Walls in the open space

I recently worked with a group who were all working in an open space office layout. This was an ideal open office layout in the sense that each single work station was identical. That is not always the case in Thailand ... In another group I work with, there are 3 'grades' of open space working areas: the higher someone is up in the organization chart, the higher the partitions separating his particular work space from the one next to it !

So in the first group, the situation was really ideal. Open space. Frequent exchanges and interactions. A habit of asking one another if any help was needed. But when we started an Action Learning session to find a solution for an important shared challenge the team is facing, members very quickly realized that although they were sitting next to one another, and chatting all the time ... none of them really understood what the others were doing, or what challenges they were facing, or what help they really needed. The open space creates part of the context. This context can be conducive for collaboration, but it is not enough just to put people next to each other, and then assume (or hope) that they will collaborate.

This reminded me of a recent quote from Stefan Lindegaard, the Open Innovation guru. When it comes to getting innovative ideas from your team, Lindegaard says "People First, Processes Next. Then Ideas". In other words, ideas will come when you focus on your teams and put in place processes to allow them to share their ideas. I extrapolate this to my open space situation. You cannot create collaboration by putting people in a certain environment, however colorful and encouraging these surroundings might seem. Collaboration happens when people WORK together, share challenges, share successes and help each other to learn from failures. That is built through developing a mindset of really helping each other out, and establishing processes where cross-functional teams work on shared tasks. A nice open space is cool, but that is not the end of the job !