Space and Innovation, and their Relationship

Divisive Nature of Space on Wisdom

I have begun investigating into space and innovation, and their relationship in 2005. I believe that the way a space is configured at the workplace impacts the quantity and quality of creative ideas and commercially viable innovations produced by the organisation.

By dividing the space into smaller parcels and allocating these to different organisational stakeholders to facilitate labour division, specialisation and scaled economisation, people get divided and their collective institutional memory and tacit knowledge is also disaggregated, distributed and stove-piped within these pockets of space. While technology may support the retrieval, transmission, sharing and storage of information from and at different venues, the reintegration of these elements into their original whole and relaying it as wisdom between organisational members remains a challenging and costly affair for many practitioners of organisation development.

Politics are Built into the Space

The call for keeping wisdom centralised and intact comes from the recognition that innovation is a product of creativity that combines and recombines current wisdom into new forms of representation that transcend traditional arrangements and structures. This propensity to create is heightened when innovators gain access to a wider array of wisdom that exists in the various communities in the organisation. In a divided organisation, the dispensation of this wisdom is obstructed by the rights, influences and power one has over the wisdom in a broken-up space vis-à-vis some other spaces. While these are intangible, their physical representations like social boundaries, physical structures, and geographical time zones are. These barriers constraint the movement of people and the knowledge they carry. These undermine their chances of creating breakthrough ideas and innovations.

Channelling Causes the Creation of Dark Spaces

Inductively, one can conclude that there is an explicit and positive relationship between the configuration of space and the prospect of the organisation in producing innovations. The layout affects the movement of its occupants, who are the carriers of knowledge and wisdom in the organisation. This channelling effect determines the preferences of the occupants over the use of a certain passageway, corridor or access route. This means it is more by design than coincidence that the foci of a network and its social order is skewed towards those destinations where channelling plays a defining role in the given space.

Unlike explicit knowledge, which is observable, recordable and storable, tacit ones are more likely to be effectively transferred from one individual to another through interactions like conversation, discourse and collaborative work. The effects of channelling create pockets of vacuum in certain parts of the organisation where such interactions are disabled. These dark spaces lack the drawing power to bring in enough of people to generate the diversity necessary for wisdom to be created. They also provide little attraction to stem the flow of these resources out of the space. This makes the stay in the dark spaces short and this disables meaningful and fruitful interactions, which is essential in the creation of breakthrough ideas.

Limiting Factors - Scientific Management Principles

Nevertheless, the way businesses are structured today informs us that the artefacts of scientific management will continue to be the cornerstones of organisatíons. Productivity with labour division, controlled decentralisation, and scale economisation will remain the dominant forces in influencing the organisation of resources for competition. In the face of such an arrangement, innovation practitioners need to find creative solutions that allow them to leverage on the current sciences of organisation to cultivate ideas and harness them as commercially viable innovations. They need to create white clearings in the dark spaces.

A Toothless Elephants are Forever White

In the course of my work, I have worked with organisations keen in creating spaces for creativity and innovation. The experience has been mixed. I have come across organisations which had funded the building of innovation rooms for the sake of meeting some business excellence requirements without wanting to understand how the rooms were to be subsequently used. Many of their investments ended in waste and further development in this area was shelved given the rooms' low utilisation rates. Eventually, these white elephants were converted for other uses when new priorities surface.

The main reason for these failed experiments is not because of the shortage of space or people with knowledge and wisdom. It is the lack of sharewares that enable meaningful and fruitful conversations, discourses and discussions to take place in these spaces. When the interactions are not meaningful, participants cannot find the purpose and motivation for attending and participating in these wisdom engagement gatherings. Spaces provided for these gathering are eventually unused. With proper channelling and availability of sharewares, we have the ingredients to build white space, as opposed to dark spaces.

Wiring Up the Space

As early as 2006, experiments to hardwire sharewares into the organisation's white spaces had begun.

Plan-Do-Check-Act or PDCA is the mother of all problem solving sharewares. What does it actually do and why is it so important? A process is a mechanism that times the release of a number of problem solving or consensus building sharewares to the participants at the most appropriate moment. It is important to time their release because there is a need to account for the pace of the conversation and learning during participation and overcome the forming, storming, norming and performing stages of a team as it grows it knowledge and experience.

My early attempts were confined to incorporating accelerated solutioning processes into spaces like meeting and work rooms. Several approaches were contemplated at that time and the more concrete ones are presented below:

• Hardwiring – This is the kind of wiring found in the iStudio of the Ministry of Education, where the innovation process described by John Kao was hardwired into the space. Here, the designer believes that breakthroughs could happen when participants experience total immersion in and strict in adhering to the prescribed process and hardwiring the process into the space guarantees such results. His process could be found scripted onto the walls and the fixtures are built and acquired to allow the participants to follow the given script.

• Soft Wiring – This is the type of wiring that was adapted by the Ministry of Defence for its innovation rooms. The layout and fixtures are designed and acquired to create an environment that is suitable for a finite array of processes. We were able to accommodate a range of layouts within these definitions:

• Very Soft Wiring – where the layout of the room could be copied from some where without the need to understand the influences and nuances of the process and environment on the team's performance.
• Semi-Soft Wiring – where the layout of the room is configured around a generic team work methodology and could be used for a finite array of processes. Here the influences and nuances of the process and environment on the team's performance are broadly accounted for during design.
• Softwiring – where the layout of the room is laid out around a particular category of team processes and could only be applied for a particular category of team work. Thus, if the room is fitted for prototyping, it could support all kinds of prototyping activities and nothing else. Here, the influences and environmental impact on team's performance are narrowly considered.

• Flexible Wiring. This kind of wiring combines the benefits of both hardwiring and softwiring but uses different technologies to overcome the challenges experienced when switching between these two kinds of wiring. Technologies are used to make the switch seamless. Taking this a step further, flexibility wiring includes the ability to strip down a team process into specific components and to have these combined and recombined with other strip down components of other team-based processes to form new processes. Thus, the idea of creating self-contain modules from pieces taken from different team work methodologies and supporting their execution within the space is the main thrust in its design.

I have left the public service in February of 2007 and is unable to follow-up and learn more about the outcomes of these experimentation with spaces. However, I have heard of initial successes during the early day of their implementation.

This article was 1st written on 17 April 2009.
Copyright 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.