A Vision of the New Workplace Revisited - Site Selection magazine

From Site Selection magazine, September 1999

M A N A G E M E N T S T R A T E G Y
A Vision of the New Workplace Revisited CONTINUED

Data from Office Users - Testing the Interaction/Autonomy Model

What was special about A Vision of the New Workplace, besides the fact that the article attracted an unusual amount of attention, was our attempt to predict the likely pattern of change in office layouts by using a model designed to relate organizational to physical change.

Diagram 1 We argued that as organizations become more interactive and autonomous, as a result of exploiting the potential of IT, so the demand for a wider range of new kinds of office space is likely to increase. We predicted that such changes in the pattern of demand would be neither arbitrary nor unpredictable.

The model that results from relating changes in organizational structure to physical change, the Interaction/Autonomy Model as it has come to be called, was intended not just to make a theoretical point, but to be a practical device for measuring the rate and the direction of change in the working environment in actual, working organizations.

Diagram 1 is from our original article, in Industrial Development. It was intended to exemplify the kinds of work (and the appropriate types of office layout) we expected to find in each of the four quadrants of the Interaction/Autonomy model.

The arrow coming from the bottom left-hand corner of the matrix indicates that we expected many basic processual tasks to be automated or exported to economies with cheaper labor.

Diagram 2 The arrow in the top right was intended to indicate the emergence of the virtual and the growing potential for the separation of people and place. Reality turned out to be rather more complex than this initial sketch, but as we shall see our model also turns out to be far nearer the truth than we dared think in terms of our prediction of the overall direction of change.

In 1993, we had little field data of our own and few convincing examples of the innovative use of space by changing organizations. Our earlier paper was necessarily speculative and abstract, a model-building exercise rather than the record of sustained achievement that business readers like so much.

We were, however, already deep in the development of Workplace Envisioning and reasonably sure that the computer-aided workshops that we were already running in client organizations would produce, in the not-too-distant future, substantial quantitative data from managers and staff working. In this way, we already knew that our hypotheses were testable in the context of business.

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