Newton Did Not Work in an Open Office

Isaac Newton did not sit in an open-air cubicle design, sharing documents in the cloud and participating in global group discussions on his iPad by Apple. Instead, he sat under a tree and looked at the clouds, and an apple fell on his head.

Sometimes, knowledge workers need the solitude to think.

We have a tendency today to default to the idea of creating teams to do work, and many organizations have moved toward open-concept offices to support that. But research over the years has suggested that people can be more creative and more more effectively when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

This should make sense. I mean, it’s hard to take an idea and pursue it if someone sitting next to you is dragging you off to think about something else. You often need time to stop and think through the implications of an event or the possibilities of a new idea before you are ready to present it. Team efforts, though, tend to go at a faster pace and you may have to leave an unfinished idea behind if you cannot keep up with the group.

We often design our “thinking” spaces these days to encourage group work rather than individual effort. Of course, this may simply be the excuse we use for cost-cutting measures cloaked in the aura of team-building. Cubicle farms have replaced offices for all but a few employees, it seems, which are certainly cheaper on paper but having the wrong setting can severely diminish your ability to pursue your creativity. When I taught at the Air Force Academy, where the cadets were kept moving at a frantic pace between classes, leadership training, and physical activities, a colleague pointed out what was missing in the academic areas: benches. There was no place for cadets to just stop and sit and think, because we had not created an environment for them to do so. The way you organize your workforce and your office design says a lot about how you expect your people to work, and very often these days, we push them away from any individual effort or deep thinking.

This is not to say that we should swing the pendulum to the other side and do away with collaboration. As with most things in life, the extremes are unhelpful, while success is usually found through balance. There are good ways to collaborate, and then there is collaboration for the sake of collaboration. Susan Cain suggested that

…it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it.

There’s a time to work on your own, and a time to come together. Those needs may be different for different employees in your organization. Try to create an environment that enables people to work alone when they need to and together when they need to, so they can do their best work. After all, isn’t that what you want from them?