Make Your Own Space

Have you learned to have a healthy suspicion about “the way things are supposed to be”?

While I was in elementary and high school, my mother encouraged a certain fluidity about rules and regulations. She would happily grant me periodic “mental health days” if I thought a break was in order.

While I was in college, there was a lovely home about a ten-minute walk from campus. It belonged to the parents of a sometimes girlfriend; always and still a friend, occasionally something closer. I adopted them as a set of spare parents, more readily available than my own a thousand miles away. Over the years, I would take refuge there from time to time. No questions, no expectations, always welcome. Without models to guide us, we worked out arrangements fit to whatever moment we were in. 

This is on my mind as I try to work something out. I’ve noticed how often the advice I encounter about life and work has a certain implicit message of “everything you’ve been doing is wrong, here’s the right answer.” Whatever method or practice or tool or system is being pitched, the framing is that this is the solution to your problem. 

What’s missing from all of this advice is that your job is not to select from among the hypothetical solutions on offer. Your first task is to ignore the canned solutions and their canned definitions of the problem and work out your own definition of the problem. 

If it’s helpful, you are free to examine the solutions on offer, but what you want to do with those purported solutions is explore the underlying model of the problem they were built to solve. That can serve as additional input as you work to better define your problem. 

The key here is that knowledge work doesn’t fit into standardized models. How you solve a problem differs from how I attack the same problem. This is the fundamental promise of knowledge work. It is a search for the unique answer to the unique question at hand. If there were an off-the-rack answer, then we’re talking about standard operating procedures not knowledge work. 

There is an essential design component at the outset of any knowledge work effort. What features of the problem are salient? What tools and techniques are already at hand? Can you reorganize and redeploy the existing tools? Do you need to add in a new tool or technique (and figure out how to use it effectively in this context)?

There’s a hypothesis coming into focus for me here around the notion that any knowledge work effort begins with a design step. Analogies about work tend to be anchored around factories. The problem is that you design a factory once and run the same things through it over and over. 

I’ve spent considerable time in factories but I’ve spent more time in a place that provides a better analogy for knowledge work–the theater. No two productions of _Hamlet_ are ever the same; even with a known script the goal is to create something new and possibly unique.

Staging a production is a much more complex creative task. You start with an empty stage and you transform it into a magical space. That transformation may start with a script but it opens up to encompass sets, lights, sound, movement and more. Designing for knowledge work needs to be similarly expansive. It will require multiple perspectives and, often, multiple collaborators. 

Let’s see where this might take us.