ABSTRACT
Companies usually – and rightly – consider space for their offices to be outside
the ‘core mission’ of the organization, and therefore not a management
responsibility. A recent case study in Harvard Business Review described how
responsibility for a controversial new workspace was lodged with the facilities
manager and her architect.1 The CEO took an interest in the project as a driver
of cultural change in the organization, and the chief financial officer (CFO) was
concerned about costs. However, the crucial decisions about how to make
space more open and more egalitarian, how to fit more people in, and how to
transform a traditional corporate culture so that the new workspace concept
would work, were basically left to the design team. This is not untypical of a
corporation’s approach to changing workspace. What does it imply? Perhaps
general ignorance, or belief that space is not relevant, perhaps conviction that
the facility manager and the architect could be sacrificed more easily than the
CFO if disruptive levels of conflict are generated by the project, perhaps the
lack of a holistic and integrated view of how an organization operates in space.
It is puzzling how companies fail to take into account that workspace, while it
