Month: January 2019

Increasing the number of people on teams into the same size of office space comes with challenges, not least of which, where are they going to sit.

A design company draw up plans for increasing the number of desks by giving everyone smaller desks. I think this is a bit of an obvious approach and fails to understand the problem. It occurred to me that the proposed layout was based on two unvalidated assumptions; that there should be one desk per person, and that those desks can be standardized.

I think that different people work in different ways at different times and designing office space to allow for flexibility provides a far more ‘human’ environment. My suggestion was three different types of workstations that provide for different ways of working. There would be the usual desk, chair, monitor, docking station combo, empty tables which might not even have chairs as these could be taken from desks if needed, and standing desks with large monitors. These different types of workstation allow for more than just head-down working at a computer, they also allow for meetings, discussions, quiet thinking work, spreading out lots of things work, etc., etc.

My shower stopped working properly. The flow rate was low, the water temperature would fluctuate between cold and really hot, and would stay hot even when the hot tap was turned off. It bothered me for days but I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong.

Then it occurred to me to rub the rubber nozzles where the water comes out of the shower head. This broke the limescale that had built up and allowed the water to flow freely. The water flowing freely stopped the hot water from backing up into the cold water, and the hot and cold mixed to a constant water temperature.

I was pretty pleased with myself that such a simple solution fixed the problem, and couldn’t help thinking that there is a bit of a metaphor there in removing blockages to allow value to flow and so reducing problems upstream. How do we give more thought to maximising flow and the leading edge of value delivery to our customers? How do we understand more about the value that our customers get, where and when they get it? How can we remove the blockers that prevent us from delivering value at the best flow rate for the customer?