Sharing Workplace Approaches Across the Atlantic

Art of the Future received a visit from the executive team of the VC Business Company located in the Netherlands. They were on a mission to talk directly with thought-leaders in the field of workplace strategy. On a learning expedition organized by principals Carolien de Heer and Michael Kloprogge, VC closed their offices for several days, boarded a plane to New York and drove to Cornell to talk with Professor Franklin Becker, author of Offices at Work: Uncommon Workspace Strategies that Add Value and Improve Performance (2004) and the classic Workplace by Design: Mapping the High-Performance Workscape (with Fritz Steele, 1995). Although Becker has now turned his attention to healthcare, the VC team garnered insights from their discussion. The next day, they again fit their group of seven into a minivan and set out on a 250 mile journey to Art of the Future, located north of Boston. We were pleased to have this opportunity to share our research, experience and perspectives with this thoughtful, energetic and dedicated group.

The VC Business Company is a consulting organization specializing in the optimization of workplaces for corporate and public organizations dealing with changes induced by market dynamics. VC has a workplace concept which focuses on activity-based working; meaning that the types and number of spaces are tailored to the needs of the user. They start with an investigation of the customer needs, utilizing online surveys, interviews, occupation measurements and technical information about the building. Their workplace concept consists of modular blocks that are combined into a lay-out. VC also takes part in strategic discussions regarding the future of the workspaces, the workplace and the use of real estate. They take qualitative aspects into account along with the quantitative, building a business case for the customer, so that they can make a well-reasoned decision.

VC is seeking to strengthen and further think through this workplace concept. Hence, their learning journey to the U.S.. They report that they found their interview with Art of the Future very inspiring, giving them new views on workplace dynamics. We noted that the Art of the Future approach begins further "upstream," working with clients to integrate their strategic context with their workplace plans in order to engage employees and improve productivity, which translates into better customer relations and business performance. Once the client organization has identified the right mix of places, technologies, policies and processes to optimize their workplace solution, Art of the Futures works with a firm such as VC to translate these insights into design solutions.

The team from VC says “It was surely a good idea to share experiences. We also hope that we have more discussions on the various topics that we reviewed...” Lunching together after the interview, we all gained a better understanding of our respective American and Dutch views on culture, politics and society. Following their intensive interviews with Becker and Art of the Future, they took a day or two for sight-seeing in New York City and were soon hard at work back in the Netherlands.

The Structural Dynamics of Patient Safety

For the last fourteen months, Art of the Future principal, Michael Sales, has been working on a mammoth patient safety initiative at the Massachusetts General Hospital. This program, entitled Engaging Leadership in Patient Safety, is sponsored by the Hospital and by the Donaghue Foundation. It has provided participants with in-depth insight into the structural dynamics underlying hospital systems in relation to patient safety issues. Structural dynamics identifies and connects the driving forces comprising the elements of a system. Intervening one or more of those factors impacts the entire system. Virtually every single feature of a hospital system is related to patient safety, and the importance of this issue is truly enormous. Every year, there are thousands of fatalities and serious injuries that result from preventable lapses in patient safety within hospitals. Unfortunately, hospitals can be very dangerous environments. In addition to the heart-wrenching human costs of patient safety problems, the social costs are very high. Think of skyrocketing malpractice insurance rates and their impact on health care costs.

This research initiative focuses on the role of leadership as a driving force in hospital systems impacting the quality of both clinical and non-clinical group's patient safety performance. The effort has been led by Dr. Sara Singer, a professor of Health Care Management and Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. Sara's research on the construction of patient safety culture is extensive, involving a national consortium of 135 hospitals prior to her work at MGH. Building on her previous research and the work of others as well, Sara's model for hospital leadership in support of patient safety emphasizes seven interrelated elements:

1. The unquestionable demonstration that hospital leadership really cares about patient safety.
2. Hospital leadership displays a welcoming response to the expression of patient safety concerns by any staff member
3. Leadership acts in a way that encourages the discussion of patient safety
4. Leadership is skilled at facilitating communication and teamwork about patient safety
5. Leadership takes visible action directly related to patient safety
6. Leadership mobilizes the information needed to support patient safety initiatives
7. Leadership seeks input from relevant stakeholders before and after taking actions related to patient safety.

Singer's hypothesis is that hospitals where leaders focus on these seven factors will become learning systems in which everyone will be active protectors and protagonists of patient safety.

The research project has been testing this thinking by running multiple groups through an intensive training program called Healthcare Adventures based at the Center for Medical Simulation, a collaborative effort of Harvard, MIT and a number of other players. Michael has been one of the chief designers and trainers associated with Healtcare Adventures, along with our close colleague, Jay Vogt of Peoplesworth, Sara, and members of the staff of the Center. In this particular version of Healthcare Adventures, Singer will compare and contrast the performance of these groups on a number of measures with those of others who have not been exposed to the training after the passage of one year and the results will be the subject of a variety of planned reports.

Among the components of the training, the leadership groups going through the training are exposed to an intense teambuilding experience in the form of a simulation that challenges them to act as leaders confronting a complicated patient safety situation. They also spend time reflecting on their own practices as patient safety leaders and planning a significant intervention in support of patient safety that will be monitored and measured over a period of time. All of this is accomplished over the course of a full day of training.

Additionally, each participating group gets a two hour follow up session in the form of a structured Booster Shot that looks in on their successes and learnings since the completion of the one day training and reviews their activities related to their intervention project. The preliminary results of these Booster Shots have been quite encouraging. Not only have the teams made significant progress in their specific patient safety activity, but they have also come out of the follow up training session charged up to function together more effectively as a leadership team. It is striking to see how powerful a brief structured follow up can be to a training session. It is so often the case that a training experience is treated as a "one off" activity that might have resulted in learnings for the day but recedes quickly into the drift of life. Periodic reviews of what was learned and what results were accomplished are very much worth the investment. Many times groups will discover they got a lot more out of a training than they thought they did when they look back upon it through the lens of subsequent action.

The impact of this research project is just beginning to be appreciated. It may become one of those rare, high leverage activities occurring at the right time and in the right institutional context to have far reaching effects on the delivery of health care in hospital settings. If so, it will to a great extent due to the focused attention of the project's champion, Sara Singer, and two well-connected sponsors, Prof. Jeff Cooper, Executive Director of the the Center for Medical Simulation, and Dr. Gregg Myers, MGH's SVP for Quality and Patient Safety. The positive connection of project champion and sponsor is one of the important factors contributing to this effort's success.

What could be more relevant to Art of the Future's focus on Life Sustaining Environments than patient safety in hospitals? Stay tuned for more progress reports!

Structural Dynamics Applied to the Credit Crisis

Thank God that the Nobel Prize for Economics has been awarded to Paul Krugman!

Krugman is a professor at Princeton who won the Nobel for his work on global trade patterns, specifically challenging the classical theory of competitive advantage, which asserts that countries should concentrate on producing something that is distinctively particular to a regions, with facts that seem to demonstrate that trade is dominated by a few countries who all produce somewhat different versions of the same thing and do that well.

That is not, however, why his receipt of the award is being celebrated here. It is his work as a columnist for the New York Times that makes him special to us because he's had so much practice writing for the general public that one can actually understand what he has to say without having to earn another graduate degree! (To emphasize the importance of this point, let us note that we are also currently reading "Causal Layered Analysis: poststructuralism as method" in Metafuture.org, which--while it promises to be an important article--has more challenging words in its title than have ever been spoken to our current American President!)

Krugman's writings in The Times has severe critics, mostly because his work frequently reflect the perspective enunciated by the Democratic Party. However, as noted by his many fans like fellow Nobel laureate, Paul Samuelson, Krugman may be opinionated but, he sure has been right recently. He has been beating the drum to take the economic perils that have been unfolding in the US and worldwide over the course of the last year plus much more seriously than mainstream politicians and policy makers were willing to do. Even today Henry Paulson was describing the step of the "government owning a stake" in US banks, the quasi-nationalization that Krugman has been calling for, as "objectionable to most Americans, me included," but it certainly seems to be one of the steps that is needed to keep America, and the world as a totality, working.

Krugman has the ability to reduce complex conditions to their simplest terms, as he did in the column published on the day that he was awarded his Nobel laureate:

"What is the nature of the crisis? The details can be insanely complex, but the basics are fairly simple. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to large losses for anyone who bought assets backed by mortgage payments; these losses have left many financial institutions with too much debt and too little capital to provide the credit the economy needs; troubled financial institutions have tried to meet their debts and increase their capital by selling assets, but this has driven asset prices down, reducing their capital even further. What can be done to stem the crisis?... The natural thing to do, then — and the solution adopted in many previous financial crises — is to deal with the problem of inadequate financial capital by having governments provide financial institutions with more capital in return for a share of ownership. "

Here's our Structural Dynamic way of capturing that description:

This is a troubling time when the policy makers who have been responsible for steering the American economy and, therefore, exerting tremendous influence over the world economy have been profoundly wrong. If Krugman doesn't claim to understand what the precise solutions are, there is certainly no way that we do either. But, we certainly seem to need more transparency and conversation about options and less screaming by people who claim to know something that they do not. It is difficult to reflect and analyze when worry demands action. Yet, wisdom requires us to understand what has happened to us before we rush off with too many fixes.

Me, I hate this way of thinking. I'm losing money every day. Like a bad dream, I want it to be over. But, unfortunately, I guess I get to be one of the grownups in this situation, just like Krugman. This is an era in which we all have a chance to be grownups, people who resist the blandishments and anxieties of the moment to make good choices for the long term.

The power of distal stimuli

Freakonomics is the study of how powerful causes have distant effects. Henry Kissinger once asked Zhou Enlai, premier of People's Republic of China, to assess the consequences of the French Revolution. His response: "It's too soon to say." That's what we mean by the art of considering and discovering distal stimuli!

Using massive data sets, Levitt and Dubner methodically dismantle the "conventional wisdom" that the economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, disdained: "We associate truth with convenience...with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being." Real understanding of economic and social behavior entails attention to complexity. Comprehending the true character of events "is mentally tiring. Therefore, we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas that represent our understanding," rather than to those that might lead us to richer insight.

Because Structural Dynamics is a way of seeing connections that might not be intuitively obvious, it is closely aligned with the mode of thought presented in Freakonomics. This way of thinking can lead to radical and controversial conclusions. And, nowhere is this more evident in Levitt and Dubner's work than in their analysis of the sharp decline in crime rates that began in the 1990s.

Ranking their frequency of mention in article in the US' ten largest circulation newspapers from 1991-2001, eight crime-drop explanations are investigated:

1. Innovative policing strategies
2. Increased reliance on prisons
3. Changes in crack and other drug markets
4. Aging of the population
5. Tougher gun control laws
6. Strong economy
7. Increased number of police
8. All other explanations (e.g., gun buybacks)

Their conclusions: While a few of these factors contributed to the drop in crime (e.g., increased incarceration sentences for violent crime), none come close to explaining the extent of the decline.

Instead--and here's where it gets controversial--the authors found a direct and powerful connection between the decline in unwanted babies being born and the drop in crime that occurred approximately eighteen years later. "A woman who does not want to have a child, usually has a good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby's health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn't received enough education....Two factor--are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child's propensity to commit crime." Thus, in 1973 when the US Supreme Court said that Norma McCorvey (aka Jane Doe), a poor, alcoholic drug-user who had already given up two children for adoption at age 21 had privacy rights that included the right to an abortion, the pool of those who were likely to commit crimes against others became much smaller. (It should be noted that McCorvey renounced abortion in 1994.)

Even though Levitt and Dubner take great pains to not state an opinion on the morality of abortion, the very fact that they demonstrated a direct link between the right to an abortion and a precipitous drop in crime has made their book both reviled and celebrated.

LIke manyexploration of systemic dynamics Freakonomics is an presents the narrative without presenting the picture. (See our blog entry on Microtrends for a more detailed example of the negative consequences of this approach to information.) However, it makes a potent case for the value of structural dynamics. Understanding anamolies--phenomena that aren't easily explained--will usually take us far past the first, the second or even the third answer, the conventional wisdom, into an analysis of the system of interrelated forces that tweaked one way or the other produce very different outcomes.

All-Hands-On-Strategy: Strong Relationships Make for Better Decisions

Anika and Michael are on the board of directors of the Boston Chapter of the Association for Strategic, with Anika serving as President and Michael as Program Chair. We are very pleased that our colleague and friend, Diana Smith, will be addressing the September 10th meeting of the ASP at the new InterConitnental Hotel in downtown Boston. Diana's talk, "When Good Strategies Go Bad: Strategically Critical Relationships Are Usually At Fault" will present ideas developed in her current top selling book, Divide or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength.

A $50 registration fee includes a networking reception with hearty appetizers and wine/beer as well as the presentation. So, this occasion is definitely a great reason to spend the evening in the heart of Boston. [Diana's talk will occur in conjunction with a conference on measurement in organizations hosted by the Palladium Group: contact us for special pricing for the conference.]

Diana and Michael were both students of Chris Argyris, with whom Diana and Bob Putnam authored the important book, Action Science. Like Diana, Art of the Future's perspective emphasizes the relationship between cognition, emotion, and language in the behavior of individuals and groups. Our particular concentration is on the way in which decision-makers consider and make choices about organizational futures.

Divide or Conquer offers a range of concepts and tools the "reflective practitioner" (a term coined by Don Schön, another mentor to Michael, Diana and many others and a close collaborator of Argyris') can use to consider his or her or their own practice in strategically critical relationships or in any interaction that is important. We all hold "frames" about others, i.e., interpretations of who others are, what they mean, what they want, how they are feel about us, what we can expect of them. As a reviewer of Diana's book notes, "Frames turn patterns of interaction into more enduring relationship structures without the people involved even realizing it."

The notion that "only senior managers can or should be involved in strategic planning" is a common frame that limits organizational creativity and resilience. As our article, "Futures Thinking by Middle Managers" points out, this assumption is tied to other unseen and/or undiscussible dynamics of organizational life. For example, left on automatic, organizational forces will push middle managers away from one another. They become weaker partners in strategic thinking because their relationships don't incline them to share information, insight and wisdom. Encouraging middle managers to develop closer, authentic connections can bring a fuller spectrum of organizational talent to the challenge of making good choices. Making the assumed, but unconsidered, frames that shape the realities of organizational life explicit can yield transformative results.

Diana's work demonstrates tremendous power comes from designing and constructing an "all-hands-on-deck" learning system that pays attention to the quality of key organizational relationships. It may take time for the payoff to reverberate throughout the system, but the positive consequences are long-lasting. Our own work indicates that contributions to organizational learning about the possibilities of the future exist at all organizational levels and leadership with foresight will commit to building a relationship system that releases understanding and wisdom wherever it resides.

Applying Structural Dynamics to Microtrends

Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne's Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes is a fast paced, breezy read on 75 trends in 15 categories. Before, during and after he got hired and fired as Hillary Clinton's chief strategist during her presidential run, Penn ran a polling firm that focuses on emerging forces shaping American and other cultures. Microtrends are under the radar screen and typically involve something like 1% of the overall population. Fathering, for example, shows up several times as an emerging trend. There are a lot of "old new dads" these day (50+ y.o. men having babies) but politicos, to their peril, are ignoring fathers in general by spending all their time with soccer moms (a term invented by Penn) and "ardent amazons," i.e., the growing number of women going into jobs that demand physical strength, such as the military, fire-fighting, plumbing, sports and building. Penn's thesis is that the dynamism of these (and other) multiple microtrends is both positive and negative socially. Positive because they demonstrate the boundless energy and inventiveness of humanity; worrisome because they indicate that we are radically fragmented, moving in a multitude of directions simultaneously.

Our point here is not to add another concise distillation to this already concise and distilled book. Rather, it is to point out the assistance that Structural Dynamic can bring to even as crisp a presentation as Penn's. Structural Dynamics seeks to identify the persistent, core elements of a system and then to use that analysis to generate a range of alternative futures. Penn does an excellent job of laying out these ingredients for the microtrends he examines, but he does not do so in a graphic way that allows the reader to hold his entire argument in mind, nor does he make much an attempt to demonstrate the linkages between the trends he studies.

In every section, Penn pulls together data from a number of sources to support his assertion that a relatively unnoticed group of people are exhibiting a behavior that has aggregated into a social phenomenon. Lets take "Pet Parents" as an example. More and more people in childless households are giving extremely VIP treatment to their pets. The first class jogging pet stoller at right is available "just for pets" for a mere $169.99 (including shipping) is one of a myriad of goods and services (think health insurance) for pets that were basically unheard of five years ago.

So far, so good: Something's happening here/what it is ain't exactly clear, but then the situation comes into shaper relief via the microtrend analysis. That analysis then opens up a raft of possibilities that one might not have thought of previously, e.g., the burgeoning employment opportunities emerging in all things pet.

However, the linkages between the elements of the pet parent system aren't really apparent with Penn's approach and that's where Structural Dynamics comes in.

Here's a picture of the factors that Microtrends offers in its thinking about pet parents, modified by the addition of one element that creates a systemic look at the phenomenon.

Many factors are creating childless households, such as increased
longevity and the delaying of child birth by women into later years. Women in particular seem to be pampering pets in droves prior to giving birth to children and couples without children are likely to be pet owners. Increasingly, people who either have been parents and want to continue to have an experience like that or people who have never been parents of children but want to pamper somebody are going all out for their pets, as Penn demonstrates in a way that was mindboggling to us. Not surprisingly, all of the advanced goods and services being purchased for pets is causing them to live longer, providing humans with the proven healing power of pets for a longer period of time, which is another factor that is driving human longevity. (This was the force we added to Penn's analysis.) The more that pets are part of the family, and we mean really part of the family, the more they'll be coming to work, and that has its own set of dynamics. Of course, there are critics of the so-called pampered pet phenomenon, including animal rights activists who think that the whole concept of "owning" an animal should be prohibited or at least overseen by various watchdog agencies, no pun intended. The "o" associated with the arrow between animal rights activists and pet parents means that the more powerful pet rights advocates become, the more strictures pet parents are likely to face.

This comment about the power of pet rights advocates allows us to make a summary point: just as in every other system, each element affects the whole. If pet insurance rates fall drastically because life insurance companies become convinced that something furry or reptilian or winged is going to help people live longer under all sorts of conditions and, therefore, make the pet owners better insurance risks, one could expect more spikes in pet ownership and pet parenting. If, on the other hand, pets become associated with law suits and higher and higher veterinarian malpractice insurance rates leading vets to perform fewer and fewer procedures intended to extend the lives of animals and charging higher and higher rates for whatever they do in fact do, pet pampering is likely to suffer.

Microtrends is a great read, and we would like it to have gone farther. A systems analysis, such as the one we've developed here, would have made it more powerful. By the time the reader gets to the end of each section, he or she is likely to have a hard time remembering all of the ingredients of the argument that have been presented. A Structural Dynamic approach pulls the information together.

Penn worries about social fragmentation. Graphically illustrating the linkages between the various trends identified and pointing out the prospects for high leverage interventions that would touch the many interacting components identified in these 75 stories might have pointed toward transcendent, macro factors that may reduce the the tensions that arise when individuals and small groups pursue their specific interests. If interest groups are only passionately disintegrated, a "tragedy of the commons" with all of its attendant hostility and conflict is virtually guaranteed.

The expansion of the rights, power and individuation of women, which is a big part of the Pet Parent picture, seems to be showing up across cultures, nation states, and economic strata. Women may be microtrending in all sorts of directions, but they are macrotrending toward having a greater influence in all matters. Perhaps a whole raft of microtrends are differing manifestations of this one larger phenomenon.

At the moment, the book's celebration of microtrends seems to only be adding to the shattering of social cohesiveness it laments.

New Directions in Work Strategy

Increasingly--and perhaps irrevocably--questions regarding the environment are moving to the fore of strategic thinking.

I was recently on a conference call planning for a conference which will have "sustainability" theme. The call organizer seemed a bit uncertain about introducing this word, as though it were not quite kosher for a conference that will attract a lot of people in suits to have sustainability as a core consideration. She said, "I don't mean sustainability in the environmental sense only. Every organization has to be sustainable. It's not like this is going to be a Greenpeace conference. But, environmental sustainability is certainly part of the equation." But, as the conversation unfolded, it became clear that a lot of us who are strategists see the relationship of organizational futures to ecology as very central to organizational viability. You can't really have an organization if you can't find raw materials because they are in short supply, if your people can't get to work because they can't afford gasoline, and if your customers can't go out to buy your goods and services because the rate of increase in asthma is 75% and a goodly amount of that is attributable to environmental pollutants.

The people and organizations that become part of the solution to these terrible environmental conditions we're facing will become the survivors and the heroes of the future; those who are in denial or locked into benefits of the old way of doing things are coming to the end of their tether.

The situation is both extraordinarily dire and incredibly rich with opportunity.

Lets take consumer plastic trash (pictured above) as an example. According to Business Week, "almost 30 million tons of solid plastic waste is dumped at sea or buried in landfills [per year!]." Only a very small percentage of the plastic that could be recycled is. The result: a vast amount of plastic--both recyclable and indestructible--finds its way to a vortex in a remote area of the pacific ocean in the region of Hawaii. There a mass of floating plastic, sort of like The Blob from the 50s, twice the size of the State of Texas congealing and threatening the world ecosystem.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is just one of innumerable ecological nightmares that are becoming increasingly difficult to sweep under the rug. If we don't address them, we can forget about it, we're going to be toast. Bring up that doleful music playing for the requiem scenario. I don't know if it will happen before my lifetime is over or in the next 100 years, but the human species can't continue to deny the conditions it has created for itself and for the entire planet with impunity.

The good news is that there are thousands and thousands of efforts underway to ameliorate the current crisis and improve matters. Some, like bicycles, are no-brainers. Portland Oregon has become the United State's premier bicycling city with 6% of the commuters using the non-polluting two wheelers. Washington DC is following the lead of Paris in bike-sharing, and other American cities are close on its heels.

One four letter word is definitely implicated in the bicycle story: JOBS. While, unfortunately, it appears to be the case that bicycle ridership is down China it is still huge there, with something like 450M riders, and it is clearly a growing phenomenon in the traditionally developed world. So, every organization would be wise to begin to take its biking employees and customers more seriously.

Other approaches to reducing the environmental impact of our present economy , such as bio-plastics, are more controversial. Like all genetically engineered products, bio-plastics, which can be used as plastics but bio-degrade as plants, critics suspect it of being unnatural or injurious to a more organic form of agriculture. However, whatever the concerns, it seems highly likely that some firms like Metabolix, with its Mirel that might replace millions of tons of plastic per year, are bound for an enormous success in the decade ahead. And, the people who are really doing the research for their organizations on what will make an environmental difference and what won't, are also bound for some big successes.


The curtain is closing on the era where we couldn't pay attention to the world we're in, the world we're creating. Like Sam Cooke said, "a change gonna come." The gaia is coming to the place that it's always been, center stage.