Editorial
“The reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves,” Tony Award-winning theater director Diane Paulus once said. “That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself.”
This feeling of connection, of being part of something greater than yourself, can help combat the sense of loneliness and isolation that can affect our personal, social and professional lives. While this is a complex issue with far-reaching impact, those of us working in the areas of digital workplace and employee experience need to acknowledge this sense of disconnection as a critical threat to organizational culture, knowledge sharing and innovative thinking.
These concerns were swirling in my head recently, as they so frequently are, while I read Tiago Forte’s manual to personal knowledge management, “Building a Second Brain.” In the book, Forte notes that most of us spend a great deal of time considering the comfort and functionality of our physical working environment, as it can impact our productivity and the quality of our output. For example, when we are in a space that features high ceilings — “think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven,” Forte writes — we are more likely to engage in abstract, visionary thinking. The opposite also holds true, he adds, pointing out that when we are in a low-ceilinged room, “such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely.”
For the past five years, I’ve worked in Knowledge Services at one of the world’s largest architecture and design firms. While we aren’t known for designing cathedrals — think more along the lines of Superbowl stadiums, corporate headquarters and award-winning cancer centers — the perspective I’ve gained has allowed me to become acutely aware of the power of the built environment to support resilient communities, healthier bodies and happier minds. And as someone who shares responsibility for employee and digital workplace experience, I’ve come to learn that all environments, including the digital ones, should be designed with care and attention to detail. To encourage innovative thinking and feelings of connection in your organization, your digital workplace needs the equivalent of high ceilings; in other words, the ability to look up and around freely.
Related Article: Need to Boost Innovation in Your Workplace? Get up and Play
Architects and designers know this phenomenon as the Cathedral Effect. If high ceilings in a physical workspace can potentially encourage occupants to feel connected to something larger, to think big and to share those thoughts with others, how can the digital workplace offer similar support?
Celebrate Analogical Thinking
Innovation is often born of the creative combination of disparate concepts and perspectives, a process known as analogical thinking. This type of reasoning involves comparing and contrasting different concepts or situations to draw parallels between them. Analogical thinking can help us generate new ideas and make better decisions.
In his book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World,” author David Epstein described an intranet project that truly embodies a holistic approach to unexpected thinking:
“In 2001, the Boston Consulting Group, one of the most successful in the world, created an intranet site to provide consultants with collections of material to facilitate wide-ranging analogical thinking. The interactive ‘exhibits’ were sorted by discipline (anthropology, psychology, history, and others), concept (change, logistics, productivity, and so on), and strategic theme (competition, cooperation, unions and alliances, and more).”
Epstein went on to say, “If that all sounds incredibly remote from pressing business concerns, that is exactly the point.”
To support analogical thinking, consider ways to:
- Generate curiosity among employees with unexpected knowledge resources derived from different industries.
- Break down silos and promote knowledge sharing across roles, teams and workgroups, especially between teams that don’t frequently interact.
- Use analogies when communicating with employees to demonstrate the power of analogical reasoning. (But don’t overdo the sports analogies, as tempting as that might be.)
Foster Psychological Safety
No one can have big thoughts or a sense of connection if they live in fear of failure. Fear of failure, which translates neatly to risk aversion, will undermine the success of any individual, team or organization. I’ve written previously about strategies for fostering psychological safety in the digital workplace, such as enabling two-way communications, cultivating a culture of feedback and celebrating risk-taking and its inherent failures. Celebrating risk-taking means creating opportunities to examine failure carefully and with an open mind. Even when the new play doesn’t work and the quarterback gets sacked, the team can come together with lessons learned to cut or improve the play. (Oh no, I’ve done a sports analogy!)
Related Article: How Creativity Fuels Digital Transformation
Celebrate Employee Thought Leadership
When your employees generate new theories and conceptual connections, how can the digital workplace capture and elevate these? Some ideas:
Use two-way communications platforms, such as Viva Engage, to allow employees to share thoughts and elicit feedback at will. You can also establish more formal opportunities for employees to publish thought pieces within the intranet environment for their fellow employees to review.
Capture metadata and establish authorship and usage rights for any knowledge resource an employee adds to a repository. At our firm, we catalog resources in one of four ways:
- Internal author(s), internal use only
- External author(s), internal use only
- Internal author(s), external use permitted
- External author(s), external use permitted
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This allows us to easily retrieve and highlight knowledge resources our employees have created, whether they were formally published or created over the course of project work. This also enables us to mark items with a warning note if they are for internal use only.
Have employees present their ideas in knowledge-sharing meetings.Consider capturing the artifacts from these sessions, including the recording and the presentation deck, to package and share within the digital workplace.
Consider implementing an idea management program that allows employees to submit suggestions and feedback about the organization’s processes or products. Most organizations have no formal mechanism for capturing ideas, let alone acting on them. The digital workplace presents a number of opportunities to better manage and surface innovative ideas from the people who know the work best.
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