How do you answer these questions
about your workplace?

posted: April 2001

Reflctions March 2009

It has been nearly eight years since I wrote these questions. In this period, we have built more work which demonstrates viable alternatives to the status quo than in the three decades before.

to future links and notes

Also, I have written thousands of pages both describing this body of work and as well as articulating a philosophy of architecture in support of a new-old way of building and being with self, team, society and Earth.

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I am, at this point of my life and work, 70 and a half years old having spent better than 52 of them in the pursuit of the making of authentic architecture. I am not an architect in the normal nor legal definition nor a builder in the way that this art is practiced today. I would describe what I do as master builder except for the presumption of the first word of this term.

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What does it add up to?

This is a worthy question given the primary purpose of this web site which is to explore how does one live a self-aware, creative, productive life in this present society? How does one help improve Humanity’s situation while avoiding negative, unintended consequences and harm? And, how can the lessons learned from this exploration be made useful - recreated of course - to others seeking a similar path?

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This body of work is not mine to claim alone. There were many who came before me and a team which I have worked with over the years. I can claim, I suppose, that I advanced the idea and application of organic architecture and acted as spark plug, guide and sometimes teacher to what I expect to be an emerging, viable practice of some duration. Architecture is a curious mix of tradition and innovation. It takes both in balance to significantly advance the art and properly address the issues both of Humanity, broadly, and those of a specific time and place.

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I do not consider this to be a good time for architecture. This judgment is independent of whatever successes or setbacks I have personally experienced. FLlw’s dictum that we will not have an organic architecture until we have an organic society certainly still holds true. As I write these words, we are in another global melt down with the powers-that-be trying to fix what has clearly exceeded both utility and capability. These disruptions are coming now with greater frequency and magnitude while the underlying factors remain ignored with emerging possibilities neglected and even fought in many cases. Great effort is being spent to protect a way-of-life - if it can be called that - which has long ceased to be viable. It is not that there is not good in our global society - there is plenty of that. It is not that there are not many viable alternatives being proposed and demonstrated - we have a warehouse of good options in our global library. Even, it is not that many wonderful works of architecture are not being created - more now, perhaps, than in any period of known history. It is that the system - the species - called Humanity is without a rudder on a wild storm swept sea of our own creation. Pogo was right.

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Architecture is always a reflection of the society which builds and uses it. It is more. It is a powerful expression of a society’s aspirations and a tool for achieving them. This is true of all architecture and particularly the workplace as it is the workplace where a great deal our our future is conceived and built. When I talk about Authentic Architecture, and the fact-based nature of architecture, I mean to be taken literally - not metaphorically. Architecture is built philosophy. In practical terms, i.e. in practice, our species self image and philosophy has run its course. We are building monuments to a dying culture and work environments which are accelerating this death process. We are smothering our potential future in the landfill of an over-hyped consumerism. A few years back, I described our “global” economy as “a massive positive feedback loop on steroids with delusions of grandeur” and it recently has been proven to be precisely that.

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We have made growth our vision, defiance of Nature and our own individual and species self-interest a cult philosophy, and signature works, by star architects, the tombstones in our expanding global graveyard.

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Why?

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Perhaps, the present crises - a down payment on many more to come if we do not change - will be seen for what it is: feedback not bad luck. As painful as it might be, perhaps, we will take on the task for recreating our future. Perhaps, architecture will serve its legitimate function by supporting this renascence. If so, it starts in the workplace for that is the machine which is grinding out the consequences we see all around us.

to future links and notes

Objectively, it can be argued that the MG Taylor, AI, and the TSM Architecture team have created an unique and the largest body-of-work presenting an alternative work environment - of integrated physical place, work processes and augmentation tools - which exists. These works, when employed to their full potential, form a single coherent system based on 21st Century science and arts not the potpourri of competing, contradicting and mutually exclusive philosophical leftovers in which most people work today. In scale and scope, by in place standards, these works are insignificant. In today’s throwaway industrial world, many of these have been destroyed, their specific mission accomplished, nearly as fast as we are building new ones. Our strategic intent, going back into the 70s, has been and remains to build a global network of these work environments - we call the navCenters - each owned and operated by individual organizations and all, together, capable of functioning as a global capability and capacity. This network includes portable workplaces we call RDS units. While individually ignored by mainstream architecture, together as a body of work, a result of undisputable quality and significance has been achieved. Along with the navCenters and RDS Units, we are just beginning to build larger office landscapes and smaller, personal home work environments.

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From the standpoint of an operating system made up of independent yet wired together parts, we are just beginning to see the reality of what is a generation old vision. While these environments have been used to solve problems and facilitate work involving thousands of people, multiple governments and business organizations to achieve a collective project objective - thus, providing proof-of-concept - as well as bring together in collaborative sessions leaders from all over the world at Davos, the ValueWEb we have woven together has yet to take on a critical, global, systemic, Worthy Problem as a ValueWeb. In recent years, there have been ever more significant uses of this System and Method. Yet, we are still nibbling around the edges of its true Mission.

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From my perspective, a big work or a small work; a global focus, or a local one; a temporary environment, or a Xanadu; an issue effecting the globe or a small community; are all equally important. Our society’s measures of significance and importance are not useful in regards this work. It is the integration of these efforts and their accumulative critical mass which matters. - I estimate a broadly distributed critical mass of three to five percent is required to effect the global transformation which is now taking place by default. The definition of a WorthyProblem is that it leads to a practical solution at some specific local time and place and connects to a global systemic, accumulative result. It is significance, local practical result and connectivity which defines WORTHY.

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While we most often “work for” large organizations, our Mission is to support the Transition Manager. This is a one-person-at-a-time bottoms up process. In this work, the individual workplace, the teamspace, the large collaborative DesignShop® space - physical and virtual - are all necessary. One person working, a team, a hundred or many thousand, is equal in our eyes and all necessary. This way-of-working, to work in support of individual to global transformation, must scale, in multiple recursion levels in a ValueWeb architecture, from a single knowledge worker to a planetary society.

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It is in this context, that the questions I asked in April 2001 must be taken for your workplace is where you settle in each day to be productive, supported by and effecting the entirety of Planet Earth. Your workspace is also where you spend the majority of your life-time.

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In the old Hebrew, “to worship” meant “to work for.” I have never seen work as a necessary thing to do so that one can “earn a living” in order to buy the bobbles produced by a global consumer economy. To me, work is a sacred act. It is the producing - be it food, a poem, a brick, a cathedral, a computer, a truly entertaining party experience, a night at the opera, a spaceship - the best of yourself in the form of a concrete gift to the Universe. To be sure, often there is trade and money involved. At times, monetary wealth produced. These are transactional considerations. The real wealth is what all Humanity produces in the search for understanding, enlightenment and prosperity for all living beings, including Gaia - to limit our thinking to the scale of this one planet, for now. It is the genius of each of us and the GroupGenius™ of billions which matters.

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thoughts about the ten questions

Does it express the brand called you? When I say the “brand called you” this means “you” as an individual and “you” as part of a community, region, planet, species and intelligent being wherever-whenever this may be. You are unique - an entire universe within yourself and you are part of an unfathomable whole. Can your proper expression be procured out of a freeze dried shelf at Walmart? Where is the YOU in your workplace? Where it the PLACE in your workplace? How does your workplace reflect to others - and to you - the you you are and want to become? If your legacy was the place you now work is all that a future archeologist would know of you, would this be an accurate expression of who you are, what you believed in and have created? Brands are important. They are the artistic expression of an idea, product, service, individual, community of work, organization, a city, region or political economy. Brands communicate essence. They are as important to an individual and, internally, to an organization as they are to the “market” outside of them. They express fact and aspiration and, when falsely represented, they backfire. In asking if your workplace actually expresses the brand called you, I am asking you to step outside of yourself and and “look” at the system you, your work, and your environment of work. What speaks, when you do this and do you like what is said? to future links and notes

Does it support your work or do you adjust to it? List out all the functions you perform in the doing of your work. Analyze your work environment. Does it specifically support all the processes you employ? Can your place of work easily change to fit the modality - energy, spirit, task, tool requirements - you are in at any moment. Or, do you have to conform and make do with a place which was designed based on a book of averages that never really existed in the flesh? Your work environment is shelter, expression and the arrangement of space and tools the purpose of which is to support and augment what you do. Basically, the “office” is what it was a hundred years ago except that the phones are better, typewriters have become computers, open-office cubicles are the norm, “adjustability” means wheels have been put on some things and - in really enlightened environments - we have informal, “soft,” cafe, “collaborative” spaces. Most of these are improvements - some not - yet the underlying physical, process and social architecture remains remarkably the same. This in a period of the greatest change in history. Did we really have it that right a century ago? Or, are we still thinking in a box? to future links and notes

Are you stimulated or bored? What? Your are supposed to work not be happy. Work is serious, not play. It is something you have to do! And maybe, if you work hard enough, are lucky and do the right things, you can make enough money to retire. Maybe, you even might get rich as that is the “American” dream. This is quite a script. And a damaging one. It results in a workplace of status symbols, luxury flaunting lobbies and executive offices adjacent to the utilitarian, humdrum, one-size-fits-all sameness called workstations, and the segregated-from-it-all production places which just recently have begun to become a place a human should be asked to be. If you think all this without esthetic sensibility, think again. These attributes brilliantly express the dominate philosophy, in our society, of work and our opinion about workers and their social status. And, I am describing the workplaces of the “lucky” people. The places which the vast majority of working people on this planet have to endure goes without comment. We know that children - of all know species - if deprived of a high variety, interesting, stimulating environment, which they can engage with, will grow up with less developed brains. We know that older people, lacking a stimulating and relevant-to-them environment will slip faster into dementia - no matter its cause - then those who live in a normal environment and stay engaged. Why, do we think, then, that low variety, dull environments are just the place for learning, work and getting well? When I ask people where they go on vacation the answers, at first, look to be all over the map. Some go to the Big Apple, others to the rain forest, others to the beach, the mountains, a country inn and so on. After asking “why there?” the pattern becomes clearer. To each, their place of choice is different, engaging, often challenging, exciting, new, demanding, stimulating, restful, away, conducive to personal thought and introspection, an opportunity to share with family and friends. In other words, places of high variety with both prospect and refuge, individual space and community. When I then ask them to apply these attributes to describing their ideal workplace, the most amazing, thoughtful, exciting performance specifications come out. I then ask them to compare these specifications to their workplace and they are almost to a person shocked by the gap. A gap that few were aware of an half an hour before. By the way, if I skip all of this and just ask what they want in a workplace usually the response is about a bit more space for this and that, temperature control and stuff like that. Important considerations yet tightly within the frame of the existing dominate solution set. Improvements at best. This demonstrates the power of a paradigm. When Gail and I go into schools to work with young students, teachers always tell us about ADA and a host of other symptoms. We say “fine just bring in the food and we will go all day.” “All day?” “Yes, all day.” “No breaks?” “No breaks.” “Impossible!” “Just watch” We put them into a self-managed simulation and they go all day producing wonderful work and exhibiting profound learning. When asked how we did it we, as gently as possible, explain that they were boring the student to death. By the way, when we work with Fortune 500 executive we give them the same content and the same exercises. Same results. to future links and notes

What structures does it impose? Structure and process are the same thing. A structure, from the vantage point of a perceiver, is a process too slow to observe - a process is a “structure” changing at a rate which can be. The aluminum frame of your office window is actually burning. You cannot see this nor feel the heat. It is called oxidation which is how we metabolize. This process will actually consume your own cells long before you will be able to see the window frame evaporate. “Structure “wins.” You cannot overcome a structure by ignoring its existence and the fact of what it does. Structure-processes which are within our perceptual range, with good science and engineering, are relatively easy to modify, invent, build and employ. Structure-processes “smaller” than or “bigger” than our perceptual range, are more subtle, less easy to understand, require refined models and instruments, and tend to produce unintended consequences when we mess with them out of ignorance. A neural net is a structure and so is a global power grid and the Internet and they are all remarkably similar. Language is a structure and so is a philosophy. The design of a manufacturing “process” is a structure and so it the US Constitution. Structures facilitate and they also impose limits. This is why - and how - they work. When you walk [a structure of “controlled” falling] into your workplace [a structure of walls, wires, tools, surfaces and symbols] you [a structure of immense complexity with a social, economic, biological ecology] with the intent [a neural, social, biological structure parts of which may go back 10,000 or more years in its present form] to do work [in a scientific structure, a force acting on a mass over a distance for a time], “you” are engaged in a complex dance which no one understands and the scope of which cannot be accurately defined. The way your environment is wired together may very well lack requisite variety with your reality and the task you have in mind. How do we successfully engage with a system which is too complex for us to understand and control? How do we make structures which work with us and not against our well being? What are the key factors - out of billions of factors - we should pay attention to when making workplace? What does thinking about your workplace in this way bring to mind? What action on a mass over a distance for a time is implied by what you conclude? to future links and notes

What does it symbolize? We live in a world of symbols which we have created. Symbols are a means of and a natural consequence of our cognitive functioning. They allow us to see patterns, chunk information and come to conclusions rapidly. They also can trap us and make us vulnerable to manipulation. Art employs and creates symbols. Go to a movie and look at it from this vantage point. Observe how words, gestures, color music, pacing, light levels, objects are expertly employed to invoke your thoughts, memories, biological-chemical reactions and emotions. The movie is actually happening inside your head - what is on the screen is merely the stimulus. Isn’t it amazing that you can become sad at a hero’s loss or sexually aroused by what are in fact only flashing pixels on a screen? All designed objects - and much of what we call the natural world - well done or not, to a greater or lesser degree, effect you in the same way. You cannot avoid this. It is a structural phenomena. Your history and values will, of course, determine your specific response yet, as long as you are alive, you will respond no matter you recognize it or not. You can go to the movie, or not. You can examine you reactions, or not. You can - over time - “change” your responses by understanding your self and environment better. You also, can change your workspace so that is more accurately provides you and others feedback to who your are and wish to become. to future links and notes

Is it a healthy place? Our workplaces with rare exception are not healthy. In most cities on a summer afternoon, the accumulate pollutants inside our buildings are twice, on average, whatever the state is on the outside - which is few cities can be considered good. Most of our industrial products are toxic. Much of the furniture restricts movement as many “conveniences” take away the requirement to be physically active throughout the day. Our flat-earth stacking of what are essentially one story buildings on top of one another to create hi-rise structures which emphasize large, horizontal, low ceiling, spaces which create “thinking in a box,” “tunnel vision,” and the sense that “my back was against the wall” - come to think of it, calling them spaces is a cognitive error almost as great that these “spaces” are causing in those who unfortunately must occupy them. We are told that this does not effect thought and work. Poor light spectrum causes headaches to a significant number of the population while the lack of shade and shadow provides glare and little rest for the eyes. The stress of organizational relationships and the pressure to produce more and more with less and less, in this the wealthiest period in the known history of the world, is not a prescription for mental nor physical health. Nor, is it the way to true creativity and productive performance. You are an oxygen burning machine with a poor air supply in a polluted container, with bacteria laden dry air being blown at you, which offers little prospect or refuge nor relief from social pressures and annoying light while everything you touch is likely to be mildly to seriously toxic. If you are tired at the end of the day after just burning your normal 100 watts an hour do you wonder why? There is no theory or practice of physical or mental health which would support the practice of a modern work environment. What is your body-mind fighting? Contrast this experience with active exercise, in good company, in a natural environment while on a vacation. An environment is “the circumstances which surround an organism.” It is not easy to prescribe success or happiness. It is not that difficult to make an environment which systematically facilitates the emergence of health, good energy, and productive, collaborative work processes. A good investment, I think. to future links and notes

What does it really cost to make, keep and get rid of? Typically, the work environment is seen as a sunk cost, an unfortunate yet necessary expense to be controlled by budget. Such amenities deemed to be desirable and affordable are added to a base cost arrived at by standard means and rarely challenged at it root It is assumed that the system which build these environments is basically efficient and that competition is keeping this so. Unchallenged, this assumption is one of the greatest fallacies in all of Human Enterprises. Aside from this circumstance, which gives up 20 to 40 percent of the capital value from the beginning for no benefit, there remains a number of curious economic premises which defy the imagination. It is considered reasonable for example to tear down and replace whole built spaces at the end of each five year lease cycle. These acts are called leasehold improvements once again demonstrating the power of words over objective fact. Until the arrival of “systems furniture,” these “improvements” were built conventionally using permanent yet low quality materials and methods it being too expensive to build well for such a short duration. This has placed millions of people in sheet roc drums for rooms. The problem with “systems” furniture, besides the typical dullness of its design and coldness of its materials (slowly improving now) is that it yet includes only part of the system. It also tends to be style driven (to compete, I suppose) and thus thrown away prematurely in order that a new look can be had - unfortunately a variation on the same old theme. And, like in the case of the “permanent” solution, to be hauled away a boon to the trucking industry and land fills as recycling is just starting to get its toe in the door. What is missing from all of this is the idea of life-cycle economics where all the lust-to-dust costs are accounted. What is missing is the notion that a knowledge worker’s work environment is the factory now and should be considered as an investment which produces an authentic return - like a machine tool. It should pay for itself and then some. What is missing is that workspaces are personal and, to be optimum, should be unique to each user. That they must easily move around as teams need to reconfigure and that they should be considered as works-of-art and go with, and evolve with, their user-owners for decades. A work environment, where a person spends a major portion of their life should at least have the utility and quality of the car that person drives to work and leaves parked 90 percent of the time. And, this level of investment can be justified if in fact the “system” really worked. to future links and notes

Can you TEAM? For all the talk about collaboration, the environments - an integrated system of physical place, work processes and augmentation tools - that actually support group work, remain mysteriously absent. This is a hidden crises. Almost everything which promotes true teaming in the workplace is counter intuitive to the philosophical assumptions and the built infrastructure of our society. Inroads are being made in the technology realm yet, in a curious way, these are tending to actually impede F2F interactions. What is lacking is system integration and true work disciplines (not to be confused with dogmas and rigid, inhuman, protocols flying the false flag of authentic work processes). A Team environment supports individual work modalities while being able to easily and rapidly reconfigure for scheduled and spontaneous, fully supported core and extended team collaborative work. This has to seamlessly work over time and distance by employing RemotePresence™ techniques. Teams have to be practiced into reality. They require symbol, locality, common cause, mission focus and cultural inclusion. Employed properly, architecture can provide the Armature for these attributes. This precludes the pre-lean-manufactured, plain-jane-vanilla, user disenfranchised, isolated, grab bag of mixed signals, cold, dull, nailed-to-the-floor, industrial-model, throw-away, “environments” prevalent today. to future links and notes

Does it help you manufacture knowledge? A knowledge environment is a learning environment. When recognized as such, schools will be more like work environments and the workplace more like universities at their best. Some of the Silicon Valley firms - the ones which remain successful - realize this. In modern manufacturing, a workstation can be moved to where needed and is always configured as part of a whole system. Both batch and one-off processes can be supported. Reconfiguration can be done often in minutes and hours. Different assembly techniques can be employed and mixed. Craft and mass production is combined to support mass-customization. This is lean production. Many learning-knowledge-design environments succeed at creating the amenity and spirit of free inquiry and collegiality, necessary for the making of knowledge, yet fail to systematically harvest this knowledge, develop it thorough collaborative efforts, and focus it on needed solutions. What is needed is an environment which integrates all of these parts into an engine of creation. This is what MG Taylor calls a navCenter. Knowledge not applied is actually not knowledge - it is information. It is in use that it become true knowledge and most valuable. Today, “knowledge” is created in one part of our society or an organization and then “applied” in another. These process-structures, lacking adequate feedback loops, are ad hoc, disconnected and fragmented. Typically, the end user is left out in the rain. A true knowledge economy requires an architecture of ValueWebs with investors, producers and users collaborating in a systemic way, able to do rapid prototyping in iterative cycles, thus jumping the curve in order to stay requisite with the challenges they face. to future links and notes

Are you getting a profitable return? All living beings must function at a profit. It is a biological necessity. They must bring in what their system requires to function plus reserves which enable them to succeed though environmental fluctuations and change. There has to be profit to fund learning, growth, change and improvement. The amount of profit a being requires is determined by the distribution of key resources in its environment, the fluctuations of that environment, the being’s gestation periods, demands of the next generation, and potential to evolve. Profit requires storage. When a being dies, this marginal utility is returned to the environment and or to other members of its species. The more complex a being and its society the greater the requirement for legitimate profit and the more forms this profit takes. Too little profit can be deadly and so can too much. Nature does not support large margins for extended periods of time. As a human I have oxygen storage for a few minutes, water for a few days, food for a few weeks. This storage system evolved given the relative distribution of these “goods” in the natural environment. When I fly, technology is employed to augment my oxygen storage capacity among other key resources. What would I look like if I had to “store,” biologically, six months of oxygen and four years of food? Morally and functionally, personal profit is limited by proper storage ability and understanding. If I weighed 500 pounds how much would this really extend my food latency capability and what would be the consequences to my health? This weight is actually a radical diminishing return - too much “success” of one function putting the rest of the system at greater risk. If Humanity consumes our planet, what will be the results? The concept of profit, for humans and Humanity, is far more subtle and variegated than just that of physical well being and financial success. Once survival levels are exceeded and a society is stable, quality of life and happiness is only loosely linked to economy. All human societies, no matter how impoverished, have some forms of art and recreation. It is true we “do not live by bread alone.” In advanced - not necessarily rich - societies, work increasingly becomes an expression of leisure, creativity, art, recreation (re-creation), health and future well being with monetary profit being but one measure of success. We sometimes forget this even when “the game” is really the thing. Modern societies have whole industries with billions invested, with “ferocious” competition, and where the industry net-out has never claimed a profit. The airline industry is one example. In the end, the measure of a life or a society is how well the marginal utility has been spent - not “earned.” The profit from your work should be measured in spiritual, intellectual, emotional, visual, artistic, financial, community, societal and species-wide, global, ecological and - at minimum - planetary terms. Your workplace - places, actually - have to be created and employed in light of this economy-ecology. to future links and notes

These ten questions are listed separately yet should be answered systemically. They reflect a system of thought and it is what underlies them which is important. Reflecting on the question and taking appropriate action on resulting insights is far more important than the direct answers themselves. Making shelter is a basic human requirement and capacity. This, at minimum involves living, working and community spaces. Today, these are separated, fragmented and managed by entirely different rules-of-engagement. This is expensive and non functional. The workplace, itself, is segregated between managerial, professional, knowledge-work and production. It is all knowledge work and design now no matter the specific task at hand. The value add is knowledge, art and the experience provided.

to links and notes

We are in a time when the very foundations and superstructure of our Human Enterprise are being questioned, reevaluated and will ultimately be recreated. The workplace is a good place to begin. Even though most of us are still “trapped” within huge organizations, there remains - if we will exercise it - many degrees of freedom in how we shape our personal and team workplace. It is dangerous not to do so. It is potentially a waste of a life not to do so. Nature once provided our workplace. Now, it exists for most of us as a consequence of our social architecture. The purpose of a system is its output. Take a hard look when you next go into your place of work and, with a beginner’s mind, ask if it is “natural” and where you want to spend a major portion of your life-time.

note: March 27, 2010:

For an application of these concepts to the real world of a technology company renting space in a commercial building with landlord requirements, click on the graphic below:

You may conclude from this piece that we, at MG Taylor, AI, TSM Architecture set very high standards and goals in our quest for the ideal workplace. You are right. Many say that this is too idealistic and impractical. I think not. I believe that what is offered as the workplace today is what is impractical and that there is a direct relationship between these environments and the mess we seem to be making of our world. And, I point out, my criticism of the human workplace is reserved for the very best society has to offer. The vast majority of humankind works in far worse circumstances than most who have the means and leisure to visit this web site. This is a fact worth pondering. Can we really afford to throw so much potential genius away? Can we morally justify doing so?

Indeed - in deed - we have a long way to go in action as well as in theory. We have to ask if we are fully employing our centuries of accumulated knowledge and the resources of our huge Universe or our we fiddling around while Earth and our Human Society burns.

We have the tools to do much better than we are doing. The only questions are will we apply what we know and what are the consequences if we do not? In a time when collaboration is so needed what does the structure of our workplaces actually say about our commitment to co-design? In a society which says it honors learning, thinking, innovation, individual achievement and team spirit, do the pidgin holes of our typical work environment match those in our mind and visa versa?

How and why did the philosophy of utilitarianism kill the spirit and glory of honest, productive, original and useful work?

posted September 5, 2001

revised March 6, 2009

• 20010401.333633.mt • 20090301.7719201.mt •
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(note: this document is about 95% finished)

Matt Taylor 615 720 7390

me@matttaylor.com

Copyright© Matt Taylor 2001, 2009