How to Start Designing for Life in a COVID-19 World

It’s time to develop new ways to work – and to make what’s ahead our finest hour

Over these past six months, we have heard from a host of brilliant and brilliantly candid subject matter experts from the United States and Europe about how COVID-19 can – and eventually will – change where and how we work.

We’ve listened, learned and shared their insights about the emerging, interdependent relationship between human enterprise and human wellness; and the material changes that must occur – quickly – if we want our businesses to prosper and our workforce to thrive.

And we’ve confronted, finally, a truth laid bare by COVID-19: For the workforce to thrive it must be healthy, productive and fulfilled.

We contend that this can be our finest hour and a watershed moment of the 21st century. To make it so, we must identify the social norms that have, since the First Industrial Revolution, inveigled us into believing that there is only one way to think about how and where enterprise – i.e., work – happens in any sector. 

Our working theory of holistic preventative design describes the optimization of both man-made and natural environments for human health and wellness (physical, mental, emotional) in order to promote the long-term financial health and wellness of an organization.

The theory represents our foundational thinking regarding a new way of configuring the workplace, work culture and work itself around the health and well-being of the people who perform it. This requires, in part, breaking free of the norms of individual, diagnostic wellness toward something more comprehensive, proactive and preventative.

Our first step in this process employed Greentarget’s consultative, qualitative approach to research. By speaking with leading minds in a variety of fields – commercial real estate, architecture, design, healthcare, innovation – we got a handle on some of the most innovative things happening when it comes to the intersection of work, wellness and space, as detailed in the multipart series released over the summer and early autumn.

But we view this as an inspired beginning, one that will form a new line of questioning, informed by what our experts have taught us and aimed at exploring ways we might modify the existing norms that create the biggest barriers to innovation. 

Or to abandon them completely.

To guide this line of questioning, we turn to GreenHouse’s Innovation Dynamics. It relies on a set of six lenses to identify social norms – those rigid, tightly limited social expectations that shape our perspectives and govern our behaviors – in order to help us see how to deviate from them. When we do so, and the deviation is distributed through a sufficient number of social groups, we achieve social change.

Identifying and subverting – or changing – social norms through deviation is the one true path to innovation whenever and wherever people are involved. It’s also the path to a new concept of work, wellness and space, configured for the health of the business and for the people it employs.

So – how do we do this?

Step 1: Identify the Norms

Leaders and their teams can begin to identify the social norms related to the concept of the office and offering within any organization by asking some questions related to, for example, actors:

1)    What groups of people (actors) within our organization have a direct relationship to the challenge of working in a physical office?

2)    What observable behavior are they exhibiting in relationship to this challenge?

3)    What do those behaviors suggest about those groups’ interests and concerns at this stage of the pandemic?

Your answers to question 3 will reveal a norm (or norms): what each group of actors thinks they should do or not do now based on what they have observed and heard from other actors in their group; and what they themselves believe normatively.

Once identified, the norms that are no longer relevant or required will begin to surface (e.g., all employees must be at the office by 8:30 a.m., lunch hour is between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. and so on), given both the conditions caused by the pandemic as well as new employee concerns, needs and logistics.

Then we can begin to see the norms that have been impeding our progress and resisting innovation.

Step 2: Seeking Deviation

Our next step is to design a way to deviate from, or subvert, those norms – tactically. Which necessarily leads to a new way of thinking about how to not only configure an organization under these unique conditions but also how to engage with the concept of work in an altogether different way.

Leadership might start by asking, for example:

1)    What behavior by existing actors in our organization is already challenging the norm?

2)    How might that behavior express itself among other groups of actors?

3)    What new behavior, from a new actor introduced into our organization, could further challenge or dismantle the norm?

Step 3: Diffusion

When those deviations from the old way of thinking are distributed or diffused through a sufficient number of groups in an organization, a new organizational norm or norms will emerge.

Let’s say a single consulting firm adopts a new remote-work model; leadership rolls out a new set of guidelines that enable the vast majority of its employees to work from wherever they please, with a core group of managers reporting to work in the home office every day. That firm’s success in both client acquisition and retention and, most dramatically, recruiting and retaining the market’s best players leads one of its competitors to adopt the same model. Another follows, and soon this “Mission Control” model – a few key workers on the “Earth,” everyone else in “space” – has become the common model for consulting firms. Seeing the success of the model, perhaps a few clients of those firms begin to adopt it as well.

A new norm is born.

As the deviations take hold, you will behold a social innovation, one that may make thinking about work as a process and less of a place that much easier, though this is not to say that the office of old will become obsolete. It may be used for different reasons – as a place where employees don't necessarily show up merely to work, at desks, but a place to gather when collaboration is called for on certain projects; or simply to socialize with co-workers, in real time and in real life – to serve the human factor that is so necessary to building trust, respect and office relationships.

Inspiring Change

The inverted “Mission Control” model described above is, obviously, only one of many possibilities that become available to us when we have the right data, with the right social context, that we need to identify and challenge the social norms that dominate our perspectives – hence, our thinking – about the problems we face, circumscribing the actions to be taken to solve them.

Yes – we know now, thanks to the subject matter experts who participated in the inaugural Immediate Frontier initiative, what corporate America must do to evolve and adapt to forge ahead, in spite of or perhaps because of the challenges wrought by COVID-19.

But inspiring the plurality of actors related to these challenges to enact and embody change requires identifying and changing social norms. Or creating new norms altogether.

Innovation Dynamics enables us to see that the possibilities of our future are not, by default, an unforgiving negation of the best of what we call “the present.”

They are instead an encouraging reminder that our present can, in fact, be transformed into something that for too long we couldn’t imagine, simply because we didn’t have to, putting well within our grasp something better than what we once thought was the best of our now, which was really the best of somebody else's then.

Innovation Dynamics™ is a registered trademark of The Brador Group, Ltd.