Why 'where' matters (part 2)

An inflection point in history -- and the incredible opportunity in front of us

This is a follow-on to my last post, “Why ‘where’ matters.” If you haven’t read that yet — it might help before diving in here.

I was recently catching up with a friend I haven’t seen in quite some time, and when he asked what I’ve been up to, I felt an instant dread.

What am I up to?

I am exploring this thing that shows up in our lives at every moment of every day and yet has no easy description, no culturally-accepted term like “mental health” or “environmentalism.” It’s real and visible all around us…. and yet, how it affects us is buried deep within and out of conscious reach most of the time.

Physical space: it’s about creativity and psychology, organizational management and talent, buildings and infrastructure, work and play. It’s individual in nature but influenced by the group. It belongs to nobody in particular — not HR, not an individual manager, not Real Estate, not even a CEO. And yet, it matters tremendously.

What I’ve been exploring has no simple description because, I believe, the world hasn’t yet woken up to its significance and given it the attention it deserves.

We are at an inflection point in time at which we have an incredible, once-in-a-century opportunity to make some decisions that can monumentally accelerate human creativity, progress, and wellbeing.

That is a BIG statement - I know. It’s one I’ve been wrestling with over the past couple of years and am only beginning to share with the world (hence, this blog). And so you can imagine the dread I was feeling with my old friend trying to fill him in on what’s occupying my headspace these days — will I be able to explain it clearly, succinctly enough for him to get it?

And, what even is this inflection point exactly?

The office as a tool

I’ll use a simple metaphor to try and explain this.

For the last couple hundred years — since the industrial revolution and the invention of the modern firm — most of us humans have taken up work that dictates where we must be, when. There has been no optionality; the space we occupy is simply the cost of doing business. With the exception of the proportionally very small real estate team that exists only in large organizations (we’re talking 3 or 4 people at a 2,000-person company), none of us have really put much thought into where we work.

And where we work, I should say, is where we exist about two-thirds of our waking-hours as human beings.

So imagine you’re a chef, and now think about the difference between your kitchen and your food processor.

Your kitchen matters, but it’s there every day and you don’t have a whole lot of choice around it. Maybe you gave it a little thought when you did the renovations, but besides that, it’s just, well, there.

Your food processor is something entirely different. Your food processor involves constant choice. You get to choose when you want to use it and how. Do you want to chop your walnuts or puree them? At what speed, and with what attachment? Where in the flow of your cooking process do you want to integrate it? Who on your team should be operating it? You can choose a Kitchenaid or Cuisinart or splurge on a Breville, and you can swap and trade it for another pretty much whenever you feel like it.

The office was a kitchen 3 years ago and today it is a food processor. And that change unlocks incredible opportunity — opportunity to craft and shape and use it how we see best fit.

That crafting is going to be mega-complex. We will have a million choices to make — what type of environment we place ourselves in, at what times / for what activities, and with whom. Nobody will be singularly responsible because the inputs belong to nobody in particular.

Soon enough, thinking about this won’t be a choice

At the intersection of the physical world and human nature lies a tension we so often choose to ignore. We live and act out our daily lives as if we are in control, our minds in charge, our words the truth. In fact, we are nothing but creatures of evolution, influenced at every moment by the multitude of signals and inputs around us.

For most of modern history, there was no business need to think about this. Because nobody else was thinking about it, you didn’t have to. Capitalism only requires that you marginally outdo the competition, and shaking the boat on a topic as crazy big as this would have been hardly worth the risk. Pioneering the way forward on a new future of where we work requires changing hearts and minds, and when you’re running a business you only get so many risk cards to play. Just look at what happened when Marissa Mayer tried to make work from home a thing, back in 2013 (could any of us have imagined where the world would be ten years later?).

But now, things have changed. COVID forced us all to work from home, and all of a sudden the cat was let out of the bag.

Three years into the pandemic — with shopping back 100%, travel back 100%, schools back 100% — offices still remain hardly half as full as they used to be.

There is no going back to the old ways, and anybody who dares try to force it will find out the truth the hard way.

And so, most companies have been kicking the can down the road, letting employees set the tone and seeing what happens.

They’ve done this because they are either not prepared to take on the complexity of answering the questions that come with this new reality (who, where, what, when, and, most importantly, why), or they don’t understand why where matters to begin with. The former is understandable, the latter dangerous.

Why? Because now that the cat’s out of the bag, the food processor’s been bought, someone is going to figure out how to use it best. And when they do, they will win. They will make better food, they will steal your customers, and, eventually, they will put you out of business.

The path ahead

This won’t happen overnight. It will be years, probably.

Academics can help — in fact, I think an entirely new field of research will emerge at the intersection of economics, organizational behavior, operations and management to put data behind where to use the food processor, when, and how.

But the data will provide guidance, not answers.

Instead, it will be experimentation by individual firms that take us from today to the future. Testing and learning — how should this new tool be used?

And if you want to come out in front on this, you’ve got to set the table. It begins with inviting everyone to dinner and acknowledging that ‘where’ does matter — that for the first time we have access to an incredibly powerful tool, if only we can use it right.

If that feels hard to do — I’d recommend starting with yourself to understand why ‘where’ matters, to you. (And, you may come to a different conclusion than I have on all of this; perhaps you’re not convinced ‘where’ actually matters all that much).

From there, it’s on leadership to then set the tone for a grand new experiment. One that will involve everyone and require a lightening of mood, an acceptance of what we do not know, a want for creating a better future.

The best way to do this, I think, is to let our imagination run wild.

Think about a time you were on fire — creating incredible work, with unbelievable speed. Nothing could get in your way.

What if you could experience this every single day?

Now, imagine you can. What might that world look like, and how does ‘where’ play a part in it? We don’t know exactly how, but we know that we have the right equipment and we’ve just got to get the buttons in order.

This opportunity, I believe, is the single greatest gift these last three years have given us. It will be solved — capitalism will take us there, I have no doubt. The question is, how quickly, and more importantly, what role do you want to play in this experiment?

I certainly know where I stand.