By Bruce BarclayFall 2018; W&P #10
Tags:  ecosystems • facilities management • collaboration • infrastructure • cross-functional

Note:
The Work&Place Editorial Advisory Board applauds this article as one of the eight best articles we published in 2019. We recommend it highly for its candor, its thoughtful critique of workplace design and management practices,  and its call for more attention to the complex “ecosystem” that surrounds and includes the workplace.

The natural world is a story of constant change and evolution.
Animals, plants, insects and micro-organisms exist in an ecosystem, adapting to relentless changes in their environment, where they are influenced by habitat, climate and their co-habitators. They respond to change faster than humans, because they are not tied by the same restraints and conventions. They are compelled to adapt to changing environmental conditions – or die. They are interdependent and reliant on each other, on competitors and on cohabiters for mutual advantage.
“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
– Charles Darwin
Figure One
As humans move into what Klaus Schwab, Director of the World Economic Forum, has called the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”,i there is much we can learn from nature, particularly regarding the workplace environment. The transformation of an organisation’s real estate, facilities management, IT, and HR functions into a workplace ecosystem has been discussed publicly for some time, part of the natural evolution of the business world.
Professor Franklin D Becker, known as one of the founding fathers of FM, coined the phrase “organizational ecology” to demonstrate that all organisations are essentially complex systems characterised by the interdependence of the social and the physical. ii
“Changes in any one aspect of the system reverberate throughout the system. Organizational ecology conceptualizes the workplace as a system in which physical design factors both shape and are shaped by work processes, the organization’s culture, workforce demographics and information technologies.”
Organisations are, Professor Ilf Price later argued, “ecologies produced by variation, selection and retention, acting on replicating narratives, representations, signifiers or discourses.” iii
In 1992, the International Development Research Council (IDRC) looked at the ways the corporate real estate world was changing.  In a series of studies, known as CRE2000, the IDRC examined how real estate was moving up the value chain from stage one, being seen as taskmasters (concerned with the technical aspects of supplying buildings), to stage five, a business strategist, where the real estate professional focuses on influencing competitive advantage, productivity, and shareholder value. That role involves becoming business partners with other areas of the organisation, such as HR, IT, and Finance, the study argued.
These views were echoed in the 1999 publication, ‘The Competitive Workplace’ iv , which viewed the workplace as an ecosystem, an integrated system of interactive parts, requiring a holistic understanding for strategic planning. The workplace is not just physical infrastructure to be managed by real estate and facilities but “the entire spectrum, from the organizational structure to real estate and facilities which shelter and support the work of a corporation.” v
In the introduction to her 2010 Liveable Livesvi report, Ziona Strelitz pointed out that the report was aimed at both HR and CRE professionals, alerting them to the tensions faced in managing work and life commitments when long travel time is involved.  She went on to argue against centralised workplaces and for “narrowing the physical distance between the workplace and employees’ domestic and family realms” which she saw as an “HR aspect of corporate real estate”.
A common gap for misunderstanding
But there is a common gap in understanding among the real estate, FM, IT, and HR functions in most organisations, described by James Ware and Paul Carder in the first Raising the Bar vii report sponsored by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). “We have seen this gap in many situations, over many years; improvement has occurred, but there remains a long way to go.”…