How Ben Hammersley creates space by creating a better understanding of the future
Happyplaces Stories (video)
I visited Ben in London. After we weren’t allowed to film inside of a StarBucks, because quite likely their coffee recipes hold secretive information, we walked to a small park nearby. Which actually in reality was a Victorian graveyard that had been made open for the public to be used as a park. A welcome dash of green in a largely urban area. While we walked there, Ben uncovered many layers of that area, by giving context to the architecture, its use and of the neighborhood we were in, which was close to his home. He just became a father to a baby daughter, which caused him to reconsider his work and life. Drastically killing off associations to organisations he was working with and for and about to move to Los Angeles to, next to his consultancy and speaking engagements, work on getting nanosatellites in the air. Fascinating stuff. I remember the first time I saw him speak, at PICNIC a long time ago, he shared a story about a trip he had made or was about to make to the North Pole, on foot if I remember it correctly. Always exploring, always out there not only to learn about the impact of technology on peoples lives, but also experiencing everything first-hand. As a journalist, speaker, author, broadcaster, technologist and writer, he speaks, explores and investigates the extreme effects of the digital and networked world on business, society, and life. He helps businesses, governments and institutions to navigate and proper in the future through compelling stories, deep analysis, and bleeding-edge examples of the modern world.
Three things
I’m doing three things at the moment. I do a lot of corporate features and which are really consultancy and speaking. Those are my major commercial operations. I have this space project, with the ultra high balloon mission first and nanosats, and all those things, in the next few years. And that’s really a ‘making’ project. So I’m building all the electronics, the software, doing all the avionics all that sort of stuff. That’s really satisfying. And the third thing is really a long term research project which feeds into the consultancy and the speaking. Which is looking at how do we as people live with modern technology. How do we live, work with, meet with, interact with artificial intelligence for example. Or, how do we optimise our ability to have good ideas, or how do we optimise our physical state. That sort of thing. So it’s a really wide ranging research project on reassessing all of the different life and work style choices that we make.
So a silly example that would be: what would be the optimal design of an office? In the 21st century. If you think about office design to date, it really hasn’t changed in the last 200 years. From that, our ability to do knowledge work hasn’t increased that much in those 200 years. But many of us spend our lives being paid to have good ideas. So, what’s the best environment, the best type of office for us to have good ideas in? Given the context of this ultra-connected, artificially intelligent, digital world that we are also operating within. It’s really looking at everything that we do on a minute by minute basis, and reassessing it in the light of new technologies. So I do all sorts of little side projects around that about office design, around physical fitness, around nutrition, around mental health, around smart drugs, around meditation, all these kind of things. And, this isn’t particularly original. Many people do these sorts of things as well. Depending on your different culture, they have different words like ‘relentless self improvement’ or ‘integral’ or whatever you want to call it. But those are my three things.
These three things really feed of each other. I wouldn’t be able to do this level of consultancy or speaking that I do around the world, if it wasn’t for the research and the work that I’ve done on my own physical capability to do that. And I certainly wouldn’t be able to do any of the space stuff if it wasn’t for the futurism that I have been doing. So they all feed of each other. And they all enable the sort of lifestyle that I am able to have.
Challenge assumptions
I very much don’t want to work in an office, unless it’s an office of my own design. And I don’t have a job. I have interesting work. But I don’t have a ‘job’. I love being in the sunshine. I love learning new things all the time. All of these different things. And what I, and many other people have realised, is that many of those statements, the reason that they are in tension with the modern world, or in tension with many peoples lives is because of we make certain assumptions around our work style or our lifestyle which are no longer necessarily true.
For many people, for example, for many organisations, if a company employs a whole lot of people who’s job is to have good idea, then it’s potential deeply irrational to set up that organisation with a location restriction on these employees. That they have to come into the office every day. For many types of knowledge based work, or imagination based work, organisations through tradition or accepted practise really hamstring themselves. For example, and advertising agency might be better of considering whether or not they need an office at all. Whether or not their employees need to be in the same country. Or any of those assumptions that we make. You might be able to do much better work where people just get gathered together in a specific place for a couple of hours a week. And that is the only interaction that they have. And all the other things they do at their own place of their own choosing. In their own way of their own choosing. And this could be facilitated through some digital technologies that we have with us al all time. We all have a phone, everybody has a laptop, we all have internet connections. We could design our own lifestyles around how we want to live. And then fit organisations into that. Rather than fitting our lifestyles around the organisations for whom we’re trying to do our work. I think people and many organisations, through a lack of interrogation of those core assumptions, really miss an opportunity to make both their lives better, but also the work that the organisation does, much better. I certainly, personally, have done much better work since I liberated myself from a lot of those assumptions.
Pretty much every creative office I have ever been in, certainly in London and across many of the major European cities and North America, all ad agencies, branding agencies, all of those creative agencies, they all have open plan offices. They have offices with music, table football, table tennis, posters on the wall, funny chairs, bean bags and the whole fucking thing. It’s very beautiful. And they look really good in magazines. And architects make a lot of money from it. And everyone thinks it’s a really cool place to go and work. But when you look in any of the studies, scientific studies about the effect of the environment on peoples cognition. Or the effect of the environment on peoples concentration, their focus and all of these different things, what you find is that open plan offices are basically poison for your company. If you are employing 20, 30, 40, 50 or a 100 people, and the reason you’re paying them is to have good ideas. Then instead of putting them in a place that makes them look good, you should put them in a place that enables them to have good ideas. What we know from all of the research, is that open plan offices are incredibly bad for you. For the number and the quality of ideas you have. People need isolation, they need to have place to concentrate, they need to have places that allow them to focus. That comes from everything. From the sound, the ambient sound, the temperature, the colour temperature of the lighting, the bandwidth coming into the building. Everything, from the cultural aspect how the company deals with email, types of meetings they have, the way that collaboration is set up. All of these things are really, really important. Much more important than a super fashionable open plan office. That we know for a fact that is bad for you.
One of the thing that drives me absolutely crazy, with a lot of organisations, is talking about collaboration. That everyone wants to optimise for collaboration. The building, the office, the digital systems. Everything is around the optimisation for collaboration. What most companies have not really properly looked at, is is the exact amount of collaboration within their business. What is the perfect amount of collaboration? And what we find is, when you actually seriously look at it, that in the vast majority of the really high value knowledge work or high value creative work collaboration is like 10%. At most. The rest of it is absorption of ideas, concentration, thinking, creative work, iteration the design. It’s you. It’s the talented person doing the stuff. It’s not having meetings. It’s not hearing other people working. It’s not being able to see other stuff happening in the room. It’s not gathering together around the table and pointing at something. It’s not any of these collaborative things.
We spend far to much time sharing space with other people. We spend far too much time in meetings with other people. Those meetings themselves are badly run and badly organised. In fact, for the very high value people who do very high value work, what we find is that they need to be briefed very well, they need to have very good research. And then they need to be left alone to do the work. And then the collaboration bit has to be very well structured, and really takes like an afternoon a week, at the most. And when you add all these things up together, you come up with a completely different understanding of what an organisation should be and why it should operate, how it should operate. Not only form a physical location point of view. But from a cultural structural point of view. From a reason to exist point of view. And all of these things are enabled by these modern technologies. The problems are highlighted by modern technologies. All of these things are coming together because of the world that we’re living in today. A good deal of my research at the moment is, is really a ‘meta’ level research of ‘how do we operate in this world better?’ And it turns out that the accepted wisdom, especially around creative work, is basically wrong. That we don’t need to collaborate as much as we think that we do. Offices are highly overrated. And we radically underrate really, really important things. We radically undervalue sleep. We radically undervalue natural light and fresh air. We radically undervalue ergonomics. We radically undervalue quiet. All of these other things. A good deal of my work at the moment is helping people work through these things fro their organisations. To try to work out what exactly what it is they’re doing, and how to do it better.
Question absolutely everything
The hard work is introspection. You need to really look at everything you do and ask: why am I doing this? What is the reason for this? And that can be everything. From a very high level particular product line, or particular business, or to very small things like ‘why do I buy my socks from this particular shop?’. Whatever it is. Or how trivial it is. And when you do that, to do that successfully, requires a ridiculous amount of hard work and introspection. What most people find when they really question why do I do this, why am I doing this, why are we doing this, what’s the point or the purpose of this activity, is that for an awful lot of those things find that you have no reason to do it at all. And actually, it’s a huge distraction. Or the reason your doing it is based on faulty assumptions, or based on fear, or a lack of self-confidence, something like that. For example, many people, many freelancers, and I’m just as guilty at this as the next person. Many people who are consultants or freelancers, take on far too much work. Because we’re really nervous of running out of work, right? But the temptation is to take on work that isn’t quite what you want to focus on. And very quickly, you can end up in a position where for years at the time you’re doing stuff which you don’t really want to be doing. It pays the bills, and all of that. But you just get sidetracked. I know for myself and from many colleagues and friends that, it’s very easy to get sidetracked for years. And it really requires a good deal of bravery and a good deal of effort to say: ‘Hang on a second. Stop all these other things, and get back on track. I will only do one or two things.’ What I found over the past six months or so, or the past year or so, I just has a baby daughter, is that my time is very restricted because of that. I share childcare. So I only really have a three day working week, and if I can only work for 2.5 days a week, the amount of work that I can take on shrinks quite radically. So I can only do certain amount of work and this has enabled me to go through my project list and kill 90% of it. Because I realised that 90% of the projects I was doing, weren’t directly strategic. You have to be really ruthless. If you look at the most successful companies of the past decade, the ones that have been really successful have been ones that have been deeply ruthless about focus. And, about killing projects. Even projects that are very successful.
And that was something I was very aware of. That I was doing a huge amount of stuff. Members of like five institutions, had loads and loads of projects and so much work, but I was giving all of them 80%. Or 70%. Whereas now I can do three things and can get them all 100%. And I also want to raise my daughter. Finish my work at six o’clock. Have a much better lifestyle and all these things. At the end of the day, that’s why you get out of bed in the morning. That’s the answer to the question why? I think it really helps, both individuals and organisations, to on a regular basis really sit back and question absolutely everything. And when you do that, you realise there is a whole load of stuff that you don’t have to do anymore. And that’s very helpful, because you just stop. And suddenly you just have time to sit in the park on a beautiful sunny day.
Focus
I think a lot of people, certainly this sort of freelancy, contractory, consultanty type of person, lack focus. Not because of some personal failure, that they can’t focus or something, but because of fear. And it is that fear of failure, the fear of running out of work, the fear that two of your clients walk away and then to have nothing. That sort of thing. It forces all to take on far too much stuff. There is definitely a point beyond which you take on so much work that you’re no longer capable of doing any of it to the degree you want to be doing it at. And I certainly felt that. From this sort of introspection, from placing constraints on ourselves, we are able I think to force us into focus. For me it’s because of my daughter. But some companies do this. They impose a four day workweek. Or some companies impose a 10 to 6 workday, five days a week and that’s it. And they turn the email service off after 6 o’clock. They shut the computer systems down, forcibly. This is a huge cultural shift for people to undergo. But after a few weeks, what they realise is that late nights, especially at creative agencies, pulling all-nighters is not a sign of creative genius. That’s a sign of shit planning. That’s just bad management. If you are doing a creative project with a six week timeline, and you find the last week is crunch week and you’re up until midnight every night doing work, then you fucked up a month ago. Many companies where they do this, where at 6 o’clock they say everybody is going home, and if you haven’t finished you work you fucked up and you can start again tomorrow. If you’re turning the server off, turning the internet off, after a month or two, people at those companies adjust. Change their working style. They get more work done in a shorter period of time. And they have a life. Then they can go home. And then they can do their own things. I know some companies who do four day weeks, Monday to Thursday, they have Friday, Saturday and Sunday off. The reason they do that is, they guide that you use the Friday to do all of the things you ought to be doing on the Saturday morning. So you do your grocery shopping, you laundry, you do you drycleaning, you go to the doctor, whatever it is. So you actually have a weekend. As well. So the Friday is the infrastructure day. It’s the day where you clean your house. We find that those organisations are happier, that they do better work, that people make more money, that they’re more successful, much less stressful, have better lifestyles, better personal lives. And so on.
The things that constrains people from doing that, is the fact that they don’t ask the question why we’re not doing this. If you look around your organisation now and think: why are we working 14 hour days? Are we working 14 hour days because we actually spend a large amount of time dicking around? Are we fully aware of the effect on our work of working 14 hour days? Is everybody here really exhausted? You know, all of these questions. The answers for all of these questions come from deep introspection. Which is painful. Because it requires you to say: ‘I’ve been doing this wrong. For maybe my entire career’. But once you’ve done that introspection, once you’ve made those decisions, you made going through the painful proces doing that, I think that what you will find is that your stuff is better, more meaningful, more successful, more insightful, more creative. You’re happier, your friends are happier, your family is happier, etc. That constant questioning, whether you’re talking about work style, when you’re talking about you environment, when you’re talking about the actual work you take on, can be very liberating. But it’s terrifying for most people.
