When it is scripted to collaborate towards a declared purpose, the socially internet literate, connected, post-Facebook mind is now the most powerful, exacting and precise human-to-human force for business and workplace transformation the world has ever seen.
What follows is written for those who need most to consider how this now entirely naturally occurring capacity can be applied to develop the strategic intellectual architecture of their modern, connected business.
Moreover, this may be performed such that the fit of its physical environment can be managed deliberately to optimise the fit of its workplace to its wealth-generating performance and the competitive growth of its collective intelligence.
At a time of unparalleled transition in the corporate office property market – demanding change, and driven in large part by COVID-19 – we aim to introduce a process that delivers an “office for the connected intellect.”
This is a working environment that is perceived as being as safe as it can possibly be in the minds of those who work in it.
It is designed such that, through their deliberate, socially driven, internet-connected participation, those tenant employees working in it are acknowledged as active agents in contributing to their own protection when in the physical workplace.
And through this, by engaging its connected intellect in the process of sense-checking for safety, the brief for the design of its workspace can in turn be driven to improve its optimal fit to both its form, functions and processes, but also to the purposes of the intelligence it must attract, contain, nurture, grow and protect in the execution of the business’s strategy.
In this, mastering its evolution repeatedly to fit both those who work in it now, and those who come along later, this may become an environment from which everyone connected to it gets more capable and richer – tenant-occupier, landlord and agent alike.
COVID may prove the unexpected trigger every employer needs to make its workplace both safer and smarter.
Towards a more intelligent organisational knowledge architecture
But, while we may believe that certain spaces will inspire better working performance, as architects, we don’t believe that without new, modern, digital-age thinking, the arrangement of its walls alone can transform mere working pedestrians into workplace intellectual athletes.
So, we are introducing a new internet-age commercial workplace briefing process that, through the environment it creates, the minds it engages and the reports it will generate, will result in an entirely different kind of connected, intelligent workplace product than currently exists.
This is one from which, informed by data, that new, emerging breed of smarter organisation and working environment can thrive, and it is one whose configuration we aim to develop by tapping its intelligence.
Because we are able to work with dimensions other architects can’t yet see, we believe the future’s high-functioning office is necessarily an intelligence-boosting product of the mind, and we will use our insight to design that workplace from its intellect up.
And we write this because we have what we believe may be a unique combination of skills in being both award-winning architects and original thinkers on networked organisational learning.
Through a prior professional engagement at the nation’s biggest bank, I also have first-hand knowledge of how to use the best tools ever invented with the aim of directing the learning and development of the connected workplace intellect to purpose.