClearing.com People Change and Leadership
Editor's Notes
- I am going to launch this talk with this advice. Solve the right problem. The most common business mistake and waste of resources comes from solving the wrong problem really well. This is particularly common in the world of physical space design. Clients show up with their list of functions (10 desks, 2 team rooms) but don’t have any sense of how that money they are about to spend will support their business outcomes. High ceilings help us to think bigger and dream of what is not. Low ceilings help us focus and make decisions. This is why every car dealership and furniture store looks the way it does.
- Part of my background is academic and I spent my research years connecting human behavior to physical space characteristics – basically how to get you to stay longer and buy more simply by the width of the aisle or level of lighting. I left academia to start an architecture firm and ended up consulting in the area of behavioral strategy. Changing people’s behavior is hard and if you can get halfway there by rearranging the furniture why wouldn’t you. But before you can design behavior you need to understand your own desired outcome.
- For the last four months I’ve been working on a project with an amazing company The Clearing. They specialize in using visual tools that they call The Primes (there is a book) to help groups move into systems thinking. This is their tool that represents the 5 conversations a leader has to help clarify desired outcome. All are critical but the decision on whether to move into the “to be” is made based on what is at stake. Which way does Stewie’s head tip. Yes I know it looks like that.
- Then comes your real challenge. You have figured out the right outcome and strategies to take your business where you as the leader think it needs to go but the problem with outcomes is that once you have more than about 5 people in your company, whatever your desired outcomes are will get filtered through your culture and so your next step is to figure out what that culture should be so that it filters out disruptions and supports the desired outcome, and now it is your turn. Culture is actually simply defined as behaviors we tolerate and those we don’t. I would like you to write down just a few behaviors that you think would support the things you are trying to do with your business.
- Culture is actually simply defined as behaviors we tolerate and those we don’t. I would like you to write down just a few behaviors that you think would support the things you are trying to do with your business.
- I’m going to take you through three examples of how behavioral goals can be supported by other efforts including workplace. Lets start with the example of a desired behavior “innovation”. There is a guy Scott Page who has done a ton of research on diversity, basically taking three groups of people, one high iq, one a group of white middle class men above average iq, and one group of varying iq and backgrounds. Group three solved problems better faster every time. The reason is something called adjacent possibility which says that we can only invent the thing adjacent to the thing we know. People from different backgrounds know different things. Looking at Standard & Poor's Composite 1500 list from 1992 through 2006 Female representation in top management leads to an increase in firm value of $42 million.
- Looking at Standard & Poor's Composite 1500 list from 1992 through 2006 Female representation in top management leads to an increase in firm value of $42 million. So in essence, what you can do is directly related to the different kinds of people that you know and that brings us to the retail concept of functional efficiency or the Milk in the back of the store syndrome. Architects, Facilities people and employees all have a natural desire to make the workplace as efficient as possible but that may not meet the end goals of the business. Apple designed their building with more centralized services meaning it takes longer for an individual to get to the bathroom – think about a waste of 5 minutes per person causing the need for an additional 135 people.
- Lets say you needed a sense of community to get to your business outcome. Community drives engagement, which drives profitability so who wouldn’t. There are four components to community and the first is membership, understanding who is in and who is out. People read the physical environment and long before they meet you, that next employee that you want to hire is sitting in your lobby deciding if you are from the same tribe. I don’t care if you like your lobby. I want to know if it speaks to your target employee. For virtual or multiple location firms there are ways to use technology to remind employees of all of your members not just those in the same building.
- The image on the left is Appointment plus, growing fast but wanting to keep their start up culture and roots and so we did things to speak to the tribe like the non-matching carpet squares. We also included things to remind people of their shared history. Early at the company a programmer brought in a huge stuffed orangutan which now sits on top of the refrigerator and is captured in the graphic on the wall. New people will ask about it and be told the stories of the early days. Shared history.
- Next behavior/space examples have to do with the retention problems and inconsistent customer sales and support at PCA skin. They sell skin care products to dermatologists and aestheticians who then resell to their customers. Their call center style employees were ex-nurses and professionals who took this job between jobs and then quit when they got a better one. Knowing group size impacts trust and loyalty, we rearranged the cubicle so that they formed loose circles. We lowered the internal panels so that a staff member could answer the phone “that isn’t my area of expertise but let me pass you over to sally who has 20 years…” and of course referral by someone else is proven to increase sales. We schedule the group with a common break time, changed the compensation so bonuses were a combination of individual and group, and rearranged every three months.
- We lowered the internal panels so that a staff member could answer the phone “that isn’t my area of expertise but let me pass you over to sally who has 20 years…” and of course referral by someone else is proven to increase sales. We schedule the group with a common break time, changed the compensation so bonuses were a combination of individual and group, and rearranged every three months.
- The human brain is limited in the number of concepts it can hold at one time and that number is roughly 7+/-2 . How many of your problems are that simple? Todays problems are so complex that this space at Maya, which is the company I am joining in October as director of Creative Environments, was created to allow an iterative conversation. The visually supported discussion starts in one place and then works its way around the room so that if you get to a place that doesn’t make sense you can see the pattern and go back and start a new thread from wherever the assumption went wrong. The kinds of problems that get solved in this room are both socially and technically complex. One example is the trending vending machine that MAYA invented for the parent company that makes Oreo Cookies . They wanted to push the message of being a technologically advanced company at SxSW and asked MAYA to help them dream up something that would engage attendees. This vending machine fabricates custom oreo cookies in response to twitter trends and customer requests.
- The kinds of problems that get solved in this room are both socially and technically complex. One example is the trending vending machine that MAYA invented for the parent company that makes Oreo Cookies . They wanted to push the message of being a technologically advanced company at SxSW and asked MAYA to help them dream up something that would engage attendees. This vending machine fabricates custom oreo cookies in response to twitter trends and customer requests.
- All of you are generally aware of the concept of iterative design but that is almost never what happens when they turn around and try to drive their own culture particularly with workplace. I want to take a small space again and ask you, what will you do when you get back?
- The trick to doing physical/virtual space work so that you are solving the right problem well, is to start with the desired outcome, figure out what culture supports that or what behaviors we will tolerate and which ones we won’t, and then design all of your systems so that they support and reward the behaviors you want and make difficult the behaviors you don’t want. Don’t design objects. Design the human story and then wrap the physical and virtual spaces around that story. And this is my business of software family – Jeff and RubyRide won a space at Mass Challenge.