The Performance Improvement Blog

From Cube Farm to Open Office

As American architect Louis Sullivan said, “Form ever follows function.”

Living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the “attitude capital of the world”, I was interested to read in the June issue of the Ann Arbor Observer that my fair city is the birthplace of the office cube farm. Given the proximity of the city to the design offices of Herman Miller, this was not a surprise. What’s fascinating to me is that the city is also home to one of the most innovative open office environments. Menlo Innovations, a software development company, has no cubicles and not much use for office furniture systems. The contrast between the office cubicles of Herman Miller and the open office of Menlo Innovations is striking.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the Action Office that Bob Probst designed for Herman Miller which became the standard for office design for the next forty years. Cube farms became ubiquitous. It wasn’t Probst’s intent to create barriers between people but that was the result. It wasn’t until the emphasis on teamwork in the 90s that Steelcase and others started building systems that were designed to facilitate collaboration. But the cube farms have persisted probably because workers like to have a space they can call their own, a space that gives them a sense of privacy (even if there isn’t any), and they like the status that comes with having the biggest cube.

None of that is available in an open office. However, what is available is ready access to co-workers, being “in the loop” on decisions, having as much or as little space as is needed to get the work done, and a level of implied trust and transparency that is not characteristic of more traditional offices. Of course, technology, such as cell phones and portable computers have contributed to making the office cubicle less needed. Knowledge workers can be anywhere and still be able to do most of their tasks. They don’t need a cubicle.

As another great 20^th century thinker, Marshall McLuhan, said, “The medium is the message.” How an office is designed and functions communicates the principles and values of an organization. One design is not better than another; it all depends on the culture you are trying to create.

Donald L. Kirkpatrick, 1924 - 2014

The field of training and development lost one of the great ones on May 9^th when Donald L. Kirkpatrick died. Over the past 50 years, he was one of the most influential thought-leaders in the area of evaluation of employee training. Through his speaking and writing he taught several generations of training managers and instructional designers how to assess the value of training.

It seems like every training, HRD, and HPI manager knows the Kirkpatrick Model even if they don’t know the name of the model or who invented the four levels. They know they can evaluate reaction to training, learning from training, behavior change in the workplace, and results for the organization.

I have been critical of the model in the past, primarily because I think it gives trainers permission to evaluate programs by collecting “reaction” data from participants when, in fact, that data doesn’t tell us anything about the value of the program to the organization. Even assessment of “learning” doesn’t tell us much. It’s not until we investigate how and why that learning is applied, what happens because of the application of that learning, and what other factors are affecting learning and its application, that we begin to understand the impact of any learning intervention.

However, this criticism doesn’t diminish my admiration for Kirkpatrick. I always had tremendous respect for the man who simply wanted to help individuals and organizations become more effective. He wrote:

Ultimately though, when people think about Kirkpatrick, I don’t want them to think about me; I want them to think about the model and the mission to ensure that training contributes to organizational results. I hope that my model helps to improve training and follow-up so that the lives of those to be impacted by organizations – citizens, customers, patients, clients, children and families – ultimately benefit in some way.

Donald Kirkpatrick’s son, Jim, and daughter-in-law Wendy, have taken up the mantle and added substantially to the Model, filling in some of the blanks that weren’t addressed in the original four levels. I applaud them for doing this and for keeping the importance of evaluation alive in the minds of training managers and leaders in organizations.

We all owe much to the contribution Donald Kirkpatrick made to employee learning and organizational improvement.

Stealing Tools From the Masters

I had the good fortune to vacation in Spain the past few weeks. While in Barcelona, I took this photo in the Picasso Museum. Banksy, the graffiti artist, engraved a large stone with a quote from Picasso and then crossed out Picasso's name and put his own. Both Picasso and Banksy were trying to say that one kind of creativity is presenting art in new and different ways. Picasso did this with his riffs on paintings by Velazquez and others. Banksy does this with his parodies of popular and commercial art. It occurred to me that those of us who create tools for organizational learning and improvement also stand on the shoulders of the talented people who came before us. Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, Peter Drucker, Chris Argyris, Donald Schon, and many others, contributed the theories, tools, and techniques that are now part of every effective consultant's and trainer's storehouse. We have "stolen" their art out of respect and made it our own.

Leadership Lessons From Cordoba Spain

While visiting Spain, I learned that in the 10th and 11th centuries the City of Cordoba was a model of peaceful co-existence among Moslem rulers, Christians, and Jews. All lived, worked, and studied together. It was a time of major advancements in literature, science, and arts. What did they know about collaboration that is so difficult for us?
(Image from Wikipedia)