I saw this story on the BBC news today. Peer1, a hosting company in Southampton have spent £400k on making their workspace playful, in an attempt I guess, to get their staff doing the stuff they want them to do with a certain amount of autonomy. They haven’t moved in yet, so it’s a bit early to say if it’s worked.
I wonder what preparation there has been for the teams that will work in this new space? I wonder what space they are coming from, and, how that has created unspoken rules about how the company works. I wonder what the transition will be like. Creating a play space sounds like a gimmick, and it would be if the company hasn’t prepared. The question is, will people know instinctively how to use this type of space to do their best work? I’d be really interested to find out how this works out for them.
Just read this post about the US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano giving up on email.
The appropriate tools on Flickr.
Via Not The Kinda Cool, from our recent trip to New York while working for Nokia at Social Media Week
We’ve been very busy over the past few days planning an intense development project that we hope will bring our organising and productivity tools and workshops to lots more people. As well as planning and doing, we will be documenting the process so that future development can benefit from it.
One of the first things we are doing is setting up what I have dubbed the war room. I’m hoping there won’t be too much fighting going on in it. I’m really excited about having a dedicated space for this project, a home for it. We will also be renaming Accelerated Productivity, a name none of us has been particularly excited about for a long time. One of the reasons the name has stuck is that naming things is really hard. It reminds me of the days spent coming up with names for songs I’d produced, here’s an example from 1996 of why I probably shouldn’t be allowed to come up with names. Enjoy.
