-- Intro --
Chris Moriarty
Welcome to Workplace Geeks, the podcast on a mission to find and celebrate the most exciting and inspiring workplace research in the world. I'm Chris Moriarty, and along with my co-host, Ian Ellison, it's our job to help us all navigate this exciting research landscape. So, first things first, thanks to everyone, for all the lovely feedback from our first episode, keep it coming, not least to repair our fragile egos but also because you're a crucial part of the show us how it evolves. So, you can email us on hello@workplacegeeks.org. Now, on that note, we've had some mail through haven't we?
Ian Ellison
We have. Yes, absolutely. So Dr. Kersten Sailer, good professional friend of ours, Professor in the Sociology of Architecture at University College London, and also co-founder of workplace scientists, Brainy Birds. What she says is, I just wanted to say that I've really enjoyed that first episode is set my mind spinning in so many directions> I'd love to challenge the access accessibility problem and argue that the gap between academia and practice has to do with mindset. Also, she says, if you haven't managed by then I'd love to get Chris to appreciate the methods section of academic papers. It's the first thing I look at. So how does that make you feel?
Chris Moriarty
Right. So that's something that's come up a couple of times since the first episode and I'm, I feel like I've been painted unfairly. As someone who doesn't care about that stuff. I do care about that stuff. I think my point was, we were talking about….about… it’s because I called a paper boring, wasn't it? That's really what it is, isn’t it.
Ian Ellison
It was. And you also use the word turgid, just to remind you,
Chris Moriarty
I did use the word turgid. That is not about the fact that we shouldn't talk about how data was collected is just that it doesn't lend itself to good writing, I guess it's a difficult thing to talk about. And a lot of papers I read, spend a lot of time talking about it, where actually, we could maybe just deal with less of that or make it more accessible just a bit more interesting, I think,
Ian Ellison
Should we take that as an invitation, an invitation to not just play the academic game, but to make it more accessible? So, people like you can get more excited about it.
Chris Moriarty
I think it's less about the fact that it's there. It's almost thinking putting yourself in the in the readers shoes to say how do we make this really exciting? And how do we celebrate it if like to Kerstin’s point, if this is the first thing she looks for. So a lot of people this is the hero of the paper. But quite often it doesn't feel like the hero of the paper, it feels like okay, the next box tells me I've got to tell you about methodology is just it's just a bit of feedback from a Luddite like me. But someone I guess, who represents a big wave of people that we want to read this stuff, right?
Ian Ellison
Well, somebody tells me you're going to be getting another email from Kerstin. We'll see
Chris Moriarty
Well, we'll have to get on the show. That's the solution to that. So we look forward to Kerstin coming on. So a reminder to everyone, you can find workplace geeks on LinkedIn. And we'll be sharing like signposts to our guests, we'll be looking at their research and given links to those and provide them some updates from the show. But we also want it to be a place for you to meet and chat with other Workplace Geeks. So get on LinkedIn search for Workplace Geeks and follow that page. And don't forget to use #workplacegeeks because that would be very nice. Thank you very much. But let's get on to today's show. So Ian, tell us what we've got today.
Ian Ellison
We have got ‘Spaces for Innovation: the design and science of inspiring environments’, which is one fantastic tome of a book written by Kursty Groves. Now Kursty she's kind of wears a number of different hats in the workplace arena. She's adjunct professor at IE University in Madrid. She is a workplace strategist and innovation consultant. She's a speaker and a podcaster herself. Her podcast is called the Office Chronicles and it's really interesting and it's well worth clicking the subscribe button for Kursty there. And I think probably the best thing for me, Chris is, Kursty is another really interesting example of a completely different journey into the workplace arena. And she's going to explain this to us, right. But this piece of research is an amazing collection of essentially outputs from a mixed methods approach to qualitative research that basically grew so large that it had to become a book and an amazingly accessible one at that for people like us.
Chris Moriarty
Perfect. Well, let's get straight into our conversation with Kursty.
-- Kursty Groves interview –
Chris Moriarty
Kursty, welcome to the Workplace Geeks podcast. Thanks for joining us. Before we start talking about your book, which is what we're here to talk about today. Perhaps give us a little bit of background about you, your work that you've done in the past and what you're doing today. How do you keep yourself busy?
Kursty Groves
I started out, in engineering. And the reason I think that's an interesting or important is because I, even though I'm an, I'm a workplace consultant, now, a title that was given to me, I didn't even know they existed. When I started doing what I do. I didn't follow a kind of typical career path if you like. So I started in engineering and then I moved into industrial design, I did a postgraduate, the RCA, the Royal College of Art. And, and I like to say I kind of got in through the back door, because they had this special course for engineers. So industrial design for engineers. And the reason that’s important is because I literally, in my first year of undergraduate, did colour theory, I did colour wheels, and I did you know, the basics of art. And so but what was really great about that was, it was a first experience, I had a complete melting pot, and just really seeing things from very, very, very different perspectives. And I was also introduced to ethnography at that point, and really, really thinking about design from a, from the kind of the human perspective or from the user. That's kind of what that was my grounding. And then I moved into become work for some product design and innovation companies, and specifically one called PDD. Seymour Powell and PDD. And they're all very, very much looking at the future, future technologies. And, you know, and how can they be integrated into our lives. But again, both of those companies were really interested in, in impacting people and being really mindful of the human experience, as opposed to going, “Oh, here's a bit of cool tech, what can we do with it?”
So that was kind of my grounding. And then I like to say I kind of swim upstream further upstream. So if engineering is about the nuts and bolts and how stuff works, and then kind of design was like, you know, how do you create something that people love or that impact people, then I moved into innovation consulting, so you know, waving my hands around a lot. And basically, I got really passionate about transferring creativity skills across to people. So I became very, very, very, I guess, practiced at facilitation, kind of moving capability from, you know, into other people into kind of teams and organisations, specifically around creativity, creative behaviours, and innovation. And it was at that point, that we were talking about how, you know, there are certain barriers to innovation in organisations. And one of them is was we talked about the environment? And I thought, yeah, this is a big one for me. And I think that really touched a nerve. Kind of, because I missed the kind of tangible side of design, which I wasn't really doing at that time. And I really felt like, I believed that whole phrase that everyone has a book in them. And so I thought, write a book about it, because we don't, we didn't really know that much about the impact of the environment on creativity and innovation. But we could just tell that there were some organisations who, who really cared about it. And in fact, the agency I worked for, at the time, ‘What If’ had amazing offices, it's, it was the reason I joined them. And so yeah, so that, so that was that that was the thing that got me really switched on to the power of space, and its role in innovation. And that's what made me kind of go out on the road and write the first book, which is ‘I Wish I Worked There’ . And it was the first book I think of its kind that went kind of from the people's perspective, as opposed to the design or the architect's perspective. Some of the examples in there, were not actually designed by anyone famous, they were actually just created by the people who work there. So that's, that's kind of where I got to and ever since then, I've been consulting in this space.
Chris Moriarty
And that's that I think that's where I first came across your work was when you were talking about ‘I Wish I Worked There’, which to me just felt like a really like a really, unfiltered fun exploration of cool workplaces. And as simple as that. It didn't have to be convoluted or have lots of kind of highbrow kind of concepts in it. It was just the true stories of real, very real stories of some great places and but that it feels to me like it was this the second book, the one that we're talking about today, was a very different brief. So just talk to us briefly about how this book came about what was what was the kind of genesis of it and what was really driving it. What was was the kind of motivation for this one?
Kursty Groves
Great. That's a really insightful question. Actually. I'm pro because the first book I didn't have a clue, and I literally was, I just want to go and find out I had a hypothesis and I almost didn't do it because I was so frightened of what I didn't know. And then the second book, wind forward probably five years, there was a call for tender by Nesta. Nesta, the innovation organisation. And they were at a point in time where they were, they weren't going to build their own building. And what they realised internally was that they didn't really have a definitive view on space, and how and its role in innovation than people internally, were saying, innovation can happen anywhere. And yet, intuitively, lots of other people were saying, ‘yeah, but what you know what it's like when you just go into a place, and it's buzzing, and you're lifted, and you feel creative, and there's just a buzz about it’ or you know ‘space does have some kind of impact on how you behave and how you feel, and maybe what you do’. So they put out this tender and thought somebody pinged it across to me, and I was slightly scared by it. I kind of thought, ‘yes, I need to do that. That's me’. But by the same token, it was looking like they really, really needed some hardcore research to go with it. A day or so later, I was contacted by Tilt Studio. And they said, do you want to go do you want to go in together on this, and what we ended up doing was partnering with IE University who I’m now a professor at so we had, the idea was that we had the kind of the practice angle, which is the designers, the Tilt, we had the academic angle, and then I was the kind of the person that was pulling it all together.
Ian Ellison
So, they put out this call for work. And then you go in with Tilt’s with Oliver Marlow, your co-author, and that I remember from a conversation a long, long time ago, this thing grew arms and legs, right, this thing started as a it was this big, but you got so passionate about it. And you saw such an opportunity that it became this big.
Kursty Groves
So yeah, so the, the bursary was kind of this, you know, only so much. But what we really wanted to do with it was kind of, you know, 10-fold more. Really, I think what they initially thought it would be was a white paper, you know, desk research. But yeah, we basically said, look, I want to go and visit these places, as many as we can. And we realised because it needed to be global, that we probably couldn't get to see all of them. So, we just said, okay, so let's go and visit as many places as we possibly can, and speak to everybody. And any case study that's in this book we've spoken to, and we've you know, we've researched and looked kind of either digitally or physically. So, it's called ‘Spaces for Innovation’. And it's intentionally structured to allow people to dip in and out. So, you can go in, and there's a there's a kind of key if you like, you can go in and say look, I need some inspiration from other organisations, you can find that. There's also there are also a number, a number of interviews with specific people from very different perspectives. So, there might be somebody who is an expert in learning environments. There's someone in there who is an expert on the built environment and technology and how that's changing. There's a complete digital transformation person in there as well. So, we will try to kind of get as many different perspectives around the area of innovation and spaces for innovation.
So, you've got these kind of different ways of accessing all of this information, plus the centered around 10 kind of core themes that we identified through all of the literature research that we did, and the interviews and the case studies that we collated.
Ian Ellison
If I was going to sort of play that back in with my academic hat on, I'd say, this is a mixed method piece of research. It started small, but it grew very, very big. And it involved literature reviewing of all lots of existing stuff. It involved interviews, it involved case studies, whether they were visited virtually or you visited with your own feet to your own eyeballs, you are out in amongst it. And then the result because a piece of research is about a process and that it's about an output. Obviously, the output is a whopper of a book.
Chris Moriarty
Can I just ask a question about the structure of the output? Because one of the things that we've we talked about in our first episode was this kind of connection between academia and business and practice, I guess. And we just talked about the disconnect and accessibility about language and structure and the rest of it now, Ian and looks at this book, and we'll get very excited about the research methodology, the you know, some of the bits that you've talked about already the literature review and how that was approached, and all that sort of stuff, which is great stuff. I look at it, and I'm sure Ian does as well. But I look at it and go, what an amazing piece of content this is in terms of its structure, and how it's mapped out. Even things like using icons to say, right, this is an interview, this is a case study, you know, almost, it's very kind of yellow brick roadie in a sense, and it gently guides you through it. So how important was that, when you were designing the output, to incorporate some of those ideas,
Kursty Groves
So important, I wouldn't have let it go forward otherwise. And the reason I'm smiling is because when I wrote my first book, I had this idea that I wanted it to have, I've really wanted some iconography to be able to show people where to go and what to look and so that they could quickly extract principles from the things that I was presenting to them and use them. So it's really, really important for me that it's useful. But it's so so so so difficult to do, and the Excel spreadsheet, that that Carmel, the editor, when he was the editor of this book created to make it happen is a thing of beauty
Ian Ellison
What's really lovely about that is you can look at a piece of research, and you can sort of treat it as this sterile thing. But a good piece of research represents the person as well, it represents what they stand for, it sort of embodies them. And here you are, with this design, industrial design, innovation background, almost saying if this book is going to represent this thing, that it's almost got to represent us as well. One of the things that we always need to think about, particularly as we move forward in this world is increasingly digital nature and stuff like that is thinking about research ethics, Kursty and I just interested in what were some of the considerations, if any, that you needed to ponder, maybe even decisions about what was included and what wasn't included from a case study or an interview perspective? What was it that how did you find your way? And what were the ethical considerations in terms of what to include?
Kursty Groves
Oh, that's such a good question. I don't think anyone's asked me that before. I think I learned a lot from the first book, in so far as we had to go through lots and lots and lots of hoops to even be able to publish anything about Disney. And Nike. You know, we really had to so we learned very, very early on, that you need to build in time to make sure that you have sign off and people are happy with what you're what you're actually presenting.
Ian Ellison
I call those organizational gatekeepers with any piece of work, you've got to get past the gatekeepers, right.
Kursty Groves
Yeah, totally. But also, we wanted to be able to present real stories, and, and also to challenge some things as well, and not just kind of almost be a show pony for the organisation. Because I think that's super important too. And I think that comes down to the approach as much as much as anything from my perspective, because then that informs what we do, I think the approach for me is always to, to find, find the story, find the interesting, useful piece, and appreciate that nothing is ever completely perfect anyway. So I'm not there to kind of, I'm not ever there as an expose. So I think if I go in with that in mind, and I'm presenting interesting, useful, inspiring information for people, and providing a platform for the organisations to be able to share what they've done, then actually, I think, that kind of issues around what you do and don't share a much easier to manage. And then just practically everything goes through a, you know, a sign off kind of process.
Chris Moriarty
Just you talking about the case studies that just reminded me of one of the big challenges that any sort of workplace researchers got when we're trying to inspire and tell those stories, because the best stories and I'm sort of coming at this from a, someone who likes to tell stories, the best stories are kind of starting in a bad place and ended in a good place. And a lot of organisations aren't that comfortable with highlighting where they were, they'd love to talk to you about where they got to, you talked briefly about the approach and the style. Was there anything in particular that kind of felt like the moment where an organisation said, okay, yeah, that's fine. If you're going to do it that way. Was there anything that you kind of used as your constant trick to just get past that little challenge?
Kursty Groves
I think a really great story also ends with a with a happy ending. So long as you've got that as your kind of mutual starting point, then it's digging and gaining trust and talking and investigating and understanding and talking to people from different perspectives around the story, which will then probably give you a starting point. And I think you know, once people comfortable that you've kind of captured down the result, the ‘tada’ Because that's what people are, you know, they want to tell you about you, right? But it's then kind of, wow, so that must have been a real challenge, what are some of the things you had to overcome to get there? Okay,
Ian Ellison
so this is a huge piece of work. It's a huge project. It's a, it's a lovely, very, very tactile, very, very chunky book. Haven’t weighed it, but it's quite substantial. We’re going to talk about a couple of models, we're going to pick a couple of case studies. And we're going to pick one interview and just sort of go deeper in a controlled way. Otherwise, we'll be here till next week talking. The two case studies that really stood out to me partly because my own personal research interests, because I've spent a little bit of time on co-working spaces, and actually a little bit time off on an Impact Hub as well. You feature two different Impact Hubs. In the book, one is Caracas, and one is Amsterdam. So let's introduce Impact Hub as a concept to our listeners. And then let's focus on why you pick them and what are they about, what they allow, and what's the lovely rich insights we get from those two spaces.
Kursty Groves
So my co-author, Oliver, Marlow, his kind of network into Impact Hub in and of itself was really, really strong. And so, us digging into co-working was really interesting, especially at that time when co-working was really just starting to explode when WeWork with still on the up. And, and the people who came much more from the genesis of co-working couldn't understand how a co-working space could just be about the real estate and not about the people. So, the Impact Hub is focused on social innovation, predominantly, and people come together here, as solopreneurs, as freelancers as very, very small kind of micro businesses, typically, to find other people to help them make a better, make a difference in the world, typically. So they'll have an idea that has social impact. And this is a co-working space that would support all of that and have the networking opportunities and the access to funding and things like that.
Ian Ellison
So I read somewhere that Impact Hub, they're a global franchise, and the sort of the three pillars of what they stand for is they’re business, because they have to make money to survive. But they’re business, there are community, and they’re are movement. And you can feel that in all of the things that you're discussing those three things,
Kursty Groves
Tatiana Glad, who runs Impact Hub, Amsterdam, was really, really influential in thinking around space, specifically, and she worked with Oliver. And then she continued to she's just at a very senior level, influence and support the creation of spaces around, you know, in and around the Impact Hub. And then Caracas was really interesting as well, because it's it because the community, the strength of the community there, which was built up through the members themselves, the space itself was created by a member. And also there was a huge amount of solidarity that they were able to create in a very, very unstable political environment, which was, you know, really interesting story in and of itself. So those two very different spaces, but very, very united by the that sense of community, that sense of agency that people have within those spaces, and how important that became. And even in Caracas, you have, it happens all over, pretty much every impact of but certainly in Caracas, had these very, very, very senior ex kind of corporate people leaving their jobs and coming into this space because they realised that they wanted to create something that was much bigger than themselves.
Ian Ellison
So Tatiana's sort of starting point was actually not space, but it was social technologies. You mentioned world cafes, which is a, which is a methodology for getting different people talking together. And then over in Caracas, it was this the thing that really stood out to me was, this is a dangerous place, right? It might be a fantastic, exciting, beautiful, amazing place, but it's also dangerous. And this was a place of safety and solace, and almost calm in amongst everything else. And so they're one particular brand, but they're fundamentally different. And I'm so glad that you called out the kind of, you know, there's a commercial side to co-working and you know, WeWork was kind of responsible, I guess, is the big brand that made that happen. So, loads of organisations now, two years into a pandemic, are kind of exploring the opportunity of co-working from a flexible space perspective. But these two cases just show how socially alive, and how it's not about shiny space, it's actually about making do it's about low road architecture, as Stuart Brand would call it. It's about these lovely opportunities. And then the magic happens.
Kursty Groves
There are two interviews in this book that I think really shine a light on what you've just said. One is with Alex Hillman. And he is a founder of Indy Hall, which is another co-working space. And he has a massive, massive following. He's a really, really interesting guy. And he talks about that, it's all about community first. And in fact, the genesis of co-working was about people who were working remotely working asynchronously or needing to come together and wanting to come together and finding cafes or finding third spaces, and then realising ‘actually, why don't we kind of do this a bit more often in a bit more of a formal’. So the community always started first. And he talks eloquently about that. And then the other person who's is interviewed in this book is Franklin Becker, he's another lovely guy. And he moved away from workplace into healthcare, and looking at really complex organisations, and how to kind of design for the kind of the processes and the experiences that actually really kind of save people's lives. But when he talks about, you know, the big kind of outward displays of, I call it expression, those outward displays of we've arrived, or we've got shiny new buildings, aren't we amazing? That's not the thing that will make people creative. It might attract people who are already creative or find that interesting. But it won't necessarily make that happen. So I think it's this, people just want to have a cookie cutter linear process. Tell me tell me what to do and I'll do it. But the reality is, there are layers and layers and layers of genuine thinking, passion, and intentionality that go into the best places that you or I will ever go into or be a part of.
Ian Ellison
Okay, so let's get to some models. So, you mentioned the word expression in the last thing you were talking about, about Franklin Becker. So, expression is one of a very famous three E's, which you extend in this book, you sort of develop the idea. So originally, Efficiency, Effectiveness and Expression, were kind of conceived and then kind of created into a bit of a model come thinking to or by DEGW. And by Frank Duffy, he certainly wrote about them in the 2000s. But he was probably talking about them and using them in the 1990s, if not a bit earlier. So, you've taken Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Expression. And you've enhanced the model in this book. And what's really interesting about this one in particular, is you use it at the beginning around the purpose of buildings, and you come back to it later, as a tool to evaluate performance. So do you wanna talk a little bit about where that one comes from and where you took it with your extra E’s and why
Kursty Groves
It's standing on the shoulders of the giants? And I think what happened here was, I just realised the Duffy/Worthington, three E's plus some work by Jacqueline Vischer around psychological comfort and physical comfort that made me think hang on a minute, there's, there's a kind of a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs thing going on here. And what struck me was actually that these three E's kind of ladder up on top of each other, whereby I was getting lots of things quite frustrated by having to convince people that you know that Efficiency objectives are not the only thing. And of course, that's, that's everything that DEGW worked very hard to kind of, you know, educate people around this kind of balanced set of objectives. And then I realised, actually, they kind of also go up in terms of, in terms of kind of, I call it organisational actualisation, which is, when I realised that Maslow actually made up self-actualization anyway, I thought, well, I'm gonna, I'm going to, I'm going to make up my own. But yeah, so in order to be the best organisation, you can, then you kind of can go up. And what I also noticed was at the bottom, that's where you tend to have things that are much more tangible. So, metrics around efficiency are much easier to obtain, we tend to have them how much cost per square foot do you have? What's the headcount? You know? How quickly are our processes working? Their Efficiency metrics, then actually, Effectiveness and metrics are more about comfort Wellbeing able to do a job well, and then Expression objectives. And I started to go, oh, this is interesting. Lots of organisations are talking externally about Expression, but what about internal Expression a sense of belonging I'm feeling that I am safe to speak my mind share my ideas, because remember, this is all in the, in the space for innovation kind of frame. But then on top of that, we get to empowerment. And there's a really critical piece of research that was done by Dr. Craig Knight around enriched environment and empowered environments. The final one is Evolution. So actually thinking about where you going in the future, and if you want to transform an environment, have some kind of change? What is it for? Is it for those Efficiency metrics? Or is it something to do with the future, in particular, this model, you've got those layers kind of going up. But I also look at it through three different lenses. So, I kind of create these different potential starting objectives, which I work through with people. And you look at it through the organisational lens, you look at it through the culture and people lens, and then you look at also through the spatial lens. And what you find then is if you really push, you can get a really interesting set of balanced objectives. But also, the process of doing that as a team means that you are less likely to be talking emotionally about kind of, you know, what, what the HR person wants, or what the CEO wants, or what the, the CFO wants you more looking at these potential objectives and realising that you actually need, you know, more than one. And they need to kind of be considered across the board.
Ian Ellison
What you've done there, as you sort of articulated the depth and the breadth in order to collaboratively almost get a bit of a balanced, well, you say balanced scorecard in the classic Kaplan/Norton sense, but I sort of balanced perspective. So now I can see why useful for conception, useful for purpose work, but equally useful for really digging deep to get those metrics which allow you to talk to them later on in terms of performance.
Kursty Groves
Yeah. And just one thing to say on the metrics is that what we tend to do at the vision setting, end of things, creating those objectives, just looking at existing metrics that you already have in the organisation that you can put against them. And then also identifying gaps. For the less tangible objectives, you often will need less tangible ways of explaining them so much more qualitative, maybe more stories, maybe anecdotes, those kinds of things that can actually help you to see whether you've shifted the dial or not on one on those less tangible objectives.
Chris Moriarty
Kursty I, I was drawn to, and this is not an indication of how far I've gotten the book, but I was drawn to a model on page six. The reason is, right, so this is the this is the space for innovation blueprint, right? Where you talk about community creativity, and space, and how they combine in collaboration to make spaces for innovation, right. And we've already talked about those elements. And you've talked about how the community had to come first and all the rest of it, but in danger of sounding really spoddy. But if you can't be spoddy on a Workplace Geeks podcast, I don't know where you can be. I was interested in the mathematics of this model. Because they are multipliers, right? And I saw someone separately talk about a model where they had multipliers and they said it was a conscious decision, because it's any one of these as zero, the whole sum is zero. And is that is that what you were thinking with this model?
Kursty Groves
Yeah, I usually talk about the innovation process as being kind of, if I want to deal with identify the identify the problem, have insights, create ideas, then implement. And if any of one of those is zero, then you know, the you don't have innovation. You can have great insights, but not get it through the organisation is exactly the same. So that is kind of what this is supposed to be about. Yes. And creativity, though, can be also used as the creative process. So it's much more about the kind of the way that you do innovation. So, I think that that's a kind of on page six is quite simplified, just to say there are kind of elements that you need to pull together, if you can have the most amazing tech, and the most amazing kind of processes and, and even machines for kind of doing innovation, and you have a great facility. But if you don't have the people that are going to make it happen, then you won't have you know, a space for innovation. And I think that one really quick thing on this is originally the title of this book was going to be innovative spaces. That's what it was supposed to be. And I fought pretty hard, pretty quickly to say that this is not about that because that's going to send us on off looking for glory pictures of shiny new buildings. No, no, we're talking about spaces for innovation, whether they be physical or, or not?
Ian Ellison
So Kursty what other avenues of research does this open up for you moving forward?
Kursty Groves
One thing I've noticed is that and we had this conversation before, didn't we that people are really switched on to this whole topic area now have coming out of the pandemic and this kind of enforced realisation that work has changed and, and questioning the role of space in that whole thing. People are coming back to this book and picking it up, which I found really, really interesting. And it's actually I love the way you said, there's this, there's lots of great content in there, Chris, because I was like, Yeah, gosh, I should be kind of, you know, sharing a lot more of this. And I've started to, so what I've started to do think about how can I make not just this, but go back to this and use it as a as a platform for bringing existing topics back up to speed, updating them, sharing them. So doing that through podcasts and doing that through conversations with people like you, I think that's what's really interesting. And I also love the fact that people are talking. And what I like the fact that people seem to be thinking a bit harder, not across the board. But I think that's what's needed. Taking a bit of time and really thinking and having a bit of bravery around not having to have the right solution. This is what the you know, for me, it's the evolution, teir of those objectives. Just really stepping into that space as opposed to being quite kind of, you know, navel gazing,
Chris Moriarty
so, Kursty Who is it that's inspiring you at the moment who's doing some interesting work? I guess, particularly, we've touched on the pandemic there. And that's kind of thrown a whole tailspin into the sector's we kind of work out what's going to happen in the future, what we're doing in the future, but who's doing some interesting work, both in terms of topic and methodology and approach? Who's catching your eye at the moment?
Kursty Groves
Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so I think, intellectually, Julia Hobsbawm is super interesting. And she comes at this whole arena from a social perspective. And so she's looking at the future. And she's really challenging leaders around how to think about the future of work and workplace. So I think she's definitely somebody she's inspiring me at the moment, definitely. And in terms of methodology, I think it's those organisations, there's quite a few of them actually on, who are, you know, getting together and really trying to figure this out. The ones who are, I'm gonna use the word brave again, to experiment, and actually building in some kind of short term flexibility, but also really building out quite confident, long term vision.
Ian Ellison
The organisations that aren't sitting on the fence and waiting for what other people are doing, they're going, this is a test and learn period. We can't be absolute about anything. But we can try stuff with a view of the stuff we're trying to achieve in the future. And we can try and join the dots and we'll get there.
Kursty Groves
Yes, and the reason I think that's so important is because that's, that's, that's the method I think they should have been doing before the pandemic anyway. And it's basically saying, we're not copying other people. Yes, of course, we'll pay attention to trends, we will look around and see what's going on. But we will make our own decisions, and we will involve our people in that. So that's why I think it's so it's such an exciting time, because I think there are more organiszations who are realising that it's not just a lift and shift, you know, case of that anymore.
Ian Ellison
Fantastic. Chris, any last questions, Kursty anything that you want to say that we didn't get chance to say,
Chris Moriarty
There is definitely something you should be telling us more about Kursty. So you you've got a podcast yourself, haven't you the Office Chronicles? So just tell us a little bit about that. And what the kind of what the gig is with the Office Chronicles.
Kursty Groves
So the Office Chronicles started out, as I always wanted to do a podcast. When I say always, I would say probably for about five or six years. And then it just came to me that actually even if it didn't have to be a long-standing podcast, it was just something that was shining a light on what was happening right now through the pandemic. That's that that's why it's called the Chronicles. I just wanted to chronicle the thing, the thinking that big organisations were going through, and it was, you know, it was really anyone who was willing to share, as you said before, you know, not everybody is, and though I had plenty of knockbacks because, you know, organisations haven't been willing to or ready to, you know, share, I'm going to continue with those interviews with what I'm calling practitioners, but I'm going to also be talking to some experts, and I'm specifically going to be delving into those nonphysical aspects of space. So, I will be talking to people about physical space but also digital space, cognitive space, or I like to say headspace, and also social space? So, people who have got a real expert opinion and view on those areas and just see where it takes me, I don't know where it's gonna go.
-- Pinder Ponder --
Chris Moriarty
Right that was Kursty Groves. So Ian, what were your key takeaways from that chat we just with Kursty.
Ian Ellison
I really enjoyed that. Well, I mean, there's tons in there, right there's just sort of too much. And we could just keep talking for another hour. But I think the things that let's kind of list them out now and let's drop into them. So I think it's really interesting to look at those ten themes that the book is kind of based and structured upon, because one thing that really stands out to me is only three of those ten themes are specifically workspace related in a physical sense. And yet, this book is called Spaces for Innovation. And Kursty was a kind of pains to talk about, we're not talking just about physical space, we can be talking about virtual space, we can be talking about headspace cognitive space, and we can be talking about social space. So it's starting to appreciate that space is far more than just the physical. Another thing I got from it; Chris was that this kind of unfolding of ideas in a continual way. So, she knows she came to that book, because of her own interests and the way her career progressed and taken her in a workspace direction. But then some of the insights she was finding from her research, those models and those thinking tools, were then evolving with her own professional use subsequently. So a great example of that is, you know, she, she developed the three E's, and then they turned into the five E's for her thinking, and now she's using a sixth E to be able to do that. And, you know, we shouldn't be shy of doing those things. But we should always be open to sort of testing and learning and validating some of our thinking,
Chris Moriarty
What I think about there when you were talking about this idea of unfolding, what I liked about it in the sense I got from her, which is this started off with a really good question, to start off with a really good question about the role of the environment on things like creativity and innovation, which I guess a lot of organisations will, will be interested in. But that whole bit that when she talked about the name of the book even had to kind of almost reverse, because there's a danger that the original title would almost pre-empt the answer. And, you know, from someone who's looking at this, in terms of what are the lessons of research lessons around this is start with a good question, not necessarily with a great answer. And I think a lot of, particularly in my past, you know, in the more PR, orientated view of research is that we tend to think about what answers we're looking for, and then work backwards. Whereas some of the best bits are this this kind of step by step, let's get the question, right. You know, we need a hypothesis to work off of because we need to test. But we don't know where this is going to end up. We don't know where this is going to take us right.
Ian Ellison
Well, it's interesting that you would use the word hypothesis there. Because if you kind of step back from that, you can come at research in two different ways. One is that you have something that you want to investigate, and maybe you have a hunch that you want to test, which might develop into a fully-fledged theory that you want to test? So, I've got a hypothesis, I want to see if it's true or not. I think you're using the word hypothesis slightly more generally, though, which is I've got an area of interest, which I want to dig into and see what I find. The other type of research is much more what we would call, we would use the word inductive, where we know that we're interested in something. We don't quite know what the answers are yet. And we're prepared to be surprised. So, we're going to make sure we don't form any foregone conclusions to hinder our thinking. And we see where this all goes. And it feels to me like the book was very much about that it was unfolding, as it went there, or the research project, which became the book. It almost needed, curating and pulling into shape, because there was just so much information that was valuable to people.
Chris Moriarty
So here's a controversial question. If this book, if this research project had been driven by an organisation, that wasn't Nesta, who was interested in innovation, they were interested in in that part of the equation. If it was driven by an organisation that was interested in space, would the research have gone in the same direction? Could it have been, you know, sort of direct because we are happy to be surprised your point there about we're happy to be surprised where this takes us? And the answer might be that space isn't as important as we thought it was.
Ian Ellison
Well, maybe you could think about it like this. Imagine if that discussion about the book title. Should it be innovation spaces or spaces for innovation, maybe it wouldn't have got rewired. And maybe it would have been innovation spaces and then continue the thought experiment, potentially those ten themes, which Kursty has recognised as really important, holistically important, which the way we would frame it, Chris, we'd say they include cultural stuff. They include technological stuff, they include the whole gamut of workplace, this book would have become much more space dominant, and we would argue, had missed a golden opportunity.
Chris Moriarty
Okay, so what else did you take from the interview?
Ian Ellison
I got in a really kind of practical, pragmatic sense, that collaboration opens up opportunities. So, this was a meaty project from Nesta, which Kursty spotted and really liked the look of but felt, crikey, this is big. And then the following day, by chance, or by luck, or probably by a little bit of design, because I'm sure they know each other really well. Oliver, Marlow at Tilt gets in touch and says should we go in on this together. And I think what’s lovely about that is, number one is strength in numbers. But number two, when you come together and work on things with people you don't normally work with amazing things can happen. Because different perspectives come to the table with different values and ideals and ideas and interests. And, you know, I think all listeners who are thinking about problems that they're trying to address, even if it's getting other folks within your organisation, from different places, to just get around a table and work stuff through with you. What a wonderful opportunity to broaden workplace thinking.
Chris Moriarty
And that kind of touches on some of the stuff that Mark Eltringham was talking about, which is different schools of science and how they can influence workplace research, you know, if we just keep obsessing with one part of it and surrounding ourselves with people from that part of it, there's so much we could miss out on right back to your point about the book, if it had been about spaces, physical spaces, how much of that book would have been lost in terms of insights that actually are really critical?
Ian Ellison
Okay, and so the last takeaway for me, kind of extends the conversation, we clearly started in there about co-working spaces. And, you know, I've got an awful lot of time for Impact Hub as a brand. And I've got an awful lot of time for co-working as essentially a sort of a work concept to think about it is quite interesting, isn't it? Because if you try and define co-working, is it a social thing about communities together? Is it a space thing about a different type of workspace, and I think what we see quite often certainly at the commercial end of our industries, we see it as like a space solution. And you can see, you know, two years into the pandemic, you can see different organisations looking at it as a part of their workspace strategy, because it might be efficient and effective to talk about a couple of those ease in Kursty's model. And I think there's a massive miss here, which is, if you really listen out for what makes a good co-working offer sparkle, it's not likely to be the shiny space, or if it is, you're probably missing something, or they're encouraging you to miss something. Because it's about that community, that movement that we're all in this together feeling. And I mean, you've had an experience of this recently, right?
Chris Moriarty
Yeah, well, I've had a few experiences on this because I used to work in one of the big brands co-working space, and was told that the benefits of it was always this kind of bumping into other organisations and this kind of curated community stuff, and it just never really happened because we were all so diverse, that you know, there were so many different organisations taking up that space offer. I used to kind of cynically say, really, it's the financial model that's, that's the commonality here do all we have in common is that we are not able at the moment to take out a five year lease because we don't know where we are in our lifecycle as a business. So I never really got that community but I did see some really cool co-working spaces where the type of organisation was kind of your table stakes so you had to be in similar in a similar sector and I think that's really cool idea, but it's what I got from that that co-working case study that we talked about. Because it's the energy that's more important and without wanting to sound kind of a bit cosmic about it. There's something intangible at an amazing co-working space. Now to give you the recent example, I you know, for our interview with Jeremy Meyerson, which is in the next episode, I had to find a great bit of space, good Wi Fi, and good acoustics so I went to one of the big brands and we you know, I'm not gonna name drop them, but you know, they're fairly big and a fairly everywhere and fairly serviced offices. But that experience wasn't great. But obviously, I was thinking about taking a membership out with them, because the space looked nice, you know, if you took a photo of it, it looked nice, it looked good. But the experience just, I didn't feel part of it, I just I kind of felt almost like a square peg in a round hole when I was there. Now I've gone to a local place called MyWorkSpot. And it's that they're tiny, that it's, they're very got the one site at the moment. But it's in my hometown, and it's run by people from my hometown. And as soon as I walked in, they've got some really nice design elements. And they've been they've got the services, right, the people at the door are great. But really, the moment I knew I was going to take my membership out with them is when I walked a few feet, and I saw someone I knew, and he's in recruitment is in a completely different industry. But there was just something about it, where I went, you know, I feel like I belong here. And not because of the design features. And not because of all that razzmatazz because the people here and there's people like me.
Ian Ellison
So that sense of belonging, bit you're talking about I mean, that comes with being in a community that you know, and love, right. But that's not to say that it can't be designed in and I think that's a key realisation here, which is certainly in the workspace, part of the workplace arena, if you like, there's an awful lot of focus on physical architecture. Of course, there is it's obvious. But I think what you start to see with some of the really innovative studios and practices that really understand what co-working is about is that they also design in the social architecture sphere. And you can design there, and it's then this the blending of the two, it's the social and the physical and how you get them to crossover. And a great example of that is, you know, instead of having a receptionist, you have what is often called in co-working the host. And it's not just a name change, they are responsible for different things because they are community connectors. There's a lovely little phrase which captures this and I've borrowed it ever since I heard Melissa Marsh say back in, I think 2014 at a workplace conference in Reading. This isn't about managing facilities. This is about enabling communities. And if we get that stuff, right, then great stuff can happen.
Chris Moriarty
And that was the central theme of what some of the stuff Kursty was talking about. You know, actually, it's the community that is the important bit. You know, communities are creative, communities are innovative, the spaces have a role. But there's a lot of other stuff that you've got to do to harness that.
So the only other point I would, I would refer to I thought was really interesting to carry on a theme is that she got to talking about parallel dissemination, which was what Matt was talking about, you know, even with a book, I would say this is a really accessible book, in the whole accessibility conversation that we've been having Kerstin mentioned at the front of the show about the challenge and the attitude and the mindset. It feels to me that Kursty was very passionate early on, how do we make this as accessible as possible, easy to read, even in the book, it opens up by saying you can dip in, you can dip out, it's not a sit down and consume. And I think that was really exciting. But even she afterwards is saying, I'm gonna have to think about how we get we've got so much good content in there, how can I bring it to life again? How can I share it? How can I chop it up and do it and I think that's, you know, there's some from my world, there's some real marketing ideas there, content marketing ideas there that are about we've got this great bit of content, don't just publish it and then sit back and move on to the next thing. Keep you know, it has its own energy, it has its own life. Let's use it and let's get it out to as many people as possible. So, a cracking first interview with a researcher, that's our that's our first one in the can.
-- Outro –
Chris Moriarty
So that's the end of today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. If you want to get your hands on Kursty's book is available as an e-book. So just search for ‘Spaces for Innovation ebook’, and you'll see that pop up. And don't forget to look out for her podcast Office Chronicles and give that a listen. So last thing to say is if you want to drop us a line at Workplace Geeks, you can do that by emailing hello@workplace geeks.org. If you have any questions, feedback, ideas for research, we could cover or you just want to say hi. And remember to look out for us on LinkedIn. And for those that are interested in talking with us about your research. Then remember the five Workplace Geeks commandments. It has to be evidence based not opinion. We want to talk to the research teams direct. We want to learn together to deliberately take different perspectives as we explore the broad church that is workplace.
That's all for now. Speak to you soon.
