Naked apes & workplace zoos | with Nigel Oseland

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Synopsis

Chris and Ian are joined by workplace researcher, author, speaker and consultant, Dr Nigel Oseland, as he gets back to his environmental psychologist roots in his recent book, 'Beyond the Workplace Zoo: Humanising the Office'. Nigel is a trusted voice of the UK workplace and built environment community and regularly hosts the Workplace Trends event series - one of the most diverse and welcoming workplace conference series of the industry calendar. The discussion moves through environmental and evolutionary psychology, via anthropology and Dunbar's number, historical Bürolandscaft and Action Office workspace designs, towards Nigel's updated and refined proposition, the Landscaped Office.

James then joins Chris and Ian for the reflection section, in which Ian attempts to bring an animated presentation about algorithmic AI workspace design to life through the medium of podcasting...

Learn more💡🤓

• Nigel on LinkedIn
• Nigel's recent book Beyond the Workplace Zoo
• Nigel's consultancy Workplace Unlimited
• Workplace Trends event series
• A 2021 article by Robin Dunbar all about Dunbar's number
• A recent article by Mark Eltringham on Workplace Insight all about Bürolandscaft office design

Email us with questions and feedback: hello@workplacegeeks.org 

Hit Chris and Ian up and follow @WorkplaceGeeks on LinkedIn
...and don't forget to use the hashtag #WorkplaceGeeks 💬

Transcript

-- AUDIEM PROMO --

Ian Ellison  

The Workplace Geeks podcast is brought to you by Audiem. Visit audiem.io to find out how you can get a better understanding of workplace experience through advanced data insights. 

-- INTRO --

Chris Moriarty  

Hello there and welcome to episode two of the second series of Workplace Geeks, the podcast that is fascinated, enthralled and gripped by workplace research from around the world and talks to the teams behind it. I'm Chris Moriarty.

Ian Ellison  

And I'm Ian Ellison.

Chris Moriarty  

And we are but your humble guides on this voyage of discovery as we unpick the nuances of workplace performance one study at a time. Now, before we dive into today's episode, we'll quickly rummage through our mailbag. And for that over to our chief rummager, Ian. Ian, what have you got?

Ian Ellison  

So first up, we've got a bit of feedback from Mark Eltringham. Mark’s talking to us about culture, about innovation, and about the great resignation three key things which kind of made his his ears prick up as he was listening to the conversation with Kate. Culture, complicated construct notoriously hard to capture in any meaningful sense, irrespective of, you know, our opinions about it. And I'm aware Mark that that's our words, for speed.

Innovation, you’re drawing attention to the really interesting work that's been done from the likes of Microsoft and from Humanyze on weak ties and strong ties in organisations, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, when people moved to remote working and the impact upon not just your intra-team strong ties, which were pretty established through teams and continued. But the kind of degradation of these weak ties beyond and elsewhere into the organisation, which have been shown to be absolutely critical for wider innovation rather than just ongoing organisational performance. So that's a really important thing to remember.

And finally, just the idea that the great resignation, I think we'd agree with you, is very triggering as a comment - I think I said that - and for many people even sort of viewed as clickbait. So enough said about that.

The second piece of feedback we got from Cat Charker. So hello, Cat, great to hear you engaging with us, because I know you've been waiting for new episodes for a long, long time. And your reflections essentially, were around the need for more critical thinking in and around workplace when it comes to data, more awareness of what the data is saying, more inherent recognition of our own biases, if we are sharing data, and essentially, not just taking data for granted whether you are sharing it or receiving it. 

So there you go, Chris.

Chris Moriarty  

Thank you very much. Now, you mentioned Humanyze there, that's of course, the organisation led by Ben Waber. And we are desperate to get Ben Waber on the show. So maybe we need to start a little competition, some sort of six degrees of separation exercise, or how can we get to Ben Waber. We've dropped him an email, but we know how busy he is, so he hasn't got back to us yet. But if you know him personally, just get your phone out now, drop him a WhatsApp and say, hey, look, Ben, you've been called out on the Workplace Geeks podcast, they want you to get in touch. And I will let you know how you can get in touch in a moment.

So just off the back of some of those bits of feedback. We just both of us wanted to say a massive massive thank you to everybody that welcomed us back with so much love on LinkedIn. When we started promoting Kate's episode. We know it's been a while so we didn't want to take that for granted. A little shout out to Miguel Agostinho, he's part of the Portuguese FM Association. The guys at Owl Labs who were the owners of the research that Kate spoke about, they were great. Super fan Stuart Watts, he was straight on to that, so thanks for that. And friend of the show Esme Banks Marr. So just a little shout out to all of you guys for the positive reaction, which means an awful lot to us, like I said, after a few months off.

And it's at this point it’s probably worth reminding us all that we don't intend this to be a one way street. If you have any thoughts or views or additional signposts off the back of an interview, please share it within our LinkedIn community. Search Workplace Geeks on LinkedIn and you'll find us quite easy. And you can also use the Workplace Geeks hashtag that's #WorkplaceGeeks. And of course you can email us at hello@workplaceweeks.org or visit our shiny new website and join the mailing list. And that's all at www.workplacegeeks.org And I think that is all the admin out of the way now on to today's episode, Ian let the listeners know who we're about to talk to.

Ian Ellison  

Okay, so today Chris, we are talking to Nigel Oseland about his new book, ‘Beyond the Workplace Zoo’ which came out last year. So Nigel is an environmental psychologist, a workplace strategist, a researcher an author and a speaker. His own workplace strategy and change management consultancy is called Workplace Unlimited and he also regularly hosts one of our favorite workplace events, Workplace Trends. So Nigel has been in and around workplace since the late 80s that included a stint working with former Workplace Geeks guest Alexi Marmot, at Alexi Marmot Associates, and also a period working at seminal workplace consultancy DEGW.

Chris Moriarty  

And on that note over to Nigel.

-- INTERVIEW --

Chris Moriarty  

Nigel, welcome to the Workplace Geeks podcast, now you don't need to introduce yourself to us because we've known you for a long time. But for those who have been living underneath a workplace rock and haven't heard you talk or haven't heard about your work, just give us a brief intro and tell us about some of the things that you've been involved with over the years.

Nigel Oseland  

First and foremost, I'm an environmental psychologist. And I say that because it's taken me a while to get back to those roots, I lost them for a while. I'm also a workplace strategist and change manager, my day to day job is workplace consulting, so helping organisations get better use of their space, that might be in terms of efficiencies, but more likely in terms of how it increases performance and well-being. I also carry out research, commercial or investigative research, which tends to be short term three of three or four months, survey based, again, looking at issues around workplace, I also carry out post occupancy evaluations, once projects are completed, ongoing, and maybe point out some of the potential lessons learned.

 Ian Ellison  

You mentioned environmental psychologist and you talked about getting back to your roots, just for the listener that hasn't heard of that branch of psychology, could you just talk to us about what it's about? I think the history of environmental psychology goes back certainly to the 80s, if not the 70s, so, tell us about where that where that sort of comes from.

Nigel Oseland  

So what psychology is basically studying is the human mind and human behavior. And all environmental psychology is studying the human mind and behavior in the context of the environment, the built environment, which is what I do, but also the natural environment, how does the environment affect our perception, our behaviors, our cognition, our performance, our well-being? – that's basically what it is, and it kind of came of age in the 1970s. It's been around in various forms for longer, but I think people started to treat it a little bit more seriously in the 70s. Partly because the hippie movement and the kind of nature side of things that was all part of some of the earliest environmental psychologists kind of came from that, that era. And that's the time when we started to see textbooks on environmental psychology, the Journal of Environmental Psychology, and conferences, and if anything, it's kind of gone a little bit out of fashion again, in terms of conferences, you don't see it so much, or the ones I go to are quite specialist, it's probably three in the world that you can go to. And if you consider that compared to some of the other conference seems like HR, it's small.

Chris Moriarty  

That's quite an interesting segue, talking about the built environment and the natural environment towards what we wanted to talk to you about today. Right? You published a book called ‘Beyond the Workplace Zoo: Humanizing the Office’. And one of the things I thought was quite interesting, as I looked at the themes was this whole idea about natural environments versus, I guess, unnatural environments, you know, to use some of the terminology you looked at, so just give us a brief overview of the book, how it came into existence, what the thinking was, before we dive into some of the key themes in it.

Nigel Oseland  

I deliberately chose that word the Workplace Zoo. I thought this is a kind of nice starting point, because again, I pulled on different sources of information and research from environmental psychology, from evolutionary psychology, and even newer field, and from anthropology, and sociology, and so on. But the kind of name of the book came really from Desmond Morris. And I don't know whether you'll remember Desmond Morris, who had a radio show, a TV show back in the 70s. And his first book was called something like The Naked Ape. And then his second book was The Human Zoo. And in The Human Zoo, he started to make similarities with animals in cages.

What he was saying was these people in a highly dense built-up city, for example, they start to exhibit the behaviors of animals that are in closed cages, so restlessness, violence, poor reproduction, other deviant behaviors, and he said, it's a bit unfair saying, we live in a concrete jungle. And he's like, no, that's unfair, because the jungle is a lovely place. It's a natural environment where animals thrive and flourish. It's not a concrete jungle. It's actually a human zoo. And I love that kind of phraseology. And I just thought, is that what we've been doing with offices over the last few years? The offices that we get badly wrong. Have we started to create these human zoos, and then it's like, okay, what can we do about it?

Chris Moriarty  

Do you know what, you will not believe this Nigel in terms of how the universe organizes itself, I was chatting to my dad last night. He lives in Ireland. So we will try and get a weekly phone call in, and one of the things we tend to talk about is what you're reading at the minute – the pair of us love a book. Anyway, I was chatting away to him and he said, “you know what I'm reading at the minute?”, he says, “it's a book called The Naked Ape by a guy called Desmond Morris”, and I said, “you will not believe this. I'm kind of talking about that tomorrow on the podcast!” So you know, he just sort of described it as this guy that was trying to, he kind of looked at, because I am far too young to remember any of this, I just want to make sure I was really clear that this is well before my time, but, but he was kind of looking at an animalistic level, trying to get past all the ego we attached to ourselves, as you know, almost like we're above nature and actually say no, we are nature. What isn't nature is how we've organized ourselves.

Nigel Oseland  

Some of his writing was a little bit controversial at the time, and, but you have to remember, because I am older than you and Ian, I was 16 at the time, at college, and I was studying sociology, and it really resonated with me. And maybe that was the start of my journey to psychology, and so on. But yeah, he basically pairs us back to animals, we are naked apes, apes without fur, and then he draws on really innate biological behaviors that we have that date back to the days when we were apes. And that might sound a bit far-fetched for some people. But this latest field of psychology, I mentioned earlier, evolutionary psychology, it's kind of what they're doing, less so from a physiological level more from a psychological level.

But what they're saying is like, we've only been in the modern office, let's call it, for about 100 years. But we evolved over millennia, to live on the African savanna in this wonderful natural environment. What evolutionary psychologists say is we've got these innate cravings for some of those environmental conditions that we would have had in those days. So that's where the importance of things like daylighting comes in, and planting and socializing. And I could go on, it's all in the book. So again, it for me, it was a nice link, because I was talking about Desmond Morris from the 1960s 70s. But actually, the most recent field of evolutionary psychology probably only came about really in the 90s builds on from some of his earlier, more controversial findings.

Ian Ellison  

It's a book of essentially two halves, Nigel, the setup, the things that we need to think about the things that have gone wrong, the things that might inform what needs to go right, then the second part of the book is your proposed solution. So, we don't need to go into super detail. It's a really interesting, and it's a really informative read, I'd almost describe it as it's a gateway for interested workplace practitioners and professionals to start to think about lots of the facets they perhaps haven't noticed might be valuable, that we need to think about. But let's spend just a touch your time on the setup on the first part of the book, the ‘where we're at’. And then let's get to ‘where we're going’. And I think we’ve got a couple of key questions along the way.

Nigel Oseland  

You're absolutely right. I don't profess to be a designer, I'm a psychologist, strategist, or do research. And what I wanted to do is capture some of the research that I sort of been lost over time. I love psychological research. But what I don't like is the language that is used, the way it's written, the way it's kind of shared within academic circles. And it's so complicated, and also they argue amongst each other, that it never gets out into the real world. So I wanted to kind of distill down what I thought were the pertinent bits of the relevant subjects, environmental psychology, evolutionary, and so on. And as I say, My intention was never to, to go into design. But as I was writing the book, and kind of coming up with all these, these wonderful findings, I started to say, Okay, I can't just say you need to look out for this, I kind of need to then put that into practical advice. So I started creating practical advice and recommendations. And before I know, I was actually into full blown, hey, here's some ideas for design.

But again, I just want to be careful there because I don't want to stifle design. But I think that's a mistake that we sometimes making maybe design briefs that are a little bit too tight, I think we should always allow designers to explore and to bring some of their intuition into design, but it has to be evidence based as well. So I didn't want to dictate a design. But what I do in the book is start to say, here's some ideas for how this really important research can start to be converted into things that we might include in the workplace. 

Ian Ellison  

One of the flavors that I got really loud and clear from the first part of the book, Nigel, was the different facets of psychology, the evolutionary psychology bit, the anthropology, the personality trait theory, the different disciplines which can help us think about what it means to be us, and therefore what that might mean in terms of the spatial needs we have in a professional setting. I got quite an individual flavor from the first part of the book, I got a kind of humans interact, but fundamentally humans are individuals with different needs. And you sort of declared it there. Are there other stones which need turning around the sociological side of things, the way that power distribution within organisations influences things? And is there a group psychology piece alongside some of the individual stuff that you've talked about, which gives us a broader picture still, perhaps? I don't know. That's what's going through my mind as I was reading.

Nigel Oseland  

I think you're right and I wrote what I was more comfortable with writing about which was the psychology and the individual aspects. I’ve had this discussion, sometimes where it's not about individual performance. It's about organisational performance. And we should focus on that. And then you start to get into metrics like profit and margin and turnover. And my argument is always, if the individuals aren't performing, then the team and the organisation can't perform. But but I accept what you're saying Ian, if those individuals are still part of a larger organism that has to work well together, but when you look at any symbiotic relationship, the individual components don't have to be the same and think the same. They're kind of working together to create something bigger than the component parts. But absolutely right, maybe that's the next book should be on the kind of social aspects of workplace!

Chris Moriarty  

We'll let you know where to send the royalties Nigel, once you're up and running. What I quite enjoyed about it, I mean, some of the people, you reference some of the ideas you talk about, for those of us that have been at a lot of conferences, and around this kind of debate for a while, we'll recognize some of those names and some of those pieces of work. But it feels to me, it's the first time really that I've seen this done in a book format, which is, look, here's all the problems with this thing we call corporate real estate, and all the kind of business drivers that are responsible for some of those issues. Here's this individual psychology bit, and almost, and this might be an unfair description, but if feels in that kind of summary piece in that first section, where you kind of look at the open plan environment is kind of like the example of when those two things are smashed together without much consideration for each other. And we get this big hotbed of debate about whether open plan works or not. So I mean, is that fair? Is that kind of conscious that you thought, right, let's do that, to decide to show an example of where it's all fallen apart?

Nigel Oseland  

Yeah, a little. Again, I do make the point that the debate on open plan, private offices, have been quite binary and and in this world, nothing's binary anymore. It's all it's all a scale. And I think it's a little bit unfair, because I think there's good open plan and poor open plan. And what I've tried to do is pick on the whole how can we make bad open plan, good, open plan. But again, the whole point of the open plan, originally, that Bürolandschaft and Action Office and so on, was about bringing people together so that they could work more closely and collaborate together, because work was moving from, some work was moving from, highly individual focus work, to work where we know that when people come together to share ideas, you get innovation, and creativity and higher productivity. So that's what those designs were all about.

Maybe in hindsight, the issue they had is they were too open and they forgot about, well, actually, people still need to focus and concentrate as well. And that's the design challenge is how do you, in an open space, because I don't think we're going to go back to private offices, in an open space, how do you create environments that work for a range of activities and a range of people? And fundamentally, what happened is like, oh, yeah, open plan’s a good idea, we can all work together, it'd be great. We're more productive.

And somewhere along the line, probably in the 1970s, with the energy crisis, the first energy crisis, someone said, Yeah, but it's really expensive, isn't it? So why don't we just cram it all down a little bit. Nevermind all these lovely plants and partitions and meeting rooms and breakout spaces, we're just gonna have like lots of rows of desks and just squeeze you in, because then I'm saving a load of money off my bottom line off my property costs. And what those people forgot is that by doing that, they're degrading the performance of their organisation. And ultimately, it's a false economy.

Ian Ellison  

You said the Bürolandschaft word there, and we're gonna get to that. But before we go any further, because I'm so interested in this concept, and you've written about it in the book, and well, you actually got Robin Dunbar to do your forword. And you talk about the role of Dunbar’s number, which is an anthropological concept. What is Dunbar’s number? What's the sequence? And where does it play out to the best of our knowledge in workspace and workplace?

Nigel Oseland  

So the Dunbar’s number most people know, is 150 plus or minus. That comes about from observations, experiments with different primate groups. And what he realized what he worked out is that the size of the primates’ social circle, and he kind of talks about the number of people that you can recognize and remember, and you have a rapport with, a relationship with, he found that with that is correlated really highly with the average size of the neocortex of the brain of those primates. So he looked at the small capuchin monkeys all the way through to chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and so on. He actually measured their brains and then he found this correlation.

For humans he extrapolated out the average size of the human brain with the network size, and he found it to be 150. And to back that up, he quotes things like old African villages would have grown to about 150 and then they would have split. He talks about Christmas card lists, not that we have them anymore, but they would typically be about 150. Facebook, and [Zuckerberg] backs him up on it, apparently the average number of people on Facebook friends was 150. I now cull after I get to 150 because I realized I can't keep up with them.

The only example I really know where it's been taken to the next level is Gore who manufacture Goretex and they tend to have factories of around the size of 150, and then beyond that, they start to split them. And it's just so that the manager the top, even though it's hierarchical, has a familiarity with all the people working under him or her, so knows them quite well enough to motivate them and have that social rapport with them, to encourage them, and so on. Where I think that translates to the modern offices, when you go to like Canary Wharf, and you see some of the floor plates down there, 400, 600 people on a deep floor plate around a core, I think that's gone beyond Dunbar’s number, it’s beyond the human scale, my only advice in that situation is to start to break it down into clusters of 120 150 or so, into distinct units, which can marry up with organisational units, as well. 

Ian Ellison  

This 150, Dunbar’s number, it's about community where personal relations can be maintained. So there are groups and he talks about 500 being the next threshold number, he sort of talks about an average magnitude of three from sort of five to 15, to 50, to 150, and onwards, and they all have slightly different properties. So five is absolute super tight, best friendships. And beyond that, it's really hard to have more best friends because of the stuff the effort you have to put into it.

When you were talking about the numbers and Canary Wharf, I was thinking about my very first facilities role, facilities assistant at Orange in the northeast. And I remember back in the 90s, late 90s, early 2000s, they were designing for communities, and they were deliberately limiting call center areas to a certain number of teams, which resulted in probably about 100 to 110, because beyond that, it ceased to be a community that worked. And partly that's about hierarchical management. But there's also something about Dunbar’s number in there.

The other one that sort of matches Gore is the very famous Ricardo Semler, who wrote in the 90s. And he inherited his father's business, a heavy manufacturing business, and completely up-ended it. And he talks about threshold limits – we've got 150 people in a factory, and the minute we've got 151, it's time to open factory number two, and then factory number three, because of essentially the Dunbar’s number argument. So, it's been done in industry as much as it's been done in office space.

Nigel Oseland  

And I'm glad you said contact center because I thought there's got to be an application for it in contact centers I just hadn’t come across it.

Ian Ellison  

Thank you for indulging me with Dunbar’s number because that was the thing I really wanted to ask you about. We've spent a little bit of time with the first part of the book, with the challenge of costs, the human, particularly individual human factors to be aware of, and how open plan has historically, despite best first intentions, gone awry, and is now on the permanent dartboard of work culture for letting the side down, irrespective of what the definition of open plan may or may not be, and all of that stuff. So let's move in the direction of your proposed solution then Nigel, you mentioned Bürolandschaft. What's that then, and why is it relevant to what you're proposing as a solution moving forward?

Nigel Oseland  

So the Quickborner brothers in Germany came up with the concept of Bürolandschaft and as I hinted earlier, was it's this idea about getting away from the more Taylorist workplace where you have rows of desks and everything is treated as a process, a serial process, almost like mimicking the manufacturing process. And they said no, you know, work is more social for one thing, but it's also more project based, and it's about bringing different people with different skills, multidisciplinary teams and so on together, so that they can work more closely. And the idea is that everything's a little bit more on show, and everyone's within reach, it’s all of those kinds of things. That was the principle behind it.

But they didn't just throw everyone into a big open plan space. When you look at some of the diagrams, you can see them all over the internet. They're fantastic diagrams because they're so far away from the space plans you see today. I mean, these things are totally organic, they almost look random, but they're not always random, and sometimes you will see a pattern. And the reason they kind of sometimes appear a little bit random is because they start with the team. And then they kind of build out from that. So if the team's got a weird structure, then the layout tends to have a weird structure as well. but they didn't just put desks in open plan. They did things like the desks were clustered in pairs, or maybe four at the most, because they recognized that people needed a bit of space around them, and while they need to come together and be able to see each other, they didn't necessarily need to be on top of each other.

They actually had screens that were like freestanding partitions, screens, planting, yuccas and bamboos, and so on, breaking up the space. Also, they would use other work settings like informal meeting spaces or even enclosed meeting spaces to break up the space. And they tend to have higher ceilings more daylight and honestly, I kind of thought the original idea behind that is actually quite good one again, it's a genuine one, and as I said, it was only when people thought, yeah, but it's too expensive, I mean, there were some acoustic issues, to be fair. But in those days, we probably didn't know quite so much about absorption and things like that, even though they had screens.

But the main issue they had is and it's documented that it was too expensive. There was too much space given over to the people. It wasn't affordable. And it's when the energy crisis hit, so in the 70s, to heat and light that space. So that's when things started to cramp down and become much denser. And that's kind of what happened in Europe. And what happened in the States is you had Robert Propst’s Action Office One, which again, if you look at it, it was similar kind of the idea of single desks, lots of screens, little nooks and crannies, corners. And then Action Office Two is basically the cubicles, and it was that kind of just boiling it all down to a much more compact layout.

Chris Moriarty  

I first came across Bürolandschaft when I was reading some of Frank Duffy's work, and he highlighted it quite early on didn’t he, and it's probably at this point we're contractually obliged to sound the Frank Duffy klaxon, because he, he gets a lot of mentions on this podcast…

Nigel Oseland  

He gets a lot of mentions in the book aswell!

Chris Moriarty  

Exactly, exactly. But I I just wonder as well… you're right about the actual image of it right, because if someone did look at the images of a Bürolandschaft floorplan, and I've just got one up on my phone, if you glanced across it, you'd be forgiven for thinking of it like a mini golf course. You know, there's all these, sort of, little bunkers shaped kind of kidney been laid out kind of spaces, and they’re all kind of higgledy-piggledy, and popped together.

Nigel Oseland  

Again, you know, I loved the phrase you were using there, what was it, higgledy-piggledy, because that that's human nature. We don't like straight lines, because going back to evolutionary psychology that the world isn't straight lines. Ok, you have trees, vertical trees, but the landscape itself is isn't necessarily straight on. So we kind of like nooks and crannies and dead ends. And but if you look at the biophilic design principles in there, it's got things like intrigue and refuge and interest and as animals, we're social, but we also have intrigue and we’re inquisitive.

And back to even to Desmond Morris, it's that inquisitiveness, if you read that book that the Naked Ape that you mentioned, it's that inquisitiveness, that allowed us to develop language and then the arts and all sorts of things. So this is really important to us. So recreate that in the office, and going into an office that looks like a car park, so it just dulls the mind as it it's just like oh my god, there's no inspiration there's no interest it's just a horrible environment. With everyone on show, which again, yes, we want to connect with each other but not to the extent where we're exposed, because again that that grates against our innate requirements, you know, we didn't like having predators creeping up behind us.

Ian Ellison  

Okay, so let's just retrace some steps to get us moving forwards. Bürolandschaft, a concept from a German consultancy called Quickborner, of the Schnelle brothers, in I think the 50s, because that book I was waving around halfway through the conversation was Frank Duffy, pretty sure it's the late 50s. I think it was the first book he wrote after his doctoral thesis or whatnot.

Nigel Oseland  

Yeah, Bürolandschaft 50s, and I think Action Office One 60s, or something like that.

Ian Ellison  

So he kind of imported the idea with a swift translation from Bürolandschaft to Office Landscaping. And a bit of extra workplace trivia for you – the very first Bürolandschaft in this country was Faulkner Browns  Architects in Killingworth. And they're still in that building now. There's some photos out there on the web of what it looked like back in the day. And it has this lurid green carpet. And there are some quite tasty shirts on display from the photograph that I've seen.

But one thing that you really do see is its spatial inefficiency. And I actually was lucky enough to chat to one of the guys who had been at Faulkner Browns for years, just before Christmas. And he kind of went, you know, great idea, but hideously spatially inefficient, wouldn't stand up to today's cost pressures, which I think,  with a hop, skip and a jump, brings us back to your proposal, which is the landscaped office?

Nigel Oseland  

It’s no great revelation. I mean, Bürolandschaft to landscaped office, and I do excuse myself in the book on that, I do say, well, it's a kind of revision and bringing it more up to date. But I like the idea of the landscaped office because not only did it play with Bürolandschaft and some of those early office principles, but it also picked up on the kind of biophilic elements and also I talk about having a vertical landscape as well as a horizontal landscape. So that horizontal landscape should be variety of spaces, and more organic, but I like the idea of vertical landscape where you've got different levels of partitioning, so you've got low screen size screens, rooms, and so on. They're all part of the mix. And so on top of that, we need to introduce greenery and other biophilic components.

Ian Ellison  

Absolutely. So into the second part of the book, you have the kind of your framing of the concept. You have the role of biophilia, you have sensory consideration, particularly around sound and acoustics, because we know that pretty much consistently noise, and then temperature, are the things which get flagged as major inhibitors and frustrations for people in poor working environments. So you address those and you reprise, what was in many ways and incredibly progressive, arguably ahead of its time idea back decades ago, and you kind of talk about it in a modern context.

You also wrote this book, during the pandemic, Nigel, and this was the time when most of the world was being forced, rudely, to wake up to opportunities for remote and hybrid work. Whatever terms we choose. You sort of frame it as agile within your book. We sort of know, off the back of the pandemic, that to get flexible working, working, it needs an input from people side of the business, the tech side of the business, as much as it needs spatial reconsideration.

So how does this book inform that broader conversation? For me, this is a workspace book – you've said it's about space design and layout. How do we sort of marry that with the more cultural and the more technological considerations in a company?

Nigel Oseland  

Really, we should have something like a landscaped office without the need for introducing hoteling, hot desking, unallocated desks. But I know that's always going to be the thing that it comes back to because it's more difficult to measure productivity. The argument will always be about yeah but we can reduce the size of the office and save money that way. It's like, yeah, but why have an office at all then? Just work from home if that’s how you feel. Or move to a different location where space doesn't cost anything. Or less.

So I thought, what is an answer to the people who say yeah, it's a great idea Nigel but we just can't afford it? And then with the whole idea, while people are working two or three days a week from home, anyway, then it's like, okay, maybe we can overlay the whole hybrid agile working on top of the landscaped office, and then that gives us an opportunity to re-address the balance of space, take away unused empty desks, but replace it, don't necessarily take away all the space you might need to save a bit of space. But rather than take away the space, just replace the unused desks with the other things that people need the social spaces, the quiet spaces, focus booths, and also just de-densify the office because back to acoustics, you know, the biggest enemy of acoustics is space. If you're sat, talking on the phone, next to someone, and desks are now going down to like 1400 1200. I work with an NHS Trust, and I wanted to introduce one-meter desks for people who were talking to patients and then writing up the notes, in the same space. You know, we cannot work like that!

So extracting the unused desks to replace them with spaces that we need. And also de-densify – so have little clusters of two or three or four desks, rather than these clusters of ten, twelve desks that we’re seeing, these rows of desks. So that that was the idea of the agile element. I am a fan of unallocated desking, I just to me, it makes sense. But I also appreciate that it doesn't work for some people, maybe people have neurodiverse, or people who are highly introverted, and so on, people in the office every day, particular roles and so on. It doesn't work for everyone. But I think for a lot of us, it can work, and I think it's better to have a space that supports you, rather than be crammed into a space that is unattractive and doesn’t support you. Because all that happens then is people won't go in anyway.

Building on from that I wrote a piece recently about the sustainability of underutilized offices because the office utilization’s never been over 50% anyway, and and don't forget, we with the two or three days, we're only using the office for about 24% of the week. Not working week, but the week is less actually things 14% By the time retaining hours. So it just doesn't seem sustainable to me to have these big heated and lit buildings that are just sitting empty for a biggest majority of the time. And yes, I appreciate some people can't get on with hot desking.

But whenever I've had those conversations, most of it's about inconvenience about oh, but I've got to come in and find a desk and then set it up and plug in my laptop. And it's like yeah, it is inconvenient. But isn't all environmental issues. Inconvenient? Yeah, we've all got to do our bit each individual person we've got to put ourselves out and all contribute and that does mean cleaning out plastic pots and putting them in the recycling bin. Yes, it's an inconvenience. But unfortunately now it's an inconvenient truth is it that we've got to do that. So I'm applying that now to the workplace and I think any organisation with decent CSR there, they will start to consider how they can not waste that asset. That was a rant, wasn’t it?

Chris Moriarty  

We absolutely celebrate rants on the Workplace Geeks podcast.

Ian Ellison  

Soapboxes are absolutely allowed. 

Chris Moriarty  

Having read all this and seen all this and, Nigel, we've done some work together and kind of floated around some of the topics, if not the specific solution you've talked about, the kind of return on workplace investment, which is something we definitely want to get you back and talking about with oour friend of the show, Matt Tucker, at some point. But we've known a lot of this for a long time. And still, still we see the stuff that we would consider and as you term it in the book, kind of like what an old fashioned badly designed zoo would look like, we still see the workplace equivalent of those…

I guess, for me, it's understanding what hope you've got that something might change? Because we all desperately want this to work for people. That's why we get so passionate about it. We, you know, this is why we've done the podcast. We want workplaces to be better. But what hope, rather than what do you think is stopping it, just what's your kind of hope about what the future looks like for workplaces? Do you think we're going to crack it?

Nigel Oseland  

I am hopeful that we can improve. I think we, when you look at actually some of the workplaces from years and years ago, when you go right back to those Taylorist offices, where people were in lines and supervised and overseen and, you know, there's certainly been improvements in that aspect of workplace, the organisation and management of it. And I have to say, I did for a while think that we were starting to get the point.

About five years ago now, there was more of a focus on well-being in the office, and how can we make our people more healthy, because it ultimately means that they are going to work, they're going to work better. But then at least we were starting to think about how do we help sustain well-being, and ultimately, performance. And there seemed to be more of a focus about, we saw the introduction of biophilia and all those things came through.

And then occasionally it gets hijacked by austerity. And then all of a sudden, we kind of flip back to oh, no, we need to save money and get rid of the space. And so it seems to me, we're just always in this cycle. And maybe the trick is to try and understand how we can ride the cycle out. What is the optimum ground where we're not throwing money on unwanted space, but at the same time, we're not being inefficient with our space?

So, comes and goes, and I think the well-being aspect, and the help of HR and occupational health, and so on, I think those are the areas that can maybe support us in our workplace design issues. Because design is kind of it's almost standalone from the business process from the organisation. It kind of sits outside. It’s seen as something you kind of got to do. We've got to have light, and you’ve got to have an office. But it's not necessarily always seen as fundamental to the performance of the business. And I think that's why it's constantly challenged to reduce the costs. 

It's very rarely you go, I talked to one of my clients, or corporate real estate, or facilities management, where they say, oh, yeah, the CEO, or the finance director, has come to me and said, how can we best invest in our office to create something that's going to improve our business long term? Quite often they're coming saying we need to save some money on our offices, what can we do, and that just seems to be the warped mentality of this industry. It's always about cost cutting, as I say, treating offices as a cost burden, rather than treating offices as an investment in the business.

You wouldn't have the same discussion with someone in marketing or advertising. You'd be saying, okay, we can grow our business, what can we do? Show us how we can invest in new campaigns to help grow our business? Well, why? Why are we investing in our office spaces to grow our business?

-- REFLECTION SECTION --

Chris Moriarty  

Hello, James, thanks for joining us again. So this time around, we're talking about Nigel Oseland, and his book Beyond the Workplace Zoo. Same format as last time, we're all going to come at this from slightly different angles. Last time we started with Ian. So this time, we're going to start with you, James. James, what did you take away from our chat with, with Nigel?

James Pinder  

The one that I sort of made a note of First, Was this some point turning interview, er, findings and insights versus then going on and making practical recommendations, which is an interesting one, because, you know, a lot of research that's published never goes beyond saying, this is the situation, this is what we found, or you might make those sort of general recommendations about need to do more research wherever and blardy blar. But what's interesting, it just cropped up at some point during the interview this thing about feeling the need to go on to make some practical recommendations. And, you know, I don't know what the answer is to this or what the discussion point is, it just stood out to me as an interesting point about, you know, piece of research moves beyond that into sort of advocacy or, or recommending something,

Ian Ellison  

He talked about almost stumbling upon it. And he was like, so I wanted to lay out some of the things that we were aware of, but by the time I'd done that, I'd kind of unearthed some ways that we might be able to make things better. So the book unfolded as a process. The final product is an unfolding, which sounds a bit pretentious, but you know what I mean.

James Pinder  

Well, but also, Nigel works as a consultant and it's quite hard if you're a consult and you've got practical experience of trying to influence change and improve things, not to, to go into that mindset, I suspect. I don't know. I don’t want to speak for Nigel there, but... 

Chris Moriarty  

Do you think it's a format change as well, because I guess if you're writing for a journal, or you're publishing an academic paper, there's no expectation that, you know, people are going to read this and be told what to do. You know, they know it's research, and it's to uncover something. But as soon as you say, I'm going to write a book, and you want people to buy that book, the research forms the, I guess, the credibility backbone of what you're reading . This is what I what I am saying says what it is, and whether Nigel like you said Ian, and he didn't set out to tell people what to do, he wanted to showcase a lot of the research from a very specific branch of psychology and its impact on the workplace.

But I just kind of feel like probably in the back of his mind, and the back of anyone's mind is once you write a book, and someone is going to go out and purchase it, and give you a lot of time to read it, you know, they are sacrificing time to read it. What do they get out of it? And I suspect for a vast chunk of the population, more knowledge is not what they expect. What they expect to be able to do is go, ‘right, what I do next?’ Any book I've had like that, there always feels to be a conclusion that says, ‘so what?’ This is, this is the ‘so what’ bit…

James Pinder  

So I guess that gets to the heart of why I sort of made a note of that, because it's interesting, isn't it, in terms of why certain things get read a lot, and other things don't get read so much, even though it might be the same research, but what people are expecting them and why people read things. I guess it goes back to something we talked about the very first episode was around, you know, who reads what, and whether some things ever see the light of day? And why is that?

Chris Moriarty  

Ian have you got anything to contribute to that?

Ian Ellison  

Listening intently. It's all good. Yeah, I was actually pondering how on earth I'm going to pull off the bit that I want to talk about cos it's, it's going to be a Workplace Geeks world first. So I was, I was momentarily distracted.

Okay, so, well, I could do a bit of backstory. So I thought, what I was going to talk about was going to be evolutionary psychology, and these two concepts of prospect and refuge, because Nigel talks a lot to biophilia, when he's talking about the sort of evolutionary perspective of where humans evolved, and now they're in these boxes. And surely there's an influence of where they involve, and prospect and refuge, being able to see things or being able to hide are two fundamental things when there's big things with spiky teeth trying to eat you.

However, when I was driving around in me van, listening to the draft of this episode, listening to the conversation, summat else popped into my head, and it actually links to something else, which has been featured at Workplace Trends before. And we know that Nigel is really involved in Workplace Trends. So I thought, let's go for this. So I'm actually going to show you some slides…

Chris Moriarty  

This is gonna make for great podcasting, this is…

Ian Ellison  

This is my point, this is why I was worried about it. And I'm gonna show you a little animation. And you're gonna have to, there's a real point to this, and I think he's absolutely fascinating about past knowledge and future knowledge, and the fact that it's quite interesting the conclusions that Nigel has come up with. So having said that scene, are you ready for this? So I'm just going to…

Chris Moriarty  

I, what I'll do listeners is I will describe you through the slides, as I see them…

Ian Ellison  

That's exactly my point. So now that I've got this on screen, let me just share screen. So obviously… 

Chris Moriarty  

I don't even know if we've ever shared on this platform. I don't even know if it works…

Ian Ellison  

It does work. I think it works. Right dudes… oh, browser needs permission!

Chris Moriarty  

Open computers, click privacy, click Screen Recording and allow your browser to share your screen. Let's say what? Well, this will be interesting… because I bet you it's gonna kick you out, and ask you to come back in again.

Ian Ellison  

Here we go. Here we go. So...

Chris Moriarty  

So talk amongst yourselves was we ring tech support…

[ Ringtone ]

All operators are busy at this time, please hold.

Ian Ellison  

Right. So, are you ready for this? Can you see that? Right. So what we're looking at is a presentation from a few years ago at Workplace Trends. And the presentation was from Zaha Hadid Architects, it’s from their London studio. And they've actually presented this a couple of times in a couple of different ways. But I'm going to talk about the one that Arjun Kaicker – I hope I pronouncing Arjun’s name well, not least because Chris we’ve got to get this guy on the podcast, because you're gonna love, I think, what I'm about to show you.

So what he was talking about Workplace Trends was ‘designing for workplace wellness and performance in the age of algorithms and machine learning’. So remember, a lot of what Nigel was talking about was Bürolandschaft which was born out of the Schnelle brothers, Quickborner Consultancy, 1950s, Germany, very manual process, actually model-based, to be able to design these big very organic landscapes which were always about a local level for the people, but huge floor plates with very, very few walls, if any. Okay, so you with me so far?

What Zaha Hadid were talking about is essentially the way they've automated an awful lot of workplace design. So I'm going to buzz down to a relevant part of the presentation to show you what's going on. So they're really interested in lots of the things that influence how people experience space, temperature, daylight, noise, carbon dioxide, people's personal preferences for where they might locate themselves. So we know these things, right, we know that these are all in the mix. And what they have started to do is develop algorithms to start showing the best possible solutions. So, you know, infinitely quicker than humans could do this. So Chris, what have we got on the screen in front of us, for the listeners at this point?

Chris Moriarty  

Erm, so we've got things like enclosed meeting, group work, learning hub, market space, snack, coffee, breakout space, so lots of different work settings for lots of different reasons.

Ian Ellison  

That's exactly it. So you've got tons of different work settings, from the collective – things like seminars and learning hubs, to the very specific – private calls and rest areas and stuff like that. So, from the collective to the individual. And what we also know from Zaha Hadid Architects, we know that they've designed some of the most beautiful, and also complicated buildings, pretty much on the planet, incredibly organic shapes, very complex. So we're not necessarily talking straight lines here, we're talking about finding work setting solutions within very complicated spaces. And so what they've developed is a technology to kind of get AI thinking about all of these things simultaneously.

So what I'm going to show you here is a video, and I hope it renders alright, of essentially the algorithm running and finding the best solution for a very complicated space, I want to say best solution, I mean, how to set up all of these different work settings, for the organisation involved, which thinks about things like visibility, and efficiency, and well-being factors and stuff like that.

So are you ready, if I run this, let's see if you can watch it, right? Have a watch of this. So there's your floorplan. And what the algorithm is doing is it's putting in all of these spaces, and then thinking about the impact of the natural light, and then thinking about the impact of circulation. What then happens is, they then say, in the spirit of workplaces always being in beta, and what we mean by that – that's a very Neil Usher phrase – but what we mean by that is, you know they change over time, and we should tweak spaces to different organisational needs over the weeks, months and years as an organisation changes, they then show how this thing can evolve. But what I'm really interested in and it's a bit of a punchline, it's taken us a while to get to it is, what can you see there on that floor plate? What does it look like?

Chris Moriarty  

Well, to me, it looks like a biological cell. It looks like a cell of a plant. But I don't think that's the answer you're looking for?

Ian Ellison  

No, well, it is and it isn't. Because what did we say - I remember when you were talking about Bürolandschaft, on the episode with Nigel, and you looked up some floor plates of Bürolandschaft -higgledy-piggledy, very organic…

Chris Moriarty  

Mini golf!

Ian Ellison  

Yeah, like mini golf is what you said. And I'm looking at that. And I was driving along last night and I remembered this presentation, and I thought flippin’ ‘eck – the algorithmic solution, the machine learning on future workspace is essentially solving in a Bürolandschaft way. And that's my punchline, which I found absolutely astonishing.

Chris Moriarty  

So let me get my head round this, my tiny little brain around this, these guys have taken, not from, but using the same sort of ideas that Nigel's looked at in terms of environmental psychology and all that sorts of stuff. They've taken those sorts of ideas, they've told a computer about them all. And I'm really boiling this down to Early Learning Center kind of language here, so they’ve boiled that down. They've then designed something or created a floor play and applied layers of knowledge, each time, to say, if we did this, what would this create? Where would the problems be? Learn and adjust. And what they've ended up with is something close to what those German dudes came up with in the 1950s?

Ian Ellison  

Well I think so. So they've applied all the different design parameters around personal preferences, and circulation, and environmental factors, particularly daylight. And so they've baked in all of these different layers, and I'm sure that this demo that I've just run is one version, and they can probably do lots of different iterations, and they set it to work. And it goes through millions of different solutions at computer speed because it's AI right, and that's the point. And and I just find it absolutely fascinating that for me, and this might be a bit of my sort of my brain sort of making sense backwards, but it almost validates, I think, how perceptive we were in the middle of the last century. And if we ended up kind of moving back in this direction, and if Zaha Hadid Architects are a pioneer in this field, and others follow, isn't it funny that 100 years later, or approaching a hundred, late years later, we might start to see similar justifications.

James Pinder  

I've seen this in the past. I think it's parametric design. So the fact that, as you change one parameter, it affects the others.

Chris Moriarty  

That's interesting, because it kind of leads into what I found really interesting, talking to Nigel about, which was Bürolandschaft, we talked about in depth. We touched on Robert Propst’s work for Herman Miller, I just find it really interesting as a kind of common theme for me, which is when good research is created, and then finds itself butting up against commercial pressures. And Mark Catchlove from Herman Miller, now MillerKnoll, when I talked to him about the Robert Propst bit, and they did a number of events about it. The solution that Propst suggests is this kind of, I think was about 180 degree angled kind of space that…

Ian Ellison

120

Chris Moriarty  

Nice and open. But he then showed, I think, in the diagram, he then goes kind of like – cubes would be really bad. But someone saw that and goes – yeah, but then we get loads on single floor plate, that'd be really good and efficient. And I wonder whether as AI starts to really, really supercharge a lot of the decisions that we start to make, we will start seeing that, not just that – come on, this makes sense, now, even the computers are telling you that that you know, to design it like this, come on, give us a break.

But if we can put that data in, over time, eventually, maybe it's happening already, we can put some of the other data in about productivity, about retention, about this, and it will start to forecast, actually, if you go down this route, we suspect that you will end up seeing these results, which will just reinforce, don't worry about the commercial pressures, it's just that you can't immediately see them, but the computer can because it's got a bigger brain than you.

James Pinder  

But that is ultimately what parametric design is about – what's the design intent? And then what's the design response? And Autodesk, and companies like that, sort of design software to do this sort of thing. But it also links to things like, you know, building information modelling, so they’re, often parametric models, so you change one thing, it impacts on another thing.

Chris Moriarty  

I remember years ago seen a BIM demo. And it was actually the first time I saw it, not simply from a cost point of view, which is typically that sort of early case studies where it's all about cost, right? If we increase the floor plate here, your cleaning costs are gonna go up by x, and or whatever it might be. But it was a hospital. I think it was in Italy, the hospital they were talking about. And it was about getting from the ward to the theater. And they realized that the doorframes weren't wide enough for the beds to go from just from the ward to theater, like literally around the corner. And the initial, the initial argument was, oh, no, it's okay, you can take them the other way. And it was like going to a big loop the loop ran the whole hospital. The medical staff said, Well, hold on, this person is getting to theater, right? We should be maximizing their comfort, therefore, they don't want to be wheeled around the entire hospital just to get around the corner. So, right enough, in the BIM environment, they're just not the doorframe wider, two or three inches each side and were able to get it through. And it calculated the impact that would have on everything else in there.

So, it's certainly moving in that direction. And I guess for the German dudes, there's a, there's kind of a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell ‘Blink’ moment here, which is kind of, our own human supercomputer kind of intuitively knew that that was the direction of travel. And it's taken us 100 years to build something as clever as us, if not cleverer, to prove it.

Ian Ellison  

Yeah, I've always been drawn, maybe a little bit like Nigel actually, I've always been drawn to the Bürolandschaft solution, the creativeness of it, given what was around it at the time. And there's a crazy German architect who's not remotely related to Bürolandschaft. And one of the catchphrases of his – I'm not going to try and pronounce his name, because he's changed it and it's the most bonkers name you've ever heard in the world – but one of the catchphrases is ‘a straight line is a Godless line’. There are no straight lines in nature, right? There are no straight lines in nature.

And it is efficiencies and accountancy, which has led to straight lines in the office, and Propst gets bad press. We know that. He is the ironic father of the cubicle, despite all of his best intentions. And there are some great journalistic accounts out there of how he lamented this because of what he got labeled with – the exact opposite of what he was striving for. But, you know, it is what happens when money gets involved. 

Chris Moriarty  

What we need is, it kind of feels to me, and with young kids, I see this all the time. If you look at soft play, soft play environments are rarely, sensical, back in, they’re off their nut, aren't they? You'd like, you're walking across a net into a tunnel and down a slide and up a pole and spin around on that bit. And that's because they love it. They love it and there's got to be something in that, you know, there's got to be something in that, that childlike curiosity…

Ian Ellison  

Curiosity’s a good word…

Chris Moriarty  

Yeah, that we’ve just lost, yeah… just these, these boring corporate workplaces.

So anyway, that that concludes the reflection section for Nigel Oseland.

-- OUTRO --

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