Our April 1993 paper, "A Vision of the New Office," attempted to build a bridge between organizational ideas and design. To do this we drew extensively on contemporary managerial literature, not least the writings of various distinguished promoters of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). We were impressed by the logic as well as by the conviction of those who argued that advances in Information Technology (IT) must lead to the rethinking of office processes as well as of manufacturing.

At that time, many organizations, dissatisfied with their return on investment in IT and influenced by such managerial gurus as Michael Hammer, had begun to invest great faith -- and large amounts of money -- in BPR. The most obvious result has been the rapid growth in the numbers and size of business consulting firms. Perhaps reflecting on this experience, Michael Hammer said in a recent seminar, "We have not adequately considered the effect that Business Process Re-engineering has on the place (of work). We need to include space in our model."

Most corporate leaders still believe that BPR has helped their organizations to become more competitive. However, recent reviews have drawn attention to the high failure rate in BPR experienced by many businesses, often pointing to rejection by the very people upon whom the success of business processes depends.

In many cases there was a significant breakdown in trust -- perhaps because the most obvious commercial reality that resulted from much consultancy talk was the elimination of jobs. The robust economy of the late Nineties has put most of these skilled knowledge workers back into the work force. Some of those workers have had to acquire new skills before becoming re-employed.

Today, of course, the major focus of most organizations is to attract and retain the best and the brightest people into their organizations. In other words, there is a shortage of skilled human capital in many Western economies.

Peter Drucker has described a fundamental shift in the structure of the knowledge work force in his article, "Managing Oneself," (Harvard Business Review, March-April 1999). "Every existing society, even the most individualistic one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: that organizations outlive workers, and that most people stay put. But today the opposite is true. Knowledge workers outlive organizations, and they are mobile. The need to manage oneself is therefore creating a revolution in human affairs."

The chief force that enables knowledge workers’ increasing mobility is Information Technology. Telecommunications and media are converging with IT, most obviously in entertainment and in business. IT, telecom and media are now integrated within what Bill Gates calls the "digital nervous system," making possible "business at the speed of thought."

Convergence is having a significant impact on both the nature of knowledge work and on the location of such work. A few years ago, the concept of being a "road warrior" was rare. Today, nomadic lifestyles are more common. "Commuting" no longer means simply getting in a car at home and driving daily to the office. To do their work, knowledge workers have to "commute" hundreds and sometimes even thousands of miles. So the obvious question is, "Do people still need offices in the conventional sense?"

Drucker, in the same article, also argued: "Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. Trust does not necessarily mean that people like one another. It means that they understand one another. Taking responsibility for relationships is therefore an absolute necessity. It is a duty."

If BPR really has contributed to a breakdown of trust within organizations, what will be necessary to rebuild that trust? Drucker’s answer is that, "The first secret of effective working relationships is to understand the people you are working with. The second part . . . is taking responsibility for communication."

It is quite clear to us that conventional office planning is a major part of the problem because, with all its bureaucratic and Taylorist connotations, it is inextricably implicated in management by force. New forms of planning office space must do the opposite. They must help businesses build trust. The corollary to this proposition is that progressive office design must enable organizations to achieve better and more dynamic communications.

This developing argument about BPR explains why in the last six years, we have found it necessary to focus so much of our research in both DEGW and Steelcase on mapping the changing patterns of communication in knowledge work. We strongly believe that office space as conventionally configured does little to support emerging patterns of communication.

The intensity of the new interaction is such that it can no longer be accommodated in a few scattered conference rooms or in an occasional cafeteria. In some organizations there is already a huge increase in settings designed to support serendipitous semi-social, semi-business encounters. These are the encounters that make such an important contribution to building the trust that Peter Drucker highlights.

However, using design to intensify the amount of communication within offices is not enough. The quality and the control of communications also matter. While our research shows a strong increase in human interaction in the workplace, there is an equally significant increase in work involving high levels of concentration.

Conventional office planning does even less to support concentration than communication. For example, over-reliance on the so-called "universal plan" forces people to go off-site to do concentrated work. The opposite phenomenon is that in offices based on new ways of working shared study booths are often provided to encourage concentrated work.

The views of managers and even of knowledge workers themselves tend to differ on the importance of these shifting priorities. Fortunately, the automation of routine office work combined with the adoption of such technological advances as wireless telephony are making possible simultaneous increases in both communication and concentration across a broad cross-section of industries and types of jobs.

While work patterns change and technologies become more and more integrated, conventional real estate executives and facilities managers are still debating the ancient dichotomy between the open plan and private offices. For them the most common form of conventional office planning is now a mix of 70-80 percent open plan workstations, arranged in the "universal plan," combined with 20-30 percent of individual private offices.

Unlike old-fashioned office space standards, which were largely based on status with the size of the office directly related to one’s position in the hierarchy, "universal plan" workstations are all made deliberately the same to reduce churn. Facilities managers have worked out that it is cheaper to move people than furniture. Implicitly they have decreed that furniture is more important than people are.

In order to reduce costs even more and to accommodate more people in less space, the areas of both open plan workstations and private offices are under constant pressure. Common to both hierarchical space standards and to the universal plan is the persistent habit of neglecting shared facilities, such as informal gathering spots, project team spaces, multiple sizes of conference rooms and cafeterias, in favor of individual workplaces with a few large conference rooms.

The task, as we see it from the perspective of six years of reflection, is to progress beyond the mechanistic and inhuman assumptions that lurk beneath the surface of the apparent rationality of BPR in its cruder forms. Given the colossal inertia of conventional real estate and office design, it goes without saying that we also still need to struggle to transcend the sterile and simplistic cost reductionism of conventional office planning. Put more positively, our task continues to be to make office design relevant to modern business in all its dynamism and diversity.

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