How long can your organisation compete against those deploying the “minimum viable” collaborative office?
A major Sydney financial institution is changing the ways it innovates and brings new products to market by instituting a “minimum viable office” to speed its corporate collaboration and learning practices.
A recent meeting with the head of innovation at one of Sydney’s better known financial institutions introduced me to a term I’d not heard before, but which had become part of his organisation’s learning lexicon. It was instituting the “minimum viable office”.
I was there to find out more about how the bank uses its premises to encourage learning, and he was showing me the facility he’d set up to address his business’s need to foster the faster experimentation and innovation that could speed the journey of new products to market.
The idea of the “minimum viable” entity is of recent currency, coined in Silicon Valley. It is core to the philosophy of the Lean Startup movement that has changed forever the ways in which web and software-based products are brought to market.
The now-proven theory is that when creating new software and web services, the primary resource is software developers, not hardware or, necessarily, physical premises. Connected via the internet, they can work from anywhere at a never before possible low cost, and they can afford to “iterate” and “pivot” their work until they find a successful commercial configuration for their products.
Their aim is to discover the “minimum viable product”, the leanest possible specification that can attract and engage a paying audience.
The ability to work at such low cost, yet with such a high potential payoff (example: Instagram was bought by Facebook in April 2012 for $US1billion, yet employed only 13 people), has also changed the ways in which such businesses are now funded in their earliest stages. Dropbox and Airbnb are among those receiving the minimum viable funding available from, for example, Y Combinator, creator of a new and “disruptive” model for investing in early stage startups.
Mainstream finance companies are no less threatened by the challenges to their business models emerging from the internet. Increasingly, such institutions, often built over many years by acquisition and the “bundling” of portfolios of products to achieve dominance across several parallel product channels, are being challenged by nimble competitors able to achieve what they can’t by focusing on tiny, specific market niches.
Launching a new enterprise, whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or a product initiative within a large corporation, has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. My host’s company now recognises that it has to match the new competition. It must get better at engaging the bright minds within it, and more effective at bringing new offerings to market with greater rapidity.
He says his initiative has been exceptionally successful. Within days of announcing it, he had a queue of people wishing to participate that he could not accommodate within the space available. Grudgingly, his senior management team made available to him a dingy, unused ground floor room that he adapted with whiteboards and all the tools of quite basic, mainly manual, knowledge sharing.
My host recognised that more effective work was likely to take place in locations where people chose to work with like-minded peers, which accommodated the free exchange of ideas, than in any standard office. Moreover, these days with reliable cloud storage becoming the norm, workers can engage with each other pretty much anywhere they like.
The obvious runaway success of this initiative is not just transforming his company’s means of engaging human capital in the delivery of those new products, but upgrading its whole way of organising itself for the future.
Unsurprisingly enough, as with any undertaking introducing change at a company’s core, this has got some people offside. But it has also yielded extremely valuable insights into the ways in which customers wish to buy the products of the sort the company offers. More importantly, it is also underwriting his campaign to dedicate an entire floor to its push.
What for us is most interesting is the way in which the dedication of even a modest space and resources can be used as the fuel of widespread organisational transformation.
At a time when the technologies of corporate learning, and the landscapes in which it takes place, are undergoing radical change, how will your own organisation’s minimum viable collaboration and learning space begin to take shape?
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About this post
This post was originally published at shiroarchitects.com.
See also:
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Posted at The Urban Developer:
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About Shiro Architects
Workplace strategy is where building design, modern technology and new ways of working come together to deliver the future of work. Through dedicated research, we aim to understand how to create workplace-design briefings that satisfy the evolving needs of occupants, owners, investors and developers of commercial office space. For organisations looking to use relocation to kick-start change in the ways their teams think and learn, we champion the use of sense-making workplace social technologies applied to this purpose.
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