Inspiring Spaces

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” -Winston Churchill

In a workplace that's increasingly virtual, what role does our physical space have? How does it influence our creativity or our ability to innovate?

Wishful thinking?Imagine the corporate headquarters of a bank. Now imagine a building painted with the colors of the rainbow. You enter the building and walk under an archway painted with a collage of photographs of the sea, people sailing, horses galloping in the water. This archway leads to an arena that can seat up to 200 people. On each side of the stage there are glass walls with rainbow-colored brushstrokes extending vertically from ceiling to floor.

Imagine you have a meeting in this location. After exiting the archway, you turn right and go to reception to find out where your meeting will take place. It may be in one of five cozy sitting areas that seem to hang from the ceiling. But your meeting could also have been scheduled in a room filled with green carpet, magnetic leafs and a variety of stools, some made of soft material others of cut- off tree trunks. Or even in a retro futuristic looking flying saucer, called the Pressure Cooker. As you wait for the other participants to join your meeting, you smell apple pie coming right out of the oven and have to talk yourself out of ordering a piece with whipped cream. You walk around the space and notice a small room with a red couch for meditating and then you see a red room with workshop participants fiddling with LEGOs. As you wait for your meeting to begin, you sip a cappuccino while reading the Dutch Financial daily, entitled, Het Financieele Dagblad. After your meeting you stop to hear a presentation about personal branding given at the end of the afternoon. In fact, inspirational talks and interesting lectures on trends, scenario planning, work/life balance occur daily in the open auditorium.

It is realWhile this might sound too far fetched to be part of a real bank, this is anything but fiction. No need to pinch yourself. This is actually a very integral part of the Bank where innovation and creativity thrive. You’ve arrived at the Dialogues House.

So if you wondered why a Bank would be interested in creating such a physical space to begin with, we can tell you: to encourage meaningful conversations between colleagues, with experts from other companies, with clients, suppliers and partners; to stimulate creativity, innovation and collaboration. This intention is reflected in the interior design layout and furniture choice. You won’t find any off-the-shelf furniture here because there’s no room for off-the-shelf thinking.

Some of the design of Dialogues House has been developed in order to create a climate in which people feel inspired to work together, other spaces to have time to rest and recharge. The bottom line is that in order to provide an opportunity for visitors, (employees, guests or clients) to contribute to a growing dialogue the space needs to suit a variety of needs. Five years ago when Gispen was given the remit to transform the former trading floor into the Dialogues House, they were asked to design a space to facilitate as much interaction as possible. What they developed was a unique, stimulating environment using select products and colors to make people immediately notice it’s something different.

Luring people into breaking habitsSo, how does one stimulate creativity, sustainability, innovation and entrepreneurship in a Bank? According to Peter Veer, CEO of Gispen, “you need to lure people into breaking habits and to step out of their comfort zone. When people sit down in a different way than they are used to, they start behaving differently, thinking differently, and talk about different things. That’s where the

creativity comes in”.

Imagine a typical office building for 2000-3000 employees. Normally you go to the company restaurant, completely secluded from where the employees actually work. The fact that a coffee house/ restaurant is located within the Dialogues House is an integral part of the design, because having a place to talk with colleagues informally, and a place to eat that is part of the par and parcel of an office. Indeed, it is another factor that makes the Dialogues House feel like such a natural environment, one that people will want to be in and not only employees but also people from the outside.

What’s more, the Dialogues House concept was created as a way to make the bank a better company, employer and sparring partner for its clients. “They wanted to pave the way into a new way of thinking about flexibility, creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship and everything that goes with it,” Veer states.

Paul Iske, the Founder and Director of Dialogues explains, “ourMission at Dialogues is to stimulate entrepreneurial thinking and behavior. When we started eight years ago, the remit was to remove the barriers to innovation and entrepreneurship: We did that in part by creating an environment which openly fosters experimentation, associative thinking, listening to one another’s ideas and further building upon them. We very much promote ‘ Combinatoric Innovation’, where the question “What could we do together?” plays an important role. In so doing we enable the development of new concepts and turning them into reality. For this, it is also important to develop a climate in which people are more prepared to take the necessary risks. To enable risk-taking also means you have to change the way people perceive failure. The word “failure” may be vilified in the Dutch professional culture, yet there can be no success without trial and error. To show people the positive use of failure I created the Institute of Brilliant Failures, that aims for fear reduction in two phases of the innovation process: People should have not be afraid to start something that might fail and in case of a failed attempt, people must be able to be open about it, resulting in learning opportunities. With Dialogues, and its physical embodiment, the Dialogues House that we created five years ago, we aim to create a dialogue that embraces combinatoric innovation; because in the end we believe that it is the dialogue itself, the bringing together of people and organizations, where the heart and soul of social entrepreneurship beats.”

Change by DesignVeer believes that a space like the Dialogues House can play an instrumental role in changing the mindset and attitude of a company. ABN AMRO has gone

through a rough patch but has really transformed from an old-fashioned bank into a more customer driven, commercially active one. “In fact, being a customer myself”, says Veer, “I’ve seen dramatic changes in the last couple of years from a traditional bank with old-fashioned bankers to one with bankers who are more proactive, and who think with the client and their company. Now I notice that the Bank is organizing things that are more interesting to clients like me, for example offering mini-workshops.”

I Wish I Worked ThereIn Kursty Groves’ recent book, I Wish I Worked There: A Look Inside the Most Creative Spaces in Business, Groves examines 20 well-known companies, including the LEGO Group, Bloomberg, and Urban Outfitters. Her book provides insights on how these firms use space in order to promote creativity and collaboration, increase employee satisfaction, and also to decrease employee turnover. Groves distinguishes between stimulating spaces (in which the mind is inspired or a thought process is triggered), reflective spaces (where people go to focus or relax), collaborative spaces (where ideas are shared and further built upon) and playful spaces (which involves experimentation and hands-on involvement). A place where people can blow off steam or bond with one another by playing games like LEGO, table tennis or foosball), is essential in fostering a climate in which innovation can be stimulated.

Companies known for their strength in innovating or getting others to innovate, such as Google and Ideo, have already aligned design with the way they work. Another example of a space that encourages innovation is Procter & Gamble’s Clay Street Project: a renovated brewery located in a rundown part of Cincinnati, where small groups spend 12 weeks focusing on business challenges in an environment that

encourages creative thinking and risk-taking. P&G encourages collaboration with flexible meeting areas and ‘nap pod’ stations and while their open ‘session spaces’ are initially quite bare, this, too, has a purpose, namely allowing the team to grow and change as the project evolves.https://theclaystreetproject.pg.com/claystreet/default.aspx

A few kilometers away in downtown Cincinnati, you will find the more conservative HQ of P&G. Do they innovate there too? Of course, yet the innovation agenda is less focused on radical breakthroughs, but rather incremental innovation. Just as intention precedes design, the context is equally crucial: while lava lamps, workstations made from recycled sunflower seed husks and Pressure Cookers may work well because of their setting, in a different environment they will probably just look silly. Aside from that, when designing

office space with innovation in mind, one should always ask: “where does the person who will work here fit in this design? There’s an inherent risk in designing to impress, without taking into account that people need to actually work there. From acoustics to lighting, and from workflow to placement of lavatories, all of these are important considerations when creating such a physical space.

Spaces of the Future?So what does this all mean for the future of investing in brick and mortar offices at a time in which work is becoming more and more virtual? It seems that while the corporate offices will still be around, they will probably be slimmed down. More space will be created for collaboration with clients, partners, suppliers, freelancers and

salaried employees. And as the number of people who start their own businesses grows, so does a changing world, one in which we increasingly choose where we want to work. Hence the ability for the space to engage us, inspire us and foster meaningful connections with the outside world may just be the deciding factor between which assignment we take or for whom we want to work. Because, let’s face it, magnetic leaves and picnic tables trump closed corridors any day.

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