Tag: affordances

Some thoughts on re-thinking your workspace

Originally posted on 23 April 2021, updated on 3 May 2021

Several of my friends and clients are wondering what their workspace arrangements may look like in the future. The lockdowns and disruptions over the past year have rapidly accelerated the use of digital technologies to enable remote work, to improve coordination within and between organisational functions, document sharing and connectivity. Some key experts and managers of some companies are now reluctant to resume work in the office.

Just thinking out loud, I would like to share some of the points that we often have to grapple with about the future of work and workspace. These thoughts are still taking shape, but I would like to share them with you as they may be similar to the points that you are discussing with your teams right now.

  1. We should think of it as working remotely rather than working from home. Working remotely has now been piloted at scale. Some love it and have vowed never to return to a boring corporate office. Others loathe it and cannot wait to get back to the corporate office. What leaders must consider is that not everybody will be willing to come back to the office.
  2. The future of the workspace is a hybrid between working in an office and working remotely. Corporate offices are now seen as so 2019. Leaders should engage with their teams to figure out what works best in a shared infrastructure and what works best remotely.
  3. It is not necessary for people to travel to work for a desk, internet connection and coffee. Leaders must re-think the affordability provided by working remotely and the advantages of working in a shared space. I know of organisations that can now redesign functional workspaces that meet the different requirements of individuals and teams. People want comfortable lounge areas for reading and writing, comfortable tables and chairs for collaboration, cubicles for making calls and deep-thinking work. 
  4. There is still a role for a corporate or a shared workspace. Not everybody can afford to create and maintain a working environment at home or in a setting elsewhere. Not everyone can perform their functions remotely. Some people simply get lonely and need to connect with other human beings. Others need the kind of equipment and technology that can only be provided and make sense in a shared environment. But there are other soft issues that must also be considered. Innovation culture is shaped by how different people interact and work together. Innovation is hampered by working only with people you like on projects where everybody agrees on what must be done next. Innovation thrives when you bump into somebody from another discipline or department. 
    Maybe Taylorism (defined by Merriam-Webster as a factory management system developed in the late 19th century to increase efficiency by evaluating every step in a manufacturing process and breaking down production into specialised repetitive tasks) and efficiency have shaped the design of office spaces for too long. Why not create innovative spaces that invite deep concentration (like a lounge or a library), or smaller cubicles for undisturbed work? Or flexible desks that can be re-arranged with good coffee nearby?
  5. While you are busy rethinking the arrangement of your organisation, why not consider placing teams or experts at your clients, or bringing your suppliers or clients into your workspace? The increased use of digital technologies during the past year has led to the discovery of how it is possible for teams from different organisations to work together in completely new ways. I recently listened to an interview with a CEO who explained that their organisation had not only embraced remote work but had also decided to switch to asynchronous meetings! This means that a meeting is recorded, and people who could not participate during the event could still contribute or even challenge what was said afterwards. The use of channels in applications like Slack and MS Teams makes this very easy if used properly
  6. There are also downsides to working remotely. Just because you use MS Teams does not mean your people feel that they are in a team, or that they are trusted or equipped to do their work. People are zoomed up! At least there were physical constraints that limited the number of people who could participate in a meeting back in the ”old days”. Now with digital communication tools, meetings are being held more frequently with more people participating. A friend told me that she spends her evenings working because her days are filled with Zoom meetings.
  7. Lastly, working remotely is not for everybody. Here in South Africa, creating and maintaining a remote workspace is also often determined by your race, your age, where you live, and who lives with you. Where you live determines internet speed, the reliability of the electricity supply and also how long and safely you commute to an office. We live in a leafy green suburb which is a fantastic environment to work in. But a colleague whom I work with lives in a small apartment with two other professionals sharing the same space and internet bandwidth. While some individuals enjoy working at their own pace, others need to be supervised. For younger employees the socialisation process of working with older and also very differently skilled people is critical.

I would love to hear from you about what you have been grappling with, or what you are debating to do right now. 

  • Have you redesigned your workspace, or renegotiated how certain processes work? 
  • Have you made up your mind whether you are going back to the “office”, or do you prefer working remotely? 
  • Has somebody on your team decided to not come back and to work remotely, or even worse, to resign because they prefer to work remotely?
  • Which tasks would you prefer to perform remotely and which in a physical office space?

If you would rather not reply on this blog post, you can send me an email.

Here are some interesting resources by others:

In interview #100, Shane Parish interviews the co-founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg. Head over to https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/ for more information 

In episode #784 of the HBR IdeaCast, Anne-Laure Fayard talks about her HBR article “Designing the hybrid office”

A special thank you to Natasha Walker and Sonja Blignaut for the conversations and the encouragement that made this blog post possible.

Image by DarkmoonArt_de from Pixabay

The affordances provided by institutions

In October 2020 I participated in a week-long exploratory retreat hosted by Cognitive Edge. Actually, there were two different events in the same month and I experienced them as one event where we explored amazing concepts around complexity, sense making, aesthetics, knowledge management and so on. During one of the many breakout groups of these events, I was confronted by the concept of affordances. I was introduced to the concept by Greg Spencer and I was immediately intrigued by it. Since then I have been thinking a lot about my work in innovation systems, institutional change, and the adaption of various meso organizations from this new angle.

Greg explained that an “affordance” is what the environment offers the individual. If I recall correctly we were talking about resilience at the time and Greg wondered how organizations provided affordances to their people that enabled individuals and collectives to be more resilient in the face of unexpted challenges. Although I have heard this word used in user-interface design contexts, I have never thought of it as being useful to think about what institutions, organizations, or other resources made available to users. I have in the past simply thought of the concept of functions, as in a technology transfer organization performs a certain set of functions in an economy that is taken up by users.

The word affordance was first coined by James Gibson in a book in 1966 (read more on Wikipedia). In 1979 Gibson refined his defintion to:

“The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment”

J. J. Gibson (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), Boston.

The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines an affordance as:

“the quality or property of an object that defines its possible uses or makes clear how it can or should be used”

“affordance,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affordance. Accessed 1/11/2021.

Gibson was thinking of ecology and how an environment provides support or resources to an animal. At the same time, the animal must possess the capability to perceive the affordances and to use it. From a human perspective, it means that things must be designed in a way that makes certain actions possible. Imagine how a door handle invites you to reach out and open the door, or how the presence of a button on a reception counter invites you to press it, or how stepping stones in a garden invite you to explore around a blind corner. However, not all the characteristics of an affordance need to be explicitly designed. Many of the affordances that make some organisations more resilient than others appear to be in what is allowed or accepted or maybe even forgiven in the arrangements in the organisation, in other words in the culture and the relationships between different people. It implies that some affordances in organisations emerge out of the interactions and the relationships between people, and I guess the same is true for communities and locations (or even societies).

For humans to draw on affordances, they must have an idea of what actions are possible or desired. They must feel empowered and capable of using, exploiting or drawing on a resource. The verb “afford” is useful to consider the energy and commitment required by a user to exploit an affordance. If the energy costs are too high, most people would not bother. This is a problem in societal change because those with more resources can often afford to invest in finding out more or exploring new ideas at the edge of common knowledge. Therefore, it is about the presence of the affordance AND the energy cost combined with the required capability (the pre-requisites) of a user to engage with the affordance.

Architects, urban planners, and many other professions already think of affordances and how people use spaces, pathways, and everyday objects. In software development, the consistency of menus, icons, and screen layouts all make affordances easier to access while reducing the effort to figure things out all the time. For instance, to improve the quality of life in many cities, urban planners are turning roads into pedestrian zones. This then changes the affordances provided by public spaces. I recently saw an interview on the National Geographic Channel (about airports) where a person explained how they design icons for signage in the Frankfurt airport that must cater for diverse travellers, languages and understanding of symbols. It struck me that the signage in the airport itself offers an affordance, but it also directs people to affordances that they might need.

When it comes to how societies create and then adapt a range of institutions that shapes market incentives and behaviours, the problem is with abstraction. There is often a low-equilibrium relation between the affordance provided and whether using the qualities of the affordance can be afforded by a typical user. Let me provide some examples of challenges in this dynamic between the availability of affordances and the ability of a user to afford drawing on it:

  • The service offering or capability of a certain organisation is not entirely an object, partly because services, advice and information flows are largely tacit.
  • It is also hard to fully understand the value of the service beforehand. Sometimes, the value of a service only becomes apparent during or it was used. Think of heart surgery, asking for technical advice from an expert, or paying for tax advice.
  • Often, knowledge-intensive services require active participation by the user – the user must be able to share relevant context-specific information with an expert while absorbing information from the expert that must be integrated back into a specific context. It is not the same as sitting in an opera and experiencing a great audiovisual experience.
  • To use knowledge-intensive services you need a certain level of knowledge intensity. The barriers to using many public affordances may be quite high, and we do not often enough consider these pre-requisites. This may also be true for many more elemental services. Today, many services offered by the public service here in South Africa assumes that users or citizens can read and write.
  • A further problem is that there is so much emphasis on the capacity and responsiveness of the providers of affordances provided by public organisations (the supply-side) while the challenges and obstacles to fully participate (or absorb) costs faced by users are out of focus.
  • With increased global mobility of knowledge and knowledge workers, if a certain environment in a country or a place is not good at providing the affordances needed in the society, some of the more mobile members might access these affordances from other places. Globally this is happening in science, technology, innovation and technology development. Increasingly it is happening in education. The challenge is that in many countries only the elite or highly mobile can afford to search for affordances beyond their borders or location. This will increase inequality, but it might also undermine the just development of the potential of places and people.
  • Lastly, there is also the challenge of time. For me to access an affordance today might be shaped by my schooling (a long time ago), the role models I had as a child, and so on. It means that we have to pay attention to the justice or injustices that may be perpetuated by certain affordances and their relations with preceding affordances that are only weakly connected. I am thinking of how some low-paid workers must spend hours a day travelling to work on unsafe public transport. Their affordances are fewer, but to access even those affordances (like a regular job) might also cost them proportionally in relation to the transport costs of a more affluent family.

I wanted to share these ideas with you because I found the idea of affordances to be refreshing. I am glad I signed up for these events to make new friends like Davina Burgess and Greg Spencer. In particular, they helped me draw back the curtains on this concept that felt so profound to me. The idea of affordances helped me to start thinking beyond the technicalities of supply, demand and persistent failures for these gaps to be closed. It also highlighted the importance of paying more attention to the capability of “users” that are trying to innovate, solve problems and the resources that they could afford to invest in drawing on affordances in their environments.