Live to work or work to live, paid or unpaid,
work is the main act on the stage of life.
Work is a production and a performance. To design a workplace is to design the work people do. Changing the work people do shifts their use of today’s workplace in new directions. Either way, design is a big responsibility: it creates tomorrow's work and opportunities.
Equally, people write their own scripts, their own stories of work. Between these stories and the designs they come from, we can learn the lessons of how to make 'great work.'
Why should we care? Making sense of what's happening now isn't easy! For all of us, the work people do is what keeps the doors open. People doing ‘great work’ is what will grow your business in the long term.
People & place professionals
For people to be truly productive, the activities that people do at work, the places they work in and ways they work must hang together. More often than not, the 'threads' of work form a messy bundle. Work Design aims to make that bundle fit for purpose and to keep it that way. The challenge for you, the change manager or human resource person, the architect, interior designer, product designer, supplier, or facility manager, is to pull everyone's efforts together to get the best outcome.
Boards & senior executives
You're a leader and you need to make good decisions quickly. You also need to be sure that your teams can do the same. Decision making demands that you understand risk and uncertainty. Planning demands that you know enough of what's going on now to avoid unwanted surprises. Plans only slightly out of step with the world inside and outside your business can lead to dark days. Real time metrics - narrative data from your own people - will give you the winning edge you need.
Solo decisionmakers & researchers
If you are a small business owner, expert, researcher or student you'll be both blessed and cursed by endless information about any question you ask. If its vital to sort through that complexity to get to the best value, you'll want great tools and an effective, flexible approach. The challenge is that the many useful tools out there compete for your attention. Sensemaking is an agile, scaleable and practical way to anticipate and explore emerging issues in your field.