Solitaire - Solidaire - What organization can learn from it

Solitaire – Solidaire, lonesome – jointly. I had already written about this theme in my article Solitaire - Solidaire. At that time, I wrote about what this double entendre means to me personally. I think that this metaphor quite well describes the way an innovative person lives and works. There are tasks that are better done alone. Finding a suitable process. Planning a procedure. Structuring thoughts. In short, activities that require a state of mental flow to be good. And there are tasks that are better done together: checking a plan. Restructuring thoughts. Questioning and evaluating a process. Finding ideas. Analyzing problems from different perspectives.

Of course, human interaction is more complex than that. It is not the case that each innovator disappears into an ivory tower, generates a great innovation and then meets with other innovators to talk about it. If only it were that simple! But when it comes to creating an environment in which innovation can take place, this metaphor can help us with our design.

Let's talk about the location first. Ideally, we find opportunities for the employee to work alone and in a concentrated manner at a workplace that promotes innovation. At the same time, there are places where people can work together. So there has to be a mix of open and closed areas. Individual workstations and meeting rooms are not enough here. Spontaneity is missing. I think an Open Space Office with an open, visible creative and discussion corner makes more sense than a labyrinthine foxhole in which employees and groups completely disappear.

Employees should still be given the opportunity to work in other locations. When I still lived in Hamburg, I sometimes didn't go straight to work in the morning, but had a coffee at the Binnenalster. There was free wifi there and I got a lot of ideas from the inspiring environment. (But please make sure when introducing it that your building is not completely depopulated, because it is also focused on spending time together.)

Another good idea is to make sure that people from different departments can meet by chance. When planning the Pixar building, Steve Jobs had the idea of having a central hall that all employees had to pass through if they wanted to go from one area to another. This way, they could meet by chance. These informal channels are both a blessing and a curse, but without them, important cross-departmental impulses are lost.

Let's talk about time. We can organize the phases of togetherness and solitude. In Scrum, for example, these are the dailies, where the whole team meets briefly in the morning and, if necessary, agrees on further times together. There are many reports about the way dailies are organized. Personally, I like the physical meeting at a project board with prototypes and intermediate stages on the table, a cup of coffee in hand and a scrum master who pays attention to the timeboxing.

But there are other possibilities: My employees like to remember that “in the good old days” a trolley with coffee and cake was driven into the open-plan office at 3:00 p.m. The colleagues ate and drank together and discussed their ideas. (But I have to admit that I did not reintroduce this tradition. But I can't say exactly why. I think it's a personal thing. The idea that development might be stuffing itself with coffee and cake at the company's expense at 3:00 p.m., while other departments are still working, seems wrong to me.)

But we can also promote solitary times. So in some projects, I have sometimes imposed a meeting ban for certain periods. During these times, the developers were allowed to cancel any meeting or block the calendar. Of course, there was an outcry in some departments because valuable resources were suddenly limited. But development became calmer again and productivity increased. Solitaire – Solidaire, lonesome – jointly. We see how this metaphor can help us find the right approach to organizing development.