Interview with Dr Francis Duffy

Citation

(2009), "Interview with Dr Francis Duffy", Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Vol. 11 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcre.2009.31211aaf.001

Interview with Dr Francis Duffy

Article Type: Talking heads From: Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Volume 11, Issue 1

Interview with Dr Francis Duffy (CBE, Past President of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Architects’ Council of Europe and Trustee of the Architecture Foundation. Dr Duffy helped to establish the DEGW partnership in 1973) by Debbie Hepton

1 Can you tell us a bit about DEGW and your day-to-day role?

I was one of the founders of DEGW in the early 1970s. I’m the “D”. We are fundamentally an architecture and design practice, but with two or three rather unusual characteristics. One is that we are extremely specialized in that we’ve focused mostly on the design of the working environment. We cover other areas such as education, but the office in particular has been our principal focus.

The second characteristic is that that we have a research tradition, something that goes right back to our origins. We have always thought that it was part of our job to develop our field. Our record of studies and publications, including many books, demonstrates this part of our work.

The third characteristic is that because we’ve worked for corporate organizations generally large ones – we have become, for a relatively small firm, very international. We have offices throughout Europe, in North America and Asia Pacific. We work as an international – you might even say global – network. The overall profile of our work goes from urban design, to architecture, to interior design, to space planning, to brief writing and programming, to user research. So we have to maintain a wide range of skills in all our offices.

I am now semi-retired, which is wonderful. What that means is that instead of working seven days a week, I work eight days a week. Mostly I do the work I’ve always done, which is consulting. I have a set of interesting clients, the mix of which has changed in the last few years. For example, I have become involved in a number of projects in the arts field, such as working on the master plan for the British Museum and strategic consulting for the Somerset House Trust and for the Design Museum. Some of these things are done under the umbrella of DEGW and some independently when there is no danger of competition with my colleagues. I have a lot of choice in what I do at the moment; it’s a very interesting point in my life.

2. What is the relationship between corporate real estate strategy and Human Resource strategy?

Our current experience in the majority of our client organizations is that there is an increasing desire to link space planning with the planning of human resources and of the use of information technology. Easier said than done. Within most organizational structures practical integration is extremely hard to achieve. These three functions are deemed to require different skills from different people with different backgrounds, all of whom have histories of working in distinctly separate ways. This is a great tragedy. It’s also true that the potential contribution of physical space to business performance has been considerably undervalued. Space in most organizations tends to be regarded as a nuisance: expensive, clunky and hard to manage. In an ideal world, the integrating and catalytic value of buildings would be recognised and the messages that can easily be broadcast to everyone working within them would be harnessed to enhance business performance.

I need to be careful what I say here, because I have already fallen into the trap of talking too much about buildings. Given the wonderful, invisible cloud of information technology that holds us all together these days wherever we are, I should be talking about the design of networks that have both a physical and a virtual dimension, and environments in many places operating in many diverse ways which need to be managed and organized in this changing world of ours in increasingly integrated ways.

3. According to your website, your primary area of expertise is the “evolving workplace”. How do you see the workplace changing in the future? Do you have any evidence to support this vision?

What’s happening at the moment in the world of work is at least as important as what happened in the industrial revolution 200 years ago, when people came down from the hills and the moors into the valleys to work in the mills. The two great laws that shaped the physical environment of the 19th and 20th Centuries were the new necessity for people to work together firstly in the same place and secondly at the same time – co-location and synchrony. Today these laws are nothing like as important as they have been for the last 200 years. Coherent work, particularly knowledge work, can be done at different times and in different places because of invisible and ubiquitous networks created by information technology. This very obvious change is going to reshape landscapes, cities and, most importantly, how we choose to live our lives. All this has occurred in the last decade or so. My prediction is that in 20 years’ time most of us will be living and working in very, very different ways.

4. What role do you think these changes will have on impacting and affecting human behaviour?

It depends on the subtle relationship between the physical environment and people’s behaviour. One argument that is often used is that physical environments are supposed to “do” something to people on their own. I don’t think that buildings do very much on their own. Fundamentally buildings are inert. What really matters is how they are used. To use buildings intelligently is a managerial responsibility which depends upon buildings being endowed with a sense of purpose. We must constantly ask ourselves what are buildings, spaces and places for? Organizations have to decide what they want from people and places, from people in places.

Basically, there are three ways of using places; you can use them more or less efficiently, you can use them more or less effectively and you can use them more or less expressively. Efficiency is using the least to do the most. Effectiveness transcends efficiency by adding value, for example, by shaping and using places both within and between buildings in ways that increase the probability of people encountering each other to share ideas. That does not, of course, mean that encounters are guaranteed. Patterns of behaviour may have to be changed too. Expression is the third and most important potential of clever design, i.e. using places and buildings to express values and ideas. To put the argument negatively: if you want to make people feel completely unimportant and miserable use architecture! Alternatively, if you want to make people feel connected and valued, again use architecture! The most important things for clients to realise is that, they must decide what it is that they want buildings and places to do; they should use design skills to increase the probability of achieving their aspirations; and they should be prepared to measure the extent to which their expectations have been met. And, if necessary, learn from the experience and be prepared to try again in a cleverer and hopefully more successful way.

5. DEGW helps its clients to use their real estate to generate business value. Can you explain how do you do this? Can you take us through an example where this has been successful?

I can give you a particularly interesting current example. The three kinds of potential that buildings offer: Efficiency, Effectiveness and Expression – the three E’s – are wide open to user organizations to use to their advantage. Buildings do not do anything on their own. Nevertheless, the briefing, design and construction process, long drawn out, tiresome and expensive as it often is, provides a most useful platform for change management through using design to introduce, orchestrate and take advantage of major changes in technology and in HR policies.

The move from one location to another in a new building can be turned into a tremendous learning opportunity for a whole organization because in the end spaces and places touch everyone. Everything that happens can become a highly visible milestone in the progress towards such managerial goals as attracting and retaining staff, encouraging as much interaction between departments and individuals as possible, expressing the business’s values more powerfully and coherently to as many people as possible or even simply encouraging people to use space over time in the most efficient way possible so that it’s not a dead weight on the bottom line.

In DEGW’s work change management has become enormously important. We have just published a book in collaboration with the Office of Government Commerce called Working Beyond Walls, which describes many amazing government projects up and down the country that have been used for change management – physical changes used to communicate the need for and to accelerate organizational and cultural change. Another very beautiful example which has just been completed is the new accommodation for BBC Worldwide in the media centre at White City, a tremendous example of very intelligent management using a re-fit in order to bring a relatively new organization together and to make it work in a much more coherent way. BBC Worldwide’s chief operating officer, Sarah Cooper, has done an absolutely brilliant job in using this series of moves over the last twelve months or so in a way that goes well beyond more efficient space use. The real goal of the project is to introduce a new, vibrant organizational culture.

6. There are many critical issues facing corporate real estate today, including sustainability, globalization, and finding and keeping talent. Can you expand on these issues and explain how you deal with them at DEGW?

The first issue is sustainability which is often thought by architects particularly, to be primarily a matter of the design of the skins of buildings and their environmental services. Both are very important, but what’s even more important is the intensity with which space is used over time. We know from many surveys, using the technique that DEGW developed called “Time Utilisation Surveys” that a high proportion of the stock of existing office space is squandered over time. Old fashioned corporate real estate and facilities management systems, which allocated office space to people, in terms of so many square metres per person depending on their job title or rank, failed completely to take account of the way office space is actually used. Our observations show that office workers are not at their work places anything like as constantly as managers assume them to be. Instead these surveys show that while people may sometimes be in their buildings they are frequently absent and, even when they are there are, they are highly mobile, Both internal and external mobility, of course, are being fundamentally enhanced by information technology which allows people to keep constantly in touch not just over huge distances but much closer to home.

The big challenge for organizations is to learn how to use the resource of space in a much more intense and less wasteful way over time, transcending conventional categories of use as well as the normal boundaries of buildings as we architects often think about them as simply chunks of real estate. The success of Starbucks demonstrates this, as does the increasing use of airport lounges and hotels, all of which provide informal, interstitial meeting spaces for an increasingly mobile work force. If you want to explore these issues further, they are covered in a book I’ve just written called Work and the City.

The second issue is globalization which is obviously part of the same phenomenon of increasing mobility. Many organizations that we work for measure space use not simply in terms of so many square metres in so many locations. Instead they have begun to manipulate the virtual dimension, which is beginning to be as important as physical space. Their management problem is how to manage the network of communications and physical spaces over huge geographies in a fluid, dynamic and sustainable way. Big consultancies like Accenture and PWC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) have been pioneers in this field, managing buildings and space in global way for almost two decades.

The third issue that you mention, attracting and keeping talent, also has a lot to do with spaces and places. An outstanding example is Google, who use their offices in a very clever way to attract talent, and then exploit every opportunity to encourage people to work hard, keep in touch and exchange ideas. Throughout Google worldwide you will find spaces designed to encourage spontaneous meetings for small and large groups. The orchestration of the use of space is not about meeting minimum standards but about using design to get the best out of brilliant people.

7. Picking up on the issue of talent, what role can the CRE strategy play in attracting and retaining employees?

CRE’s role is to support the business in a variety of ways. Places can be provided which are not just nice and comfortable but also attractive to talent, stimulating to creativity and effective in operational terms. Developments in IT have opened up many possibilities for occupying space in much more fluid and free ways. In this interactive age, CRE’s role is changing in ways that are much more like running a hotel, providing places for people to meet, talk and eat, than merely providing square feet.

8. What impact do changing demographics have on future office provision?

I am often asked about this, and I have to say that I’m a bit of a sceptic about claims that generation X and generation Y, etc. are all going to behave in predictable ways. Sociologically it’s rather a big leap to generalize about literally billions of people around the globe. There must be many, many differences and variations within such a simplistic framework. Anyway it is not so much the generations themselves, but the many ways in which the generations are taking up and being affected by information technology that are the real drivers of change.

9. You recently moved your London operations to a new location within the city. What critical factors did you have to consider to ensure the success of this relocation?

We have about 100 people in London. Although we used our previous office – a converted bottling plant in Kings Cross – in a very successful way, we moved here over Christmas, and it’s wonderful because here we inhabit the double height space that used to be the International Press Centre. We are all visible to each other in one space and that creates a wonderful sense both of coherence and stimulus.

10. At what stage of a relocation project should the employees be involved? What techniques should be adopted to enhance engagement with the process?

In an ideal world, it would always be well before. Actually, relocation exercises are too often thought of as isolated events. What you learn from change management is that change never ends. A single move is just an event, a hiccup in the system. Instead space should be being thought of as a resource that must be managed in relation to developing and changing organizational objectives, and should thus be driven imaginatively and as hard as we can, in order to get the best out of people, the best out of technology and the best out of space. It’s an ongoing process within a much greater and more interesting trajectory of change.

11. How can space be used to enhance organizational performance? And how can you measure this possible enhancement?

It goes back to business objectives and business purposes: what is space for? Information technology has become so powerful, robust, reliable and ubiquitous, that those of us who come from real estate and architectural backgrounds, should be looking into our hearts and asking ourselves how can we justify a place in an increasingly virtual world. Just imagine that we are all virtual creatures – you and I and everyone else – and we could transmit ideas instantly and respond instantly without any physical manifestation. One of us, a virtual genius, lights upon the idea of place and asks “Why don’t we have buildings with seats and rooms and walls and bricks and glass?” What arguments would this virtual genius have to assemble in order to persuade his or her fellow creatures that spaces and places are a good idea? What are places for? What do they do? How do they help? How can they be exploited to encourage the generation and creation of ideas?

This is exactly what cities are for. Why do we have London and Manhattan? Imagine cities as layer after layer of networks piled on top of one another. It’s the accidental leakages between the networks that create a great city. Non-planned, non intended contacts are becoming just as important as intended contacts. Purpose is important, but so is creating an environment which is full of interactive potential. We are talking here about the knowledge economy of course – the sort of spaces and places that attract people who generate ideas. I think we need to understand better the wonderful richness of interaction and discourse that cities and buildings can be used to engender. In the end in the knowledge economy, it’s all going to be about ideas.