Wanna Get Lean? Take Down the Walls!
January 25th, 2006 by HalTake down those walls! I've been asked about why we're so committed to working in a space without walls. My personal interest goes way back to my first job coming out of college. (Admittedly, this was before systems furniture.) We all had desks in open spaces. Learning in that environment was fast. Collaboration was inevitable.
Jon Miller, writing at Panta Rei, advises us to adopt an open office with no walls if we want to become lean. I've been giving the same advice particularly where design or engineering work is done. The Japanese call this oobeya. Working in an open space accelerates learning and innovation while eliminating rework.
Jon notes the one big obstacle to taking the walls down: the CEO said, "No way." This same closed mindedness pervades lean initiatives. Here are four others:
- No large group meetings. It will lower productivity.
- You have to tell people what to do. They are only self-interested.
- We have our way for preparing budgets. We put our budgets in place, then we meet them.
- We built this company on (some sacred cow). We not changing it now!
Getting lean first requires examining and challenging beliefs along with company cultures. Working in one big room works. Tearing down those walls takes leaders who are more committed to company and employee growth than they are to continuing to be who they have been. The good news: there are plenty of those enlightened leaders to go around. Latch on to one!
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February 1st, 2006 at 5:42 pm
Until recently, I worked at a company that had a “no walls” policy. Two departments worked in one, very big room. The room was divided into square cells, with four developers in each cell. The developers sat in the corners of each cell, so that people in one cell all faced away from each other.
On one hand, this made communication very difficult. It was impossible to know what your cell mates were doing, and no one started conversations with other people, because they could not see them.
On the other hand, that didn’t matter much, because people in the same team were not seated in the same cell. Each person had his or her fixed place, and it was not supposed to change due to trivialities like working on the same team or project.
The team I was working with managed to get out of there. For half a year, we sat together, 3 people, in a conference room the size of a cupboard, with no ventilation. Still, we counted ourselves fortunate, because we could talk, and we could help each other. In the open, but incredibly rigid, environment, that just wasn’t possible.
The only really decent work environment I’ve seen recently was one where the management let the developers decide for themselves what they wanted. As a result, the developers rearranged furniture and screens to fit changing circumstances. Sometimes walls, sometimes not. As far as I could see (I just visited, haven’t worked there) always an environment conducive to communication.