If you work in a factory or somewhere else that requires you to touch things or people, the COVID shutdowns and social distancing have clearly been a difficult situation to overcome.
But it seems that the past few months have also been very trying for many people who worked in office settings before COVID set in. The Brady Bunch meme captured this well. However, to me, that’s something which is less a reflection of reality than a lack of imagination and experience.
I’m in the minority of folks who have worked remotely for more than ten years. By now, I’ve forgotten some of the initial hiccups in doing that. Also, the software, hardware and bandwidth have gotten so much better that the experience is dramatically better than when I started.
So, I’m a little flummoxed by some of what I hear from remote working newbies. First off, of course, is the complaint that people can’t touch and hug their co-workers anymore. Haven’t they been to training about inappropriate touching and how some of these physical interactions can come off as harassment? Even if these folks were in the office, I doubt they would really be going around making physical contact with co-workers.
Then there is the complaint about the how much can be missed in communication when conversations are limited to text messages and emails. That complaint is correct. But why is there an assumption that communication is limited to text. If you had a meeting in a conference room or went to someone’s office for a talk, why can’t you do the same thing via videoconference?
(My own experience is that remote work requires video to be successful because of the importance of non-text elements of human communication. That’s why I’m assuming that the virtual communication is often via video.)
In the office you could drop by. Users of Zoom and similar programs are often expected to schedule meetings, but that’s not a requirement. You can turn on Zoom and, just like in an office, others could connect to you when you want. They’ll see if your busy. And, if you’re a really important person, you can set up a waiting room and let them in when you’re ready.
There is even a 21st century version of the 19th century partner desks, although it’s not new. An example is the always-on Kubi, pictured to the left, that has been around for a few years.
Perch, another startup, summarized the idea in this video a few years back. Foursquare started using a video portal connecting their engineering teams on the two coasts eight years ago. (A few months ago before COVID, a deal was reached to merge Foursquare with Factual.)
By the way, the physical office was no utopia of employee interaction. A variety of studies, most famously the Allen Curve, a very large reduction in interaction if employees were even relatively short physical distances from each other. With video, all your co-workers are just a click away. While your interactions with the colleague at the next desk may be less (if you want), your interactions with lots of other colleagues on other floors can happen a lot more easily.
And then, despite evidence of increased productivity and employee happiness with remote work, there is the statement that it decreases innovation and collaboration.
Influential articles, like Workspaces That Move People in the October 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review, declared that “chance encounters and interactions between knowledge workers improve performance.”
In the physical world, many companies interpreted this as a mandate for open office plans that removed doors and closed offices. So how did that work out?
According to a later article – The Truth About Open Offices – in the November–December 2019 issue of the Harvard Business Review reported that, “when the firms switched to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%”. (More detail can be found in Royal Society journal article of July 2018 on “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration”.
The late Steve Jobs forcefully pushed the idea of serendipity through casual, random encounters of employees. That idea was one of the design principles of the new Apple headquarters. Now with COVID-driven remote work, some writers, like Tiernan Ray in ZDNET on June 24, 2020, are asking “Steve Jobs said Silicon Valley needs serendipity, but is it even possible in a Zoom world?”.
There is nothing inherently in video conferencing that diminishes serendipitous meetings. Indeed, in the non-business world, there are websites that exist solely to connect strangers together completely at random, like Chatroulette and Omegle.
Without going into the problems those sites have had with inappropriate behavior, the same idea could be used in a different way to periodically connect via video conferencing two employees who otherwise haven’t met recently or at all. Nor does that have to be completely random. A company doing this could also use some analytics to determine which employees might be interested in talking with other employees that they haven’t connected with recently. That would ensure serendipity globally, not just limited to the people who work in the same building.
It’s not that video conferencing is perfect, but there is still an underappreciation of how many virtual equivalents there are of typical office activities – and even less appreciation for some of the benefits of virtual connections compared to physical offices.
To me, the issue is one of a lag that I’ve seen before with technology. I’ve called this horseless carriage thinking. Sociologists call it a cultural lag. As Ashley Crossman has written, this is
“what happens in a social system when the ideals that regulate life do not keep pace with other changes which are often — but not always — technological.”
Some people don’t yet realize and aren’t quite comfortable with what they can do. For most, time and experience will educate them.
© 2020 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved
To quote from their website: “The Intelligent Community Forum is a global network of cities and regions with a think tank at its center. Its mission is to help communities in the digital age find a new path to economic development and community growth – one that creates inclusive prosperity, tackles social challenges, and enriches quality of life.”
Then the Smart21 are culled to a smaller list of the Top7 most intelligent communities in the world each year. There are rigorous quantitative evaluations conducted by an outside consultancy, field trips, a review by an independent panel of leading experts/academic researchers and a vote by a larger group of experts.
It may not always be clear to communities what separates these seven most intelligent communities from the rest. After all, these descriptions are just words. We understand that words matter in political campaigns. But words matter outside of politics in initiatives, big and small, that are part of governing.
Although at a superficial level, the descriptions seem somewhat similar, it turns out that the leaders of more successful intelligent community initiatives did, indeed, describe those initiatives differently from the leaders of less successful initiatives.
Robots are also showing off their fun and increasingly creative side.
This is the simplest first step and many cities have encouraged local or not-so-local entrepreneurs to create apps for their residents.
While some cities have posted their open data, there is much data about urban life that the residents can collect. The most popular example is the community generation of environmental data, with such products like the Egg, the Smart Citizen Kit for Urban Sensing, the Sensor Umbrella and even more sophisticated tools like Placemeter.
Once the data has been collected, someone needs to help make sense of it. This effort too can draw upon the diverse skills in the city. Platforms like Zooniverse, with more than a million volunteers, are good examples of what is called citizen science. For the last few years, there has been OpenData Day around the world, in which cities make available their data for analysis and use by techies. But I would go further and describe this effort as “popular analytics” – the virtual collaboration of both government specialists and residents to better understand the problems and patterns of their city.
Once the problems and opportunities are better understood, it is time to create urban policies in response. With the foundation of good connectivity, it becomes possible for citizens to conveniently participate in the co-creation of policy. I highlighted examples from the citizen consultations in Lambeth, England to those in Taiwan, as well as the even more ambitious CrowdLaw project that is housed not far from the Smart Cities conference location.
Then next is the execution of policy. As I’ve written before, public services do not necessarily always have to be delivered by paid civil servants (or even better paid companies with government contracts). The residents of a city can help be co-producers of services, as exemplified in Scotland and New Zealand.
Obviously, the people who build buildings or even tend to gardens in cities have always had a role in defining the physical nature of a city. What’s different in a city that has good connectivity is the explosion of possible ways that people can modify and enhance that traditional physical environment. Beyond even augmented reality, new spaces that blend the physical and digital can be created anywhere – on sidewalks, walls, even in water spray. And the residents can interact and modify these spaces. In that way, the residents are constantly co-creating and recreating the urban environment.
The hope of ICF is that the attendees at Smart Cities New York start moving beyond the base notion of a smart city to the more impactful idea of an intelligent city that uses all the new technologies to enhance the quality of life and engagement of its residents.
In designing the course, it was apparent that much of the established literature in strategy is based on ideas developed decades ago. Michael Porter, for example, is still the source of much thinking and teaching about strategy and competition.
So, who are the new strategists worthy of inclusion in a graduate course in 2018?
But in this post, the emphasis in on strategic lessons drawn from this century’s business experience with the Internet, including multi-sided platforms and digital content traps. For that there is “Matchmakers – the new economics of multisided platforms” by David S Evans and Richard Schmalensee. And also Bharat Anand’s “The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change”.
Consider then the case of GE, one of the USA’s great industrial giants, which offers a good illustration of the situation facing many companies. A couple of years ago, it expressed its desire to “
