IDEO’s CEO, Sandy Speicher, Asks: What Is an Office Even For Now?

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0:59Welcome to the new world of work. I'm Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review. And each week on this show, I bring in a top-tier CEO as my guest, and we talk about the future of work. We talk about technology, we talk about talent, we talk about how we will collaborate and innovate in the future. So before I introduce this week's guests, I want to read a quick message from our friends at Unisys, our sponsor. Unisys is an IT company that builds critical solutions trusted by demanding businesses and governments around the world. They partner with clients to enable cloud transformation, protect critical operations, and empower the modern workforce.

1:38Visit unisys.com to learn more. So our guest today is Sandy Spiker, the CEO of IDEO. Now, IDEO, as most of you know, is a fascinating global design firm that is practically synonymous with design thinking. They didn't make up the term, but they've been instrumental in applying the concept and to popularizing its spread in the business world. I always say they're the guys who make process cool. Leading the company is Sandy Spiker, who took over as CEO two years ago. She's been an idea since 2004, focusing for much of that time on the learning and education sectors. She herself is an articulate proponent of design thinking and on its utility for solving all kinds of projects and challenges.

2:22So, Sandy, welcome. Welcome to the new world of work. Thanks, Adi. It's great to be here. All right. So let's jump right in. Really, you know, I want to talk today about design. I want to talk about design thinking. But maybe you can sort of make sure everyone's up to speed and give us the quick elevator pitch on what is design thinking. Sure. That's actually a really great way to start because we're probably going to use the word design and design thinking a lot in this conversation. um you know a lot of people have a familiarity with design from uh the things around them in their lives um you can think of maybe an interior designer or a fashion designer or maybe you know of graphic designers or interaction designers there are all different types of design and design crafts but underneath them all they have something in common about the way that they orient to the world.

3:13Designers are orienting to create choices that shape our experiences and that actually shape our future. And designers do that with intentionality. So when we say design thinking, it's a lot about the kind of methods and mindsets, the orientation of a designer. How do we bring the orientation of a designer to the questions that we're asking? And those questions can be huge. You know, we can apply that mode of thinking, that way of listening, that way of learning about other people and what other people are experiencing, the needs that they have, basically be empathic to the needs of other people in order to then imagine the kinds of experiences and environments that might exist around them.

3:59Like I say, that can go from, you know, a thing in your hand all the way to the systems that we're living in. All right. So that's a great kind of introduction. So let's talk about an environment and let's talk about an environment that's relevant for this show. And that is the office. You know, I feel like we've gone through stages in terms of our thinking about what the physical office should look like, you know, in order to help us collaborate, help us innovate, help us build a culture. So where are we with that? And forget hybrid for a second, but just in terms of the physical office, where are we in terms of how we ideally design physical workspaces?

4:39Yeah, I mean, I think where we are is in a really great moment of design. basically there's a propel fitness water with gatorade electrolytes zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work use indeed sponsor jobs it gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills certifications and more spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

5:17Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. A lot of experimentation. There's a lot of questions. People have remapped their relationship with work and we don't quite know yet what that's heading toward. And so right now, there's a lot of experimentation. People are trying out different policies around expectations for when people can be in the office. I think that there are things that we do know. We do know that people need each other.

5:55We do know that relationships really matter. And we know that there are many, many ways to build relationships. And that can happen in physical spaces that can happen in virtual spaces. I also think that we, many leaders are starting to really think about how do they optimize the office space for what's most necessary. Everything doesn't have to happen in the office. So basically, you know, there's a lot of experiments going on around what do we optimize around? Do we optimize around meaningful moments, the times where we feel we really need to be together. Of course, that's different for all different types of companies.

6:35I'll tell you one of the things that we're starting to think about is what can only uniquely be done in the physical spaces that we have. And so you think about a lot of, we're doing a lot of work with around food and beverage. You know, our, one of our offices has a prototyping kitchen. We have machine shops. We have production areas where we're making things. And those really are a way to optimize the space. So how can our spaces become more, even more of a learning lab for the areas that we're focusing on, building classrooms, building, like I say, like prototyping kitchens and other types of prototyping and build spaces?

7:18So we're kind of looking at how to turn those into the center of our spaces so that there's reason to come in rather than regulation to come in. So if you just joined us, I'm talking to Sandy Spiker, who's the CEO of IDEO, and we're talking about designing workplaces of the future. If you have a question for Sandy, put it into the chat box and I'll try to get to some questions from our audience later in the show. So, well, I want to keep going on this because it's, you know, I mean, you're talking about the office place. I think what you're saying implicitly is the office isn't necessarily conducive to working more efficiently.

7:57And now this is my view that we've learned how to do that pretty effectively from home. Many of us, you know, white collar workers anyway, knowledge workers. But that so so then the office is where we get together. Maybe the office is where we do culture, almost sort of different from work.

8:17So is that kind of what you're thinking, that the office, it's maybe not even a place for work as much as it is for interaction? Do we need to rethink this whole cultural approach to the work? Yeah, I guess what we see now is really about a question of intentionality. And every business is different, which means that I think what we're going to see is a lot more people kind of designing what their agreements are for how they want to work together. For sure, what we've all realized is that there is work that we can do from all different types of environments. We can also build relationships in different platforms, whether that's physical or virtual.

9:00I almost made up a word there, combining them. But this year, you know, one of the things that we're really looking at is not just what's the future of work where there's just like one whole new way, but what are the many ways of working in the future? At IDEO, we call this F-wow, you know, the future ways of working, because there are many, many different ways that we'll be working. And so the office space becomes one of the things that we can design for how we come together. So I think you put propel fitness water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self.

9:41What propels you propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Put your finger on what a lot of companies are doing and that is really experimenting.

10:19We don't really know what we're going to do in the future. I mean, some are, look, we're coming to work five days a week and that's that. But I think most are, well, we're going to try something and then see how it goes. From your perspective, in terms of thinking about process, how do companies, I guess, design the best hybrid work model to learn from this experimentation that's going on right now? Yeah, it's such a good question because, you know, we risk right now just kind of in the speed, in the kind of pressure of urgency, coming to new answers quite quickly or thinking that we know what the best solution will be.

10:57When meanwhile, times are really changing and people's needs are changing and all of that's happening quite frequently. So, you know, a lot of conversation out there about leaders and empathy and how the role of the leader is really to listen and listen deeply right now. understand the needs of what their both customers and also colleagues are experiencing, and use that information to understand how to design the systems around us, whether that's the space or whether that's our policies or whether that's our agreements for how we collaborate, for instance, having deeply listened to that input.

11:38And of course, what you just said there around the word experimentation, you know, a good experiment is designed to teach us something. And so how are we setting up those experiments, knowing what we're looking to learn so that we can incorporate that and iterate on that over time? This actually really requires a kind of whole new dynamic relationship across a workplace. And it's quite exciting. I think that as we see in the dynamics of the world today, everyone's really asking for an evolved relationship with work. The kind of, as everyone says, sort of like butts in seat time, you know, we used to say that in education a lot.

12:18That kind of frame that you sort of have to be here nine to five. People are really questioning that relationship, understanding that they can still be really effective at their work, but have a lot more flexibility and agency in their days. So really, I think the kind of major principle that should underlie all of the experiments that we're doing right now is how does this allow people to have increased agency and how do we create our system to incorporate the flexibility that people need as a result of that agency? Yeah, I think agency is kind of the number one issue. But it's tricky because if you ask your workforce, they may ask for 100 % agency and by that They may mean, I want to work from home 100 % of the time.

13:02What do you do with that data? I mean, who should take charge? Or again, what does the experimentation show you at the end of the day if you might poll people and they say, well, we want to work from home? Is that the data or is there other data that you could draw from to try to? I mean, I do think that people have many different needs and many different experiences. and some people are really found really a comfort and effectiveness working from home. And some people are really missing being back in person together. And some people are in between really wanting flexibility. So, you know, as leaders, a lot of our job is to incorporate all of that information and understand how to design a shared system.

13:44And maybe just to kind of talk about that notion of a shared system as we, you know, I think these last couple of years have really taught us a lot about our relationship with each other, our relationship with the world around us. We've been asked to change our ways of living in service of the collective, in service of our individual health and the collective health. And that really has caused, I think, quite an awakening where we recognize that we exist in an ecosystem. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self.

14:26What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And these relationships haven't been that healthy.

15:04And so now is a great opportunity for people to kind of reflect on what kind of life do they want to be living and how do they want to spend their days? And so, you know, one of the things that we then have to do is get to new agreements about what it means to live together, to work together. How do we rebalance, for instance, our relationship with work? How do we rebalance our relationship with the planet? How do we rebalance some of the inequities in society? And all of this is coming up for people. And so, of course, as we individually start to think about our needs, any system that we're a part of, the people who are the stewards of that system, the leaders of that system, really need to listen to the aggregate of those individual needs and find solutions that work at the intersection of as much of that as possible.

15:51Yeah, that's inspiring. Before COVID, several years ago, you wrote an article that said the secret to creative success is disequilibrium. Can you explain really what you mean by that? Oh, thanks for that question. You give me a chance to be a little bit nerdy here. Disequilibrium is one of my favorite terms, but I might go into teacher mode on it. Sorry. It's okay. Our audience is highly sophisticated. And actually, it's so relevant for today. This equilibrium comes out of an educational theory, a constructivist learning theory. The basic idea is that all of your knowledge you have constructed.

16:33What people do is they form mental models about the world around them, like we were just talking about. This is what the office is for. This is what the workplace is about. Or this is my role in society. Right. These mental models we form through the experiences and information that we're given. Well, a process of learning actually means that when we come to information that questions our mental model, it says, you know, gosh, the way I understood the world isn't quite lining up anymore. We go into this phase of disequilibrium. We're out of balance, right? Our information doesn't align with the information in the world around us.

17:11in that phase of disequilibrium, which we then use to help us. We don't like to be in disequilibrium, so we seek to get to resolve. We need to relearn. We need to know again, revise our mental models. We're sort of collectively as a society going through that process right now. A lot of the things that we understood to be true are evolving. Now, this period of disequilibrium can feel really stressful because the mental models you operate on aren't really working anymore. But this is where if we take that discomfort and we stand in it and we get curious about it and we recognize that that discomfort is actually the thing that's going to help us get to a new level of understanding.

17:56Well, we can make really great things happen in that process. And so disequilibrium is this beautiful stage that shows you you're in a mode of learning. So it offered to anybody listening to really embrace that stage and recognize how essential it is for learning and growth and that it is a creative act. We actually have that capability in us to really bring creativity and redesign the way we understand and the way we create the world around us. So is your guess that COVID and our response to it has permanently changed how we collaborate, how we interact, or that we will eventually get back to something we were familiar with?

18:43I would say that it's permanently changed something for us. I don't think that necessarily means that what we're doing right now is what we're going to be doing forever. But I think what has permanently changed is this societal scale consciousness, this real, this recognition of the largest. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

19:22It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Systems that we we live and work within. And really, I think that now, I mean, business leaders and employees and everyone are asking questions about the role that business can play in helping the world be a better place.

20:02How do we rebalance a lot of the social injustices that we've become quite conscious of? How do we create a new relationship with the planet that's not extractive but generative? These are questions that leaders are starting to ask, that employees are now demanding that leaders ask. And I think that this has been in us for a long time, the kind of belief that the way we're working isn't quite working. And these two years have really helped us see a lot of those dimensions and realize that there's, we can change things. And that's happening at a pretty big scale. So, you know, what that will mean, I think that we're all designing our way toward that now.

20:45But I do think that some of our clients, for instance, are asking super interesting questions. We have some work we're doing with multiple companies right now around, for instance, how do we increase the voice of the frontline worker in the decisions that are made about technology to support their work? Now, it's really common that there's like a tech team that sits in the background of big companies and makes a lot of decisions for what tools workers should use. And it's rare, actually, that frontline workers are seen as not just a customer in that, but a potential designer of that. And so, but yet they're the ones that know the needs, right?

21:26And so how do we actually build our organizations to be that collaborative, to not have that much distance between the decisions that are being made and the people who have the real direct front lived experience? So I'm going to, I'm going to go to a couple audience questions now, because we're getting a lot of them and they're some of them are quite interesting so this one might be out of your purview but i'm gonna i'm gonna try it anyways this is from vance uh who's in chicago uh who's asking about the metaverse you know we've been talking about designing systems physical systems to to you know improve how we do things and then there's this parallel virtual or whatever you know environment called the metaverse so the question is how do you see the metaverse playing a role in the future of work?

22:13Yeah. Hi, Vance. Thanks for your question. And while it's a very prescient question, I think this is one of the creative pathways we have for the future. I guess when I think about the metaverse, it feels like another environment for us to build a world, right? For us to build how we relate to each other, what rituals we run ourselves by, what agreements we run ourselves by. And actually, that to me is the same set of underpinnings that we need in the real world, right? That we need in our workplaces, that we need in our virtual work environments. So this idea of world building feels like something for us to all become really aware of, not just to jump into another technology tool or another platform or another environment, but to really be thinking of what world are we building.

23:05We can all become very aware of that and very intentional about that and set, you know, what kinds of agreements do we want to govern our relationships? What kind of work can we do here that we want to do here? How do we make sure that we're deepening relationships, not just transacting? It feels like there's great questions that will come up as we become more intentional about building worlds, whether that's, you know, with a headset on or whether we're driving into the office to create that world. So we're getting, you know, a few questions that are about community, about culture. And, you know, I sense in these questions.

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24:17And in my own experience, you know, that the flexibility, the agency that we want to give people, the ability to work remotely might clash somehow with building a culture and sustaining a culture that's truly meaningful. And there are a couple of questions. You know, here's one from Jerry from Wilbur in Massachusetts. She was, it's how much culture do we lose in a remote or even hybrid environment? Mary Jo from Portland, Oregon is asking, how do we increase the sense of community in the office? I think there are a lot of questions about how do we build back this culture? You started to talk about it, but I'd love to hear more because we're all struggling with this right now.

24:53And feeling that it's a trade-off, that agency is good, but you might lose culture or you have to reinvent what culture means in this new environment. it. Yeah. One thing that I don't feel we've really come to yet is what is culture in a virtual environment? You know, we have a lot of tools that manage the way we interact with each other, but we don't necessarily design that as culture. So that feels like a great opportunity. I think these questions about culture are really important for us to hold. And I think that both for leaders and for like everyone at work, we should be asking the question about like, what kind of how am I contributing to creating this culture?

25:33I think about some of the things that we've done to, in a way, hold culture alive when in person became immediately unavailable. One of the things that we did when we were, we went into shelter in place across many of our IDEO offices, is we thought about like, how do we bring everybody together in the ways that we used to, right? So like if we used to be able to walk through our space and see the work that everyone was doing. So we ended up creating this event we called the Frenzy, where it was a four day long, basically 24 hours a day rolling across multiple time zones, because we're all around the world, event where people were sharing content, where we had, you know, times where people came together, times where people could sign up for stuff, you know, so like people were sharing, teaching each other things through this content.

26:26So we did a lot to really say, like, how are we still connected? How do we still maintain our culture, even through this distributed format? And of course, as time has gone on, we're all a little exhausted by Zoom. We're all a little bit, you know, tired of this environment. It's actually quite hard to maintain the spirit of that culture. So there are some things that we did kind of in evolution for that. We started to think about, for instance, in our Tokyo office, they did something really beautiful where they recognized that even though we can't be all in the office together, we could be individually.