What do businesses see when they look in the mirror?
Will the de-materialisation of work from COVID-19 change the way we mentally imagine and visualise the organisations that we work for?
Apocryphally, a leading indicator for coming crisis at a firm is that they invest heavily in lovely new offices: think of Lehmans or RBS shortly before the 2008 crash. This is at least partly because the self-image of many businesses is projected through their physical premises. Its what clients, staff, partners and — critically — the CEO sees as “the firm” every day as they come to work. Its what they imagine the business to look like, to be.
Will the homeworking and enforced digitalisation of COVID-19 change this? And what would that mean?
On one level its a simple reflection of the growing trend towards remote working: that it is no longer necessary, or even preferable, to have workers congregate in specific locations. Long term issues of cost, of effectiveness and indeed of personal preference amongst high-value information and creative workforce personnel will simply accelerate now that the past few months’ lockdown has publicly ironed out many of the process kinks. Zoom shares rise, high end property values slump, WeWork trembles — so what?
The broader question is whether this shift changes the way that we think of the nature of the firm, the organisational construct used to manage and direct economic processes. It should because it is running in parallel with the evisceration of the traditional economic model of businesses: value is no longer, typically, a physical construct. Digitisation is driving key processes, and the data which they feed off and spawn, on to the cloud and out of the office.
Where once it made sense to integrate vertically, to optimise within a building, it makes sense now to build firms in the manner of a software bundle. The finance system becomes an operating and reporting system layer, the actual business sometimes bespoke but oftentime a marketplace, a pricing or a scoring system configured for a specific set of cicumstances.
But these changes still don’t have popular visual form. Economic and corporate power is still visualised as striking corporate architecture, physical forms reaching towards the sky.
But as businesses dematerialise will be begin to think of them instead as webs, or tree roots, specific cloud formations, or that shark made of many fish that an Accenture advert once so powerfully captured?
I don’t know — but the firm (or artist) that can capture this image will define the new zeitgeist. Welcome to the post-architectural world.
