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How to Begin
04/03/1997
by Gail and Matt Taylor
Editor's Note:
This article was originally published
in the December, 1993 issue of Mobius magazine. Copyright © 1993, The
Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business
Reprinted with permission
- Bring your team together and do a seven domains audit. Build your
best and most ambitious vision of each of the domains--and
of the domains working as a system. Build this vision from the best
you have seen and your strongest exercise of imagination. Don't attenuate
yourself by being "practical." Don't limit yourself by budget
assumptions. Design your ideal workplace.
- Then critique your present environment, domain by domain. Be frank,
honest, candid. Again, do not "skip over" issues that you
think you cannot change or that seem unconventional or controversial.
- Next, build a shift paper. Use white boards or get some butcher paper
so that the whole team can see the work, and work with it. A shift paper
is a three column chart that has each point of your "HERE"
(present reality) in the left-hand column matched with each point of
your "THERE" in the right-hand column (your workplace vision).
In the center column, describe the bridging design strategies that you
can now employ to "bring THERE to HERE." Be bold.
Be resourceful. All good does not come from the corporate finance
committee or purchasing. Design using available resources in your virtual
network to make your workplace work.
- Do this exercise often. Do it at the beginning of a major project.
Do it as "Spring cleaning." Do it when a new member joins
your project. Just do it! make each iteration a quantum improvement
in the integration of your work process, tool kit and physical environment.
- Take whatever help you can get from your organization's TQM, reengineering,
meeting facilitation, computer consultants and facility planners. But
don't accept their limitations. Take charge of your own work
environment. You, your team and your company, will be paid back many
times in job satisfaction, work productivity, increases in the quality
of product, customer satisfaction and return on investment.
See related articles:
Premises Regarding the Knowledge Economy
 
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