Arenas vs Archives
Yesterday’s work happened in two places. The morning’s studies were at the Olympic Park in Stratford, overlooking West Ham Utd’s stadium. The afternoon’s meeting was at the British Library, St Pancras.
On the surface, these look like totally different spaces. The stadium is about loud passion, spectacle, tribal identity, winners and losers, highs and lows. Whereas the library is about contemplation, analysis, individual study, quiet thoughts. But both are sites of ritual, performance, belonging, memory, and storytelling; the stadium creates stories in real time, the library holds stories of the past – different mediums, same function.
What’s this got to do with work and teams?!
Well… everything.
And teams need both.
Sometimes the workspace needs to be the arena; to build team identity, cheer, chant, connect, celebrate the wins, boo the losses. A place to play, train, test, learn and to commemorate and commiserate together.
At other times the workspace needs to be the archives. A quieter place to reflect, in order to draw on shared memory and meaning. In times of change, that reflection can really steady a team (memory fuels resilience). And we know that some people do their best work in the quiet.
So if you’re wrestling with the space your team needs to work in, try shifting the question from ‘remote vs office?’ to ‘arena vs archives?’ i.e. be purposeful about the energy, clarity, and connection your team needs in any given moment. Then you can design the space (virtual or physical) that people actually need to do their best work.
Image credit: Europeana, Unsplash