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Employees
can be seen inside Facebook's main building, the largest open-office workspace
in the world. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's desk is exactly like all the
others. Photo by Nick Otto for The Washington Post
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By Tanner Christensen
Do offices kill creativity? It depends.
Ok, but do certain types of offices stifle or encourage creative thinking? Are
open office floor plans more creatively stimulating than cubicle farms? Do
workspaces that have fun things like ping-pong tables or free snacks help
encourage workers to be more creative? What about working from a beach resort
or high in the mountains, do those types of nomad workers tend to be more
creative?
The answer, again, for each of these is: it
depends. Let’s look to the science.
We know from decades of anecdotal and lab
research that to think creatively requires just a few key things:
1.
Exposure and openness to new experiences or
stimulation
2.
Opportunities to play or experiment
3.
Space to ruminate and let ideas incubate
4.
The ability to take action and evolve ideas
5.
Some type of validation to continue and promote
creative thinking
If we look at any study around the creative
process these things each pop-up in some form or another. And if we take
each of these things and try to apply them to office workspaces we’ll see some
interesting things.
You may be familiar with some of these concepts
as they relate to the offices of companies like Pixar, Apple, and Nike. These are often big, open, and
almost playful offices which tout themselves as being creatively empowering
for employees.
I don’t work in a typical office space myself. I
actually work in the world’s largest open-office at Facebook in Menlo
Park, California.
On the face of things, it’s easy to see how
Facebook’s office might meet the requirements of promoted creative thinking. We
have massive, open areas where we work because the theory is that being able to
see what other people are working on, or bumping into a peer randomly on your
way to the bathroom, are good ways to promote exposure to experiences and
inspiration.
We promote play and experimentation through
ping-pong tables, an on-site arcade, colorful posters dotting every wall, and
by hosting occasional “hackathons” where anyone can work on anything for two or
three days out of the quarter.
Facebook also has spaces specifically designed
for rumination: tucked away, private “libraries” are sound-proofed and offer
employees a place to work quietly without distraction. If you ever visit the
office you’ll also see incredible walking paths around our campus as well as on
the massive rooftop park.
I could go on and on about how these things
relate, but the important thing to note is that, while these things do help
facilitate creative thinking, it’s hard to say whether or not they actively
promote it. I’d even argue that they don’t.
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This
isn't an ordinary park. It's the top of Building 20. Building 20 also features a
nine-acre rooftop garden, complete with mature trees and rolling hills of
grass. Photo by Nick Otto for The Washington Post
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Let’s look at a different real-world example: I
have a friend who works in a sea of cubicles. His work space is just one in a
row of many, each blocked off by a four-foot high gray wall. It sounds drab to
me, and he’d probably agree.
He doesn’t have private libraries, a rooftop
park, fully-stocked kitchens, or a full cafe to get free lunch from. He doesn’t
even have a ping-pong table. But he does have a small, shared kitchen where he
can microwave and eat his home-prepared lunch with his peers.
This friend of mine undoubtedly has space to
ruminate as a result, and he may have some exposure to experiences in his
weekly team meetings or during lunch hour, but what about the other stuff that
creativity thrives on? What about being able to take action on ideas, or
getting validation for a good idea, or being willing to play and experiment?
These are all really valid questions (which is
why I’m writing them) but let me set the record straight: what matters most in
an office setting when it comes to creativity is the close community. No amount
of colorful paint, kicked-down walls, or free food, will make employees more or
less creative.
Put smart enough and motivated enough people into
an office of any size, shape, or style, and you’ll notice something interesting
happen: those who are creatively driven turn the space into what they need it
to be.
This is because creativity doesn’t happen in the
office. It doesn’t even really happen in the world, creativity happens in the
mind. And what each of these common office designs try to do are shape the way
employees think or feel.
And sometimes this works! Having free food
available to employees can definitely help them think more about the problems
they’re solving in their work and less about what they need to eat for lunch.
But free food isn’t going to encourage anyone to work hard.
Having a rooftop park gives employees a great
space to walk and think beneath an open sky, but that park isn’t going to do
anyone any good if employees aren’t using it.
Placing a ping-pong or foosball table in your
office is a reasonable signal that having fun and playing during work hours are
acceptable to your business. But playing a table game isn’t the same thing as
experimenting with a project that could cost the business money.
So yes, offices can affect the face value of
creativity. But no, real creativity happens in the minds of workers. And to get
workers to think creatively requires more than physical or aesthetic
structures. To get employees to think creatively requires training and a
culture of working that actively promotes exploring, experimentation,
rumination, taking action, and validation that even if you fail it’s ok to
pursue wacky ideas.
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This is because
creativity doesn’t happen in the office. It doesn’t even really happen in the
world, creativity happens in the mind. And what each of these common office
designs try to do are shape the way employees think or feel.
— Tanner Christensen |
The most creative teams I know have worked in
many different types of offices. What makes them creative isn’t the office
spaces, it’s the culture around the work and what the team deems as acceptable
versus not.
You can put a bunch of toys on employees’ desks
and paint the walls bright colors in an attempt to loosen up the creative
bolts, but unless employees can see and act on the real facilitators of
creative thinking, it’s all just for show.
Originally published in Creative Something
Tanner
Christensen is a creativity expert, author of The Creativity Challenge, a web
developer, entrepreneur, designer at Facebook, and part-time artist. Christensen started Creative Something in 2008 with the goal of researching and
sharing answers to the question: How can we better understand our
creativity in order to do more with it?
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