Designing Coworking for Collaboration
Deskmag just published a piece about a Dutch incubator’s research project about physical proximity and collaboration. Among the things that stood out to me, these two sentences had the most tips for what was happening in space design as related to collaboration:
This particular space put groups with a similar focus together in separate corridors of the building. Artists, graphic designers, and musicians were clustered together, and each company had its own separate office within the corridor.
Designing Coworking for Teams
First, I notice that they refer to “companies” in more than one place, and then the fact that companies have separate offices. At Indy Hall, when we’ve had teams of more than two, we’ve had a consistant experience of those teams interacting far less. Unless the team members are particularly gregarious, the interactions with one another are enough to satiate the core needs that are otherwise unmet by people who are getting the most from coworking. We’ve theorized about ways to combat this, and among those theories has been one executed by PariSoma in San Francisco, by adding an open loft around the coworking space that’s designed for the teams they are home to. In essence, the teams have to walk through the open coworking area to arrive at their then semi-private (still open area) workspace. I’ll be visiting PariSoma for the first time next month, and I’m curious to see how the teams interact, if the goal of designing serendipity into the workflow of the space has been successful. To date, though I have yet to experience a coworking space that has achieved an ideal scenario for mixing the interactions between pre-existing teams and individuals.
Proximity Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
Second, I noticed that they’ve clustered people by focus. I’ll presume this means industry or discipline based on the article. While grouping people by their affection (or affliction) this is common in large company offices (and hospitals) for efficiency, we’ve found at Indy Hall that it’s counterproductive. We instead design for serendipity in terms of working in proximity.
The article talks about proximity in terms of closeness having an effect on collaboration. What I think they missed was designing for the effect of zones of proximal development. Instead of putting people who are similar together, put people who are different together.
The Spark Plug Analogy
My favorite new analogy for this is a spark plug: the two conductive tips can’t be touching each other, or else the spark can’t take place. A spark plug actually require some distance between the conductors in order for it to work. Coworking, I believe, is the same – the “distance” we’re talking about just isn’t physical, but instead, in variations of interests, experiences, and worldviews. We achieve this by NOT controlling where people sit, but instead, having smaller desk pods (3-4, though we’ve had them up to 6), and having a pretty steadfast “rule” of not allowing all pods to be full time or flex. By creating a cluster of workspaces where there’s a mix of semi-permanent culture of full time members mixing daily with the churn of whoever showed up that day, or at that time of day, the types of “distance” created between members that are in closer proximity to each other allow for the desired sparks to take place.
Designing to Let Things Happen
I’ve noticed this as a pattern, often times a project not achieving its desired results is because it’s too busy making things happen rather than letting things happen. Reading through this particular article, it seems like the design was focused on designing places within the workspace to make things happen rather than designing the workspace itself let things happen.
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A Feeling of Security
An interesting and fairly often recurring thread in the coworking google group is security. A recent version of this thread prompted a response from a Toronto-based coworking space, CG6. A couple of important quotes:
We never totally took security as serious as how our members might feel within the space.
This is so important. Everybody, read it 5 times. Please!
He continued to share their thought process on security cameras. We share this feeling strongly at Indy Hall, and Tm did a great job of expressing it:
We have avoided the use of Camera’s. We actually rely on our coworker and members to be our eyes and ears. One way of doing this is the type of members we have accepted in our managed spaces. Members are friends, these are trusted professionals within a circle of association who can work together, build together and save together. When there is an issue, it effects everybody. This system creates an internal law, safeguarding a community. When there is an issue, everybody takes the blame. It only takes one warning to tame everybody down and be able to respect the space they are in.
I love seeing this sort of stuff, it addresses real issues head on and doesn’t pretend that we can’t be responsible for ourselves.
This how we rebuild business and society for our futures to be better.
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Achieving Greatness & Zombification
Sometimes, XKCD gets it too right.
…you don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.
Hat tip @ Chipps.
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Should a coworking space run itself?
This is a liberal lift from the Coworking Google Group, in a discussion about if a coworking space should run itself.
Because Jeannine, Angel, and Beth have done such a great job of answering the tactical elements of this quesiton in the thread, I’ve decided to try to take a different approach.
Rather than ask if a coworking space should run itself, as “should”s tend to be tricky and prescriptive anyway, I’ll suggest that a coworking space can run itself – with a couple of caveats to explain what I mean by that – and then why it’s valuable to work towards that goal.
Caveat of caveats: In retrospect, I don’t think these 4 caveats are complete – so if you find youself asking “but what about…?”, ask in the comments.
Caveat #1
I wish I’d given up “control” sooner
When we opened Indy Hall, I was there every day to open and close. I was there to meet every new member. I was there for EVERYTHING, with my fingers in EVERYTHING.
About 18 months in, I was fast approaching burnout. I found someone who I trusted, who was organized and friendly, and set her loose on my inbox and sat her next to me and said “look for things that I’m doing that don’t need to be me, and take them from me”. She did this, and not only got a large volume of the administrative work out of my field of vision, but found ways to improve and streamline everything since it was now being executed by a fresh set of eyes. Everything I was doing before was not only still being done, but much of it was being done better. Since then, the role has changed hands about once a year, as the person in this role tends to find opportunities in the community to create things for themselves (running Indy Hall is an educational experience in itself, everything from communication skills, organizational skills, business skills, interpersonal skills, etc), and we can’t stop somebody from following their path. The role has become one of transformative learning for all four people who’ve held it (myself included).
If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have waited until I was almost burned out to get at least one more person involved that wasn’t a “partner”. It freed me up to work on the things I actually cared about, the things that actually needed me (until they didn’t need me either), and gave us room to grow.
One of my favorite quotes from Geoff has always been, “the only reason to gather power is to give it away”. That’s the mindset that’s let us seen impact and change happen on a bigger scale than any one of us could accomplish on our own.
Caveat #2
Shit always get dirty
No matter who’s in charge of the cleanliness, things always get dirty. For the first year, I cleaned the bathrooms. You can also read this as – for the first year, the bathrooms didn’t get cleaned very often. Rather than delegate this relatively difficult to delegate task (how many people have trouble getting roommates/housemates/family members to clean up after themselves in the bathroom/kitchen? yeah, it’s even harder at coworking-space volumes of activity), we hired a cleaning service. This seems straightforward, but it wasn’t to me at the time, and I wish I hadn’t waited so long. The hardest part was hiring someone I could trust, since members’ equipment was always around and I needed members and myself to feel comfortable leaving things behind.
If you’re planning for humans to be in your space, plan for it to get dirty, and have a plan for regularly removing that dirtiness. Period.
P.S. There’s a metaphor in this caveat. Can you find it? Bonus points for anyone who does 
Caveat #3
“Member” is a synonym for potential leader. Key word: Potential
If you expect every person who works from your space to step up and pitch in, you’re fooling yourself. But you’ll find that if you don’t give them a chance to step up and pitch in – they probably won’t ever bother to try.
In communities of practice, there’s very little hierarchy imposed but instead, there’s more of a framework surrounding the individuals of the community that give them the opportunities to step up and take ownership of something. I’ve found that simple changes to how we respond to inquiries has a dramatic effect on unlocking potential leaders from the community.
When somebody asks for something, try responding with a simple, “yes”. Nothing else, just a confirmation that you’d like to see that done, too. If they don’t jump on it – they’ve probably never had anyone say yes to their idea before, so you might need to nudge a bit further. Something like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea – what do you think we need to do in order to accomplish that?”. See how they take ownership from there. In the end, they might be like a boy who’s bad at reading flirty signals from a girl he likes and they might need a more explicit push, “Hey…would you like to take this on? What can I do to help YOU?”.
Not everyone is comfortable taking ownership of things that they haven’t been told explicitly to own – but once people realize they’re working in an environment that rewards people taking ownership of their work, it’s infectious.
Caveat #4
“Damage control” shouldn’t require you to be a superhero
It’s nobody’s fault, sometimes balls get dropped. Rather than jump in and pick up that ball yourself, try to get other community members to rally around the need. It’s tempting to be superman (or wonder woman), but the more times we’ve encouraged/let our members pick up things that have been dropped, the less things have been dropped.
I think there’s something that changes when people do things that they know one person will pick up if they drop it – versus knowing the collective has their back. I can’t put my finger on it, but it seems to remove the tension and fear of making a mistake from community members and increases their likelihood of ever trying again.
So the million dollar question is…
Why do you wan’t the coworking space to run itself in the first place?
For me, getting a coworking space to “run itself” has been more about removing myself as a dependency for the space to do what it does best. That means the space can continue to do what it does best for many years to come.
That means that the community members can contribute (not dictate) to the direction of the community. And given the chance, they will. They have.
I’ve seen and felt what Indy Hall can do for people first hand, and as long as it relies on me in order to do that, it’s expression won’t match the magnitude of its potential.
Whatever your goal is in opening a coworking space, consider the magnitude of it’s potential if it didn’t rely on you. If you focus on THAT goal, day in and day out, rather than “getting it to run itself” – you might actually be able to achieve it.
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