In a post last week I asked: “How will we make calls in the office now?” noting the concerns of someone who had just done their first ever day in the office after starting their career over a year ago and working from home the whole time.
Herman Miller is one of the largest manufacturers of office furniture in the world, renowned for design. This is one of their ideas “of what an office ‘neighborhood’ could look like, with spaces for team interaction as well as private work”. Oh.My.Gosh.
This is thoroughly dystopian. In addition to is showing very little imagination, what are those blue boxes? They are meant for “private work”, aka calls, but wow, they look like repurposed computer server boxes. You know (and some of you may still be holding on to them), where we used to have server racks before everything went into the cloud?
It feels like the design brief was “how can we keep costs for change down to an absolute minimum for our clients while allowing them to still tell their people that they are adapting to the future”. incremental at best and likely to have the opposite effect to that intended. Who would want to work for a company that things this is sufficient for their people?
Suffice to say that those businesses that will thrive now and into the future will have the bravery and hunger (to see their business and people thrive and to make radical change where needed), allied to the open-ness and humility needed in order to look very differently at what those solutions will look like. A little like this:
