Creating an ever-changing workplace to cultivate new thinking

Back in the early thousands I was searching for an business idea to sink my teeth into. A friend of mine was working with innovation consultant Jason Cotton, who had just left his role as Business Innovation Manager at an Australian mining company. As young and impressionable entrepreneurs we loved hearing stories about what it was like running an innovation department within a rigid corporate structure and the challenges involved.

One story in particular I’ll never forgot. Jason would speak of the importance of breaking the stale corporate culture, and the impact of our environment on innovative thinking. When you’re trying to brainstorm new ideas, holding meetings in the same old meeting rooms you’re in every day for the drab, daily grind just doesn’t cut it. Our environment has a lot to do with the way we think. How many times have you been on holidays in an exotic location and come about an incredible idea. Even just being in a new environment encourages new ways of thinking. And the same is true of the inverse — if you’re stuck in the same environment every day, it’s really hard to think differently.

And so Jason told us in order to bring his teams into a state of innovative thinking he would take them out of their working environments and into new places. The most memorable story he told of this was holding a team strategy meeting in a public toilet block. That’s right, a public toilet block.

How this translates to us in the workplace is, we can generate new thinking and cultivate growth in our community members by changing up our environment. Something as simple as switching furniture configuration across your workplace can create new patterns of thought in your coworkers.

And don’t just change it once. Continue to change your workplace environment regularly. Communities themselves change all the time, with different people and personalities, different skills and passions, and different times. Your workplace environment should change too.

Some easy ways to change up your workplace:

• When you’re designing your space, take flexibility into account. Get versatile furniture that can be moved around, drop power from the ceiling or walls instead of permanent floor outlets, and use room dividers and plants instead of building walls.
• Use LIFX lightbulbs in your workspace to create flexible lighting for fast vibe switching.
• By rolling out a colour-neutral base interior, you can pick a new highlight colour every quarter and just replace rugs and lampshades, and repaint vases and plant pots.
• Re-theme your meeting rooms on the regular, and really go to town on the fitout.

Make it a quarterly ritual to change up the environment within your workplace to keep things fresh.