By Anthony BrownSpring 2019, Issue 11, pages 34-39
Tags: workplace • workplace design • innovation• disruption

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 practices, and the way it connects workplace disruption to historical theories of innovation and other forms of social discontinuity.

In a 1973 essay called “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”, the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke sets out Three Laws regarding our relationship with technology. Only the third of these is well remembered these days:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (1)
He was one of the first writers to coin the sort of law that has now become commonplace on the subject of the way our world can be disrupted by technological developments. Those laws now include a corollary to Clarke’s:
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced (Gehm’s Law)
and an adage now almost as well known:
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run (Amara’s Law)
What these examples share in common is an implicit understanding that the world is apt to change in completely unexpected ways as a result of disruptive technological developments. They also share the assumption that we are very bad at predicting what the future holds and that we tend to confuse disruption with innovation.
When we make these errors, we can fall into the trap of thinking that the future will be primarily or even entirely an evolution of the present. In reality, genuinely disruptive developments take us in new directions and have unpredictable consequences.
Fortunately, if we understand this unpredictability and the true nature of disruption we can make ourselves ready for it. Nowhere is this understanding more important than in our working lives and the built environment. While technology can change very quickly, our skills, company cultures, and surroundings are not quite so volatile. So we must make them malleable.
That has been the core challenge for workplace designers and managers for at least the past three decades, and their ability to meet it grows more important by the day. This article sets out the nature of this challenge and explores how we are meeting it.
What disruption really means
Many people like to talk about disruption, but few of them seem to know what it really means or are perhaps deliberately misusing the term. It is most often confused with innovation and improvement. Better, cheaper, smaller, faster products are not disruptive. Nor are most new ones.
In his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma (2), Clay Christensen draws a distinction between a low-end disruption, which might involve the development of a pre-existing solution, and a genuine disruption that creates a new market and so is very difficult for incumbents to serve. The title of the book derives from the dilemma this insight creates for suppliers and service providers.
Incumbents typically ignore or downplay the disruption because they cannot see it for what it is, or it does not serve their commercial interests, or they cannot (or will not) follow its lead. The long-term consequences can be fatal….