What We Can Learn from The Breakfast Club about Communication.
The 1980’s film The Breakfast Club was one of director John Hughes’ films which focused on teen angst and the challenges of those from different backgrounds finding a way to come together in the end. In case you missed The Breakfast Club due to the fact that your time was better spent playing Pac Man or getting your mullet restyled then I will remind you that 80’s stars like, Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson played students from different cliques, forcefully united by the common enemy of a Saturday detention. Not only were they restricted to the school library, but they were supposed to produce an essay at the end, stating who they were. Of course the …brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal... all came together, despite their varied backgrounds and interests, to learn a few things from each other and succeed in producing their essay.
When considering workplace design, we have a situation not unlike that of The Breakfast Club. We have business people and designers whose common enemy is currently the challenging economy. The question is: How do we learn to communicate to each other in order to produce our essay, or find a way to succeed in this tough market?
In order to unite these groups, so that both sides can benefit, it helps to understand our differing values. Roger Martin, Dean of University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, has written and worked extensively on how businesses can be more successful and innovative by applying a designer’s way of thinking to their business and also how to bring the design and business worlds closer so that both sides may benefit.
He discusses the heavy value businesses place on reliability and having predictable outcomes and the seemingly opposite values that designers place on developing something new and unproven.
In the design of the workplace, both worlds are forced to come together and communicate in different languages developed from a different base values. Designers can show images and speak from experience on particular benefits to incorporate into a plan, but often designers must resort more to an emotional appeal and someone willing to take a leap of faith to accept a proposal.
There has been a lack of hard data available to demonstrate what designers and some businesses, have always believed in: that investing in the design of your workplace can bring about many benefits, including an increase in profits.
The design field is in part to blame for this lack of data. While businesses may fail to see clearly the benefits that a well designed workplace can bring, designers often ignore the fact that we should be doing more to speak in a language that others can better comprehend, one of numbers and statistics.
The good news is that more information is coming out, information that provides a more tangible link between workplace design and profitability. Gensler, a global architecture firm, has released the results from its 2008 study on design and the work environment.
Gensler’s 2008 Workplace Survey shows that the physical work
environment is an asset with a specific and quantifiable impact on
business success. The results showed that top-performing companies—
those with higher profits, better employee engagement and stronger
market and brand position—have significantly higher-performing
work environments than average companies.
In our Saturday detention of an economy, where it seems that we do not have the freedoms we had in easier times, we can still prosper, but we should be reevaluating our methods for achieving success. We should be looking for new types of relationships and how we communicate within them. In expanding the circles of influence, astute business leaders can take advantage of data in an area that is often overlooked; the design of the workplace, and profit from this previously untapped resource for success.
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