Dateline: Montreal, November 2006 - The offices we work in often impede rather than support productivity. The primary driver of any office "rethinking" is to provide appropriate spaces for work to take place. The work environment is a combination of physical, technical and social factors. Quiet, heads-down workspace is still a requirement in most office environments. More and more, however, the need for communal space in various forms is being recognized as the enabler of employee engagement. These interactive space needs vary considerably: from a small room with acoustic privacy for person-to- person conversations or sensitive phone calls, to cafe settings that double as informal, lively collaboration spaces, to places for serendipitous meetings in corridors and stairways. Chance encounters often eliminate the need for a formally scheduled meeting or conversation and lead to faster decisions.

Meeting with a group of senior Canadian government officials involved with real property, Art of the Future found that the majority had experience in implementing new office concepts. Those that had spoke passionately about improved morale, better communications and renewed commitment to the work of the agency that the changes had enabled.

Social network analysis can be useful in locating people in relation to how work actually gets done. There is value in changing workspace assignments periodically to heighten awareness of surroundings, knowledge of resources and to provide the opportunity to create new connections.

Mobility within the office does not necessarily equate to unstructured openness. Although we may be social animals, we still have a need for privacy and territoriality. This need can be met with half-open offices that give the worker a sense of enclosure while also providing a visual link to activity in the immediate surroundings. This awareness leads to a natural modulation of voice and an opportunity to join in or tune out as appropriate.

Boston, November 2006 - Getting below surface events into an understanding of forces compelling these events allows us to better understand how the future might unfold. At the Pegasus International Systems Thinking in Action Conference, Michael, Anika and Art of the Future associate, Rick Karash, delivered a session that demonstrated how Structural Dynamics, an integration of systems thinking and scenario planning, can be used to create views into the future.

For example, the cost per minute of a phone call to India could be determined for any point in time. By itself, that doesn't provide much information. Some insight is gained when we look at how that rate has trended over time. And, taking it a step further, if we can connect the drop in long distance telecommunication rates to other trends in society, government and/or industry [such as advances in technologies and increased demand due to off- shoring] we might be able to discover some cause and effect relationships.

These relationships are durable. They have persisted over time and are likely to continue. These structural relationships can thus be used to understand the complex forces shaping the future. Participants in the session learned to apply Structural Dynamics to consider alternative futures for any system they care about.