Facilitating Learning Through Informal Thinking And Learning Spaces

In creative organisations the importance of paying attention to the physical work environment within which creative work thrives is well understood. Research carried out by John Whatmore (1999), into what makes a successful leader of creative teams, illustrates the importance of paying attention to the environment within which creative work flourishes. Some of the practices uncovered in this research include having big toast and coffee rooms on every floor to encourage team members to eat and drink together and creating spaces for informal meetings, away from the regular work areas.

The legacy of the downsizing era of the 1990s has led to a much tighter view of what counts as productive work. Organisations have become much more results focused. As a consequence the time available for activities such as informal learning conversations is increasingly being squeezed out.

However, there are signs that more and more organisations are beginning to see the value in paying attention to the physical surroundings within which teams work and learn. Pearl Assurance, for example, has experimented with different work environments designed to help staff be more effective at work^[7]. The experiment, designed with the help of its advertising agency, involved creating three new workrooms which have a ‘funfair quality’. The three rooms include:

The Pit Lane – this is a meeting room with no door or chairs, but with a large clock which starts ticking away as a soon as a meeting begins. This room has proved most popular as it encourages people not to ‘waffle on’ in meetings.

The Sanctuary – this room is designed to help people when they have to make difficult calls, so it has a calming decor including pictures of idyllic water and fish-tanks.

Customer room – this room resembles a family kitchen, including all of the clutter one might find in a family kitchen. The idea behind this particular room design is to encourage staff to focus on customers’ needs when they meet in it.

In an article in Harvard Business Review, Jacqueline Vischer^[8], cites the approach adopted for managing workspace within Microsoft’s R&D headquarters. The philosophy adopted there is that ‘the nature of a person’s work dictates decisions about space’. This reflects the view that no single type of workspace fits all knowledge workers. So while software developers have private offices, as they need quiet spaces to work, marketing teams have big open meeting spaces as most of their work gets done in meetings. Microsoft believe that paying attention to the work environment of knowledge workers, particularly where they are in scarce supply, is crucial for attracting and retaining these workers.

My own earlier research (Evans, 2000) identified that organisations are beginning to reap the benefits of planning informal learning spaces into their office building layouts. In one pharmaceutical company, for example, one of the regional teams had created a 1960s style caf e area. This area includes a coffee machine, whiteboards and also PCs with Internet access. What this team has created is an informal meeting area where individuals want to meet with colleagues to exchange ideas and solve problems together. The success story from this changed environment is that two product developers were chatting over a coffee one day, while scanning the comments on the whiteboard. One of the two individuals happened to mention to the other that he was currently struggling with a particular aspect of a project and that he didn’t know who to turn to for help. A third person in the cafe area happened to hear this conversation and joined in the discussion. This third person contributed ‘ I had a similar problem when working on product x, what I did to resolve it was . . .’. Armed with this insight the individual was able to move forward with his project. This chance conversation is reputed to have saved the organisation the cost of setting up the informal meeting area.

^[7]Giving staff rooms for improvement. Management Section. The Guardian, Saturday 9 May 1998.

^[8]Vischer, J., Will This Open Space Work? Harvard Business Review. May-June 1999.