Part 2: Reconfiguring the Collaborative Workspace, three (and two) years on

This is the second part of an essay in two voices where Victoria Ward, Co-Founder of Jigsaw Foresight and Dr Caitlin McDonald, Digital Anthropologist and research associate at Edinburgh University's Creative Informatics programme, reflect on three years of reconfiguring the collaborative workplace together and two years of accelerated reconfigured working on a global scale.

An essay in two voices (or E2V) is “a way to speak to the world and to do so together” (Essay in Two Voices: Dialogues of Discovery, Madelyn Blair, PhD). It was thought up by Madelyn Blair and Victoria as they barrelled through the English countryside making for the Welsh border. E2V is a form of written discourse that uses a constraint (word counts) to catalyse creativity in order to have a public dialogue that embraces different styles and opinions.

The format is simple: Each essayist writes?500?words (no peeking at each other's) and gives it to the other to respond to in?250?words. They swap again and respond in?125. Swap again,?65?words. The final response is?280 characters,?or a Tweet.

This is second of the two dialogues, commencing with Victoria's 500 words. The first (starting with Caitlin's) can be found here

Victoria's 500

It’s coming up for three years since we started work together on what came to be called Reconfiguring the Collaborative Workplace. (It’s an interesting Freudian slip, maybe, that I first wrote Collaborative Landscape rather than Collaborative Workplace.) And it’s two years since that prescient work informed how I experienced the disruptions and dislocations caused by Covid.

Where are we now?

In the spirit of Reconfiguring, I want to start by saying what a gift Khal gave us both by connecting us then, intellectually, emotionally and, dare I say it, spiritually. A kind of kindred thing followed which we are still seeing play out now as you as a Jigsaw Fellow, bring heft and lightness to our scanning and research collaborations.

The way we configure Jigsaw Foresight can trace its lineage, pretty directly to our work together. One parent anyway. And out in the world of work and beyond? So much of what we said back then sticks now, even if it shows up in ways we couldn’t have expected.

Top of mind: ways of showing up so that you have reduced the friction, understanding proxemics, thresholds and borders and how to make the containers and crossings from one collaboration space to the next; making the time to build in moments of microtrust in remote working settings; providing explicit social nudge and visual cues to help narrow the distance of distributed working; working at psychological safety; understanding how interacting with the information rewires the brain; the need to use whiteboards as gathering spaces for nomadic teams; setting intention around synchronous and asynchronous work, and even synchronous and asynchronous play - it’s no good having your day off when everyone else is at work.

Most of all, your brilliant transposition of Nonaka’s ideas around ‘ba’ into committing to reconfiguring your own internal spaces of collaboration so that you can invite, recognise, spark, go out into the world. I most love that we offered the idea of soundscapes back in late 2019 and how they could create both playful environments, and deep flow and connection in teams working remotely by having a shared playlist. Sound has become such a feature of the way people have experienced and talk about the pandemic.

Maybe we could have talked a bit more about rituals and hosting, but it’s inferred, in thinking about setting intentions around time, space and attitude. So we caught it early and have had the chance to explore those things in depth over the last two years.

In short, I notice all the time how our partnership in 2019 consolidated, sharpened and refreshed my own existing work on collaborative encounters, and how the last two years have confirmed so much of what we thought then.

Lots of people have noticed these things, of course. There are proliferating toolkits, generously offered, always some new thing to borrow and try. But I’d say that our ‘next normal’ collections stand out: unashamedly prioritising creating, and renewing deep space and belonging, spaces where caring counts.

The rest follows.

Caitlin's 250

What a wonderfully buoying essay to read on a cold, wet evening faced, yet again, with world-crisis-level news. "Spaces where caring counts": one thing I have always appreciated about your approach to collaboration, Victoria, is your emphasis on care over mere curation. What we are producing, or creating, isn't simply a collection of thoughts or action items, but a collaborative space to explore things that can subtly shift the frame of the everyday.

During my coaching training we often spoke about the idea of challenging norms in order to create space for change, and we came to the conclusion that to provide robust challenges you must also have high levels of trust. Where there is high trust, you can make bolder challenges. I've seen you create these high-trust relationships in moments with the people we've invited into our collaborative spaces, and it's something I value highly about our work together.

I'm also struck by your notion of lineage or parentage for Jigsaw and our work now. As I think about Khal and the other fellow travellers who have roamed through our 'next normal' work with us, I am reflecting on different models for kinship in different societies. There are so many different ways of describing or diagramming who is important to us, ways that from where we sit might feel impossible or outlandish (tri-relational kin terms, anyone?).

But in truth the not-quite-infinite variety of ways people connect with each other, and what they choose to call attention to about that, is yet another tool we can offer to challenge expectations and creating space for new norms, while still being distinctively human.

Victoria's 125

I do like ‘producing’ a collaborative space. It’s alive - space, kinship, things produced that will travel onwards - and, introduces an element of design intentionality - creative production if you like. The pandemic propelled a surge in interest and experimentation around structures and rituals to ‘produce’ spaces, and the microspaces nested inside them. It takes me back to 2010, 2011, when running collaborative practitioner programmes with the WHO. The idea of a pattern language for collaboration was an aha for me then, and still is.

Circling back to power. Leaders need to be altogether less charismatic and more relational. That’s a different kind of power source and hard to stay true to in conventional hierarchies. Your phrase ‘new models of kinship’ nails that.

Thank you.

Caitlin's 65

When I think about a pattern language for collaboration, I think about the purpose of ethnographic writing in anthropological scholarship: to describe patterns of being that are so familiar they are invisible or un-describable to the people experiencing them. I think about the structures & rituals of meetings, email, calendars, file sharing...all the 'known unsayables' of work. I feel we do our most profound work among the known unsayables.

Victoria's Tweet

Reconfigurations. Max Ernst says ‘before he goes into the water, a diver cannot know what he will bring back’. We must all dive in, and try to describe the un-describable.

The first of these dialogues starting with Caitlin's 500 words can be found here

References & Further Reading

Essay in Two Voices: Dialogues of Discovery, Madelyn Blair PhD

WERS radio

Reconfiguring the Collaborative Workspace, by Victoria Ward & Dr Caitlin McDonald:

Caitlin’s reflections from 2021 on a year of reconfiguring

A handy timeline of lockdown

Pelican stairs: An AI assisted lockdown art project by Caitlin

That great New Yorker article on remote work

Liberating Structures