NEWS & DEALS!

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hi, James Taylor here keynote speaker on creativity, innovation on artificial intelligence, and the founder of SuperCreativityU. today, I want to talk to you about the future of hybrid offices, collaboration, and what we call the third place for improving team creativity and innovation -Hybrid Workplace And Collaboration Spaces

Hybrid Workplace

Hey, it's James Taylor here, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence and the founder of SuperCreativityU. Many of my clients just now I'm having to make decisions about how they're going to be using their office spaces. As we start to return to work, I saw something here, the HSBC, the bank, they've decided to take the top couple of floors or one of their major buildings in London, and turn it from what previously was executive offices, to collaboration spaces. And this is a trend we're going to be seeing more and more now, as we start to move towards a more kind of hybrid style of working, where many people will be working from home the majority of the week, and in for certain numbers of days, they'll be coming into a central office space, or, or a kind of what we call a hub and spoke type of office space, the role of collaboration is going to become more important. So you're going to have to physically change some of those office spaces so that they can really foster collaboration and do it in a safe way. This idea of places designed for collaboration, for conversation, for creativity, is not particularly new. We call this creativity. The third place and third place is somewhere that's not your home, but not really your office as well. It's a middle place of possibilities, where you debate, discuss, challenge each other's ideas. And it's also a place that is not just for those people within an organization. But also you can bring in people outside other kinds of thought leaders, other thinkers.  

So if we go back in history a little bit around the time of the ancient Greeks, you'd had something called de symposiums and symposium ages a word, it just means in Greek it means to drink together. So what they would do is you'd be in a room like that in a space like that, leading thinkers and merchants and philosophers and poets would come together to debate, discuss, challenge each other's ideas, and have deep conversations. And from those conversations, ideas like democracy, Justice really started to evolve. So that was these kinds of third spaces, then we moved on. And if you look at places in the Middle East, like Mecca, for example, you had the first coffee houses, and coffee houses, coffee shops, also fulfill that function of a third space. So it's where you'd get together, maybe merchants would get together and recover coffee, they would talk about the latest deals with maybe the latest ideas that were coming in from the Silk Road along with the silk and the spices, like how do these ideas affect what we're doing and affect our business? How do we affect our society, our culture, these are all the things that have been discussed. So the coffee shop in about the 15th century was really starting to be that kind of third place. And then from there, it moved up to Istanbul, in Turkey, then it moved from there over to places like Vienna, in Austria, and in the 18th century, 19th century, you had lots of coffee shops, like cafe central in the center of Vienna. And these created these third spaces for collaboration and for collaboration of ideas. Now, in this case, you might have victim Stein in one corner, Freud and another, Joseph Stalin and another. 

People get together with different perspectives, to debate, discuss, challenge each other's ideas and have very deep conversations and try to solve problems together. 

And then from there, we moved over to Paris in the 1920s, and the roaring 1920s in Paris, and there was a woman called Gertrude Stein. And what she would do is she would organize something called salons and a salon where you would bring together different thinkers, artists, actors, philosophers, business people, investors for all different kinds of bank politicians. And you'd bring them together into space and it would be over maybe glasses of wine, you'd have conversations, people can show their work. There's a little bit of a competitive edge sometimes in that as well. But it raised things and it got people thinking and discussing ideas. And it enabled a lot of new collaborations because people would meet people and say, hey, you've got you're working on an idea and I'm working on this other idea. What if we did something together and we collaborated, so those were those types of third spaces that the Cylons of 1920s.  -Hybrid Workplace And Collaboration Spaces

Collaboration Spaces

And then we moved over to America. And in America, they had coffee shops, and in fact, I was talking the other day to Steve Wozniak, who is one of the cofounders of apple. And for them, their clubs were things like the homebrew computing club. This is where Steve Jobs and, and, and Bill Gates and, and all these kinds of people would get together engineers, techies geeks, they would get together to show off the latest things that they built. debate, discuss top ideas, share plans leave a little bit of a competitive spirit in there as well. But this created this kind of third place dynamic for sometimes for collaboration. But in America, this idea of the club really kind of moved on. And now you get clubs for lots of different things. And I think now, as we move into this workspace today, where it used to be very much the separation of you either at home, or you were in your office, in your cubicle, or in your little space, your little office kind of area in the building in which you worked, I think we're gonna see a little bit of a kind of blending of these a hybridization of these, which is why you're seeing lots of organizations like HSBC is of this world. Now design more collaboration spaces. I was doing a talk the other day for the Association of our briefing program managers, ABPM, and this organization brings together the people that run all the innovation, and the briefing programs, some of the biggest companies in the world. And with them, you will really start to see how many of these huge organizations really start to rethink their physical spaces, their virtual spaces, the hybrid spaces, to add more of these collaboration elements and lots of different ways that you can do that as one of the things that companies bring me in to talk to them, I can help them think through some of these things and workshop some of these things, but part of it is a little bit about the physical, the environment, you know, the actual space. And there's, we use things like circles and colors and, and different ways of engineering that space. So it increases levels of collaboration. But then there are other things you can do in terms of how you design, the way that you go through the content in that space, how conversations are set up.

You know, what I love about this organization I was speaking about the other day. ABPM is really the creators and curators of conversations. So they're bringing together senior salespeople within organizations with some of the top prospective clients in C suite, senior vice presidents, and they're bringing them and they're kind of curating these conversations. And they bring in discussion leaders, different thought leaders from different areas, different experts from different leaders. And it's a guided conversation as a customized individualized conversation. And so that's where I start to see now is where we're going from many of these offices that you look at these big skyscrapers, you if you go around cities, many of those top floors now will not necessarily be the executive floors anymore. They will be the new collaboration spaces. These will be the new third places for the 21st century. My name is James Taylor. Thanks so much for watching, and I'd love to get your comments here below.

-Hybrid Workplace And Collaboration Spaces