Boredom makes brilliance: The surprising catalyst for workplace creativity
“It’s easier to develop a business plan to literally sell shit than it is to develop a framework to implement new ideas, like a scientist.”
Dr. Agustin Chevez
In this episode you’ll hear about
- Rethinking workplace design: Top strategies and recommendations for shifting workplaces to increase productivity, employee engagement and loyalty & how the perception of workplaces is evolving
- AI and the future of work: How AI will impact work, for good and for bad, in the coming years & how you can be best prepared within your role
- Efficiency vs purpose: Balancing the pursuit of efficiency at the cost of purpose and knowing how and when to value both
- Gamification for purpose: Implementing gamification to inject meaning and engagement into standard workplace routine
- Shifting metrics in the modern workplace: Why businesses need to rethink standard measures of success and employee experience to align with more relevant outcomes & authentically boost employee and customer experience
Key links
The Pilgrims Guide to the Workplace
About our guest
As an Architect and researcher, Dr. Agustin Chevez has dedicated his career to understanding the notion of work and uncovering environments that best support our working lives.
Agustin’s interest in the relationship between people, space and technology saw him pursue a PhD on the evolution of workplace architecture as a consequence of technology development. His work has been presented at various international forums and publications. As a sought-after speaker, Agustin has delivered international keynotes and is a TEDx speaker. He has also contributed to workplace strategies in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore.
In his latest publication, The Pilgrim’s Guide to the Workplace, Agustin revisits our assumptions about the way we use space to host the ever-evolving notion of work.
Agustin is the Workplace Research Lead at the Centre for the New Workforce at Swinburne University and an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Workplace Leadership at the University of Melbourne.
About our host
Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.
Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.
Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.
Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.
Transcript
Chris Hudson: Hello everyone and welcome to the Company Road podcast. And today it’s time to get more curious and actually quite philosophical, maybe about the concept of work and the workplace as we hear about a different way to navigate some of these areas and work something obviously that we spend a lot of the time, majority of our lives doing, and I think it’s important that we’re identifying and nurturing the right conditions.
So we’re going to go into that today. So to shed some light on this tangled topic, I’d love to introduce my latest guest, Dr.Agustin Chavez, Workplace Research Lead at the Center of New Workforce at Swinburne University. And he’s also Honorary Fellow at the Center for Workplace Leadership at the University of Melbourne. And Dr. Gus, if I can call you that today, you’re an architect, a researcher, and you’ve dedicated a lot of your career to understanding the notion of work and really uncovering environments that best support our working lives. And you’ve spent a lot of time looking at the relationship between people in space and technology. You’ve got a PhD you’ve brought this kind of concept of workplace architecture into the fore and you’ve really looked at its evolution through technology development, a number of things that have been a contributing factor to that, and you’re often speaking at an international forums, you’ve written a lot in the way of publications, and you’ve done an amazing TEDx talk I saw, which is fantastic, and you’re working quite actively around workplace strategies in this region, Australia and New Zealand, Singapore, and you also just wrote a book which is amazing. The Pilgrim’s Guide to the Workplace, where you look at assumptions around the way in which we work and how to navigate some of that. So welcome to the show, Gus. There’s a lot more I could say about you, but I want to pause there and just say welcome.
[00:01:39] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Thanks very much, Chris. Very excited to be here.
[00:01:42] Chris Hudson: Gus, you’ve got a, you’ve got a wide range of perspectives on the world of work. Before I go into these, I’d love to just hear about what it was that attracted you to this field of understanding the workplace to begin with.
[00:01:52] Dr. Agustin Chevez: It’s a great question. And as you were describing the biography there, there was a moment in time that actually I shift from being a traditional architect in which like I was working in design designing a hospital back then. And the client halfway through the process decided to change an X ray machine.
And here I’m giving away my age, but back then they were analog, so you needed to have viewing boxes to see the X rays with the backlit, and they make the very reasonable change to go digital. That created a lot of changes. We needed to change, the room of the machine, but also include monitors where there were viewing boxes and all that.
But above all, what interested me the most was how the change in information will change the dynamics between doctors and doctors and patients. I will go and do my daily job as an architect and then back home and write a research proposal for RMIT to do a PhD on the evolution of workplace as a consequence of technology development, and that really changed my view of design and also the relationship between technology, the work and the workplace.
[00:03:03] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s not something everybody does obviously. They finish what they’re doing during the day and they go home and write about such amazing things. But how did you manage that? I mean, was that just, two things that you knew were gonna work on? Did you have to juggle it with other things at the time? How do you separate things in your head?
[00:03:17] Dr. Agustin Chevez: It’s correct because I was so passionate about this concept about the change of travel of information, and I was sharing that with my colleagues, and they were saying, Gus we have to submit these drawings by tomorrow. Who cares? Let’s just deliver what we’re paid. And that’s where I started to realise the difference between doing architecture and thinking about architecture.
And, of course, sadly if you do, you cannot think. And if you think you cannot do in a way, so I wanted to spend a little bit more time thinking about the consequences of our architecture about the spaces that we design. So that’s when I say well, if I’m not getting this feedback from my peers in studio, because we’re so busy trying to deliver the design, perhaps this is a time to take a couple of steps back and think about architecture.
[00:04:08] Chris Hudson: Yeah. It’s a step that not everyone would make really, if you think about that step in itself, because people are often quite set in a career path that’s defined within their discipline. And you’ll say I’m not going to think about the thing that I’m doing, but I’m going to think about the way in which it’s done or the environment in which it’s done and yeah, what’s your point of view on, on how valuable that would be to step outside of the thing that you’re doing and the tasks that you’re delivering, but also to take a step back and think about the way in which you’re doing it and the environment = in which you’re doing it.
[00:04:36] Dr. Agustin Chevez: It comes down to how curious you are about that question. I’m not here to suggest that everybody should do the same, But really, truly have that question in you and you’re really craving for an answer and you go through the process of reading trying to find an answer and nothing really satisfies you in the way that you’re posing the question, then pursue it.
As we’re going to go further in the conversation, I think we’re going to touch on this idea of finding answers and commit to that journey, because it’s a very interesting. It’s shaping, it’s shaping your life. Once you are in the path of finding answers, eventually, you’ll come to a point that you can’t find any more answers.
And what do you do then? So yeah, I will encourage anyone that has a question that needs to be answered in a specific way to take the time, whether that’s pursuing a PhD or walking from Melbourne to Sydney or whatever is it that they want to do to follow that.
[00:05:38] Chris Hudson: This question of curiosity, I think is an interesting one because many people go through their whole careers questioning so much and within this community of intrapreneurs, I think asking questions is a big part of how people find truth within the organisation in which they work, um, in relation to the things that they value. So do you have a read on, on that in terms of how do people navigate curiosity if it’s not really known where it might take you? Some curiosity is obviously very pointed at certain questions and answers, but there are some people out there that just want to make the place different.
So do you feel like there’s a different type of person there? Hmm.
Yeah, I
[00:06:14] Dr. Agustin Chevez: think you need to be able to tolerate uncertainty and not to start the journey trying to validate the assumptions you already have. If we go back to my PHD for example my assumption was that technology was a driver of change in my view of the world. The X ray machine was a piece of technology.
It changed. It changed the workplace. Therefore, that was what created the change. But halfway through my research, it started to become clear that it was not technology that was a driver of change, but it was actually the economy of the organisation. And by that, I mean, economy as a management of the most scarce resource, whatever is it that the organisation wants the most, but has the least most of the times is money, but it can also be talent, time, quality, whatever it is, they run that economy and they look into technology and other things to satisfy that demand. It takes a lot of even courage to be able to pivot from your assumptions of what you thought was true or what puts you in the path.
Again, I don’t think everybody should be in an ongoing quest of answering questions if it doesn’t attract to them, but they are attracted to it. Once you’re in that path, you have to really be open to. Whatever is it that you find.
[00:07:34] Chris Hudson: No, I think that’s true. There’s different degrees of uncertainty. And once you find certainty, you can either be happy with that. Or you can still carry on questioning and those people will, I feel there’s a restlessness sometimes that comes in. I can see the character traits and the characteristics of what effectively is an entrepreneur within an organisation.
And sometimes those needs can be satisfied and they feel like they’re very happy to work within the system. And other times, you know, it’s I need to find something else to basically scratch this itch because I can’t get what I need to get to within this environment. So, I mean, within the context of workplace environment, that feels like it would be unique to each place, probably.
Yeah I was wondering if that, are there characteristics that you feel span across organisations that really set to define them in some sort of way? What are some of the dynamics of an organisation that you think characterise an organisation, some of the attributes, some of the things that people would experience and how do those vary, what are some of the variables as well?
[00:08:28] Dr. Agustin Chevez: From my view of the world as I see it, organisations are set up to meet a purpose. So organisations had a purpose to fulfil, and then they look into how they can structure break down that purpose into activities and how they can then put together reintegration of efforts and to deliver what is it that they’re trying to achieve.
My view of the world tries to see what environments, and by this I don’t mean the office or even space, but environments as a whole, are needed for organisations to be able to do this, to meet their purpose. And so then you have as many different environments and configurations as different purposes.
[00:09:10] Chris Hudson: And what’s changing about the environment as you see it?
[00:09:13] Dr. Agustin Chevez: So I’m a architect and workplace researcher and before the pandemic, when I told people what I used to do, they couldn’t care less, okay, whatever. Now, tell me more. And what’s your take on the office? And people are interested in where they work, before people didn’t stop and think about the environments where work they just mindlessly went into the office and came back. Now that has all changed. For me, the most exciting part is that we no longer, take for granted that work needs to happen at the office and kind of makes sense because if we look at the history of work, we will see that the office has contained work for a very short time.
The office is an invention, which the context which raised to that invention is so relevant right now to the type of technology and context and what we can do that. It seems counterproductive or even to go back to the office. If anything, we should use this opportunity to rethink the environments which contains work.
[00:10:17] Chris Hudson: That seems like it should be done, but in some cases it’s not being done because people are insisting on three, four or five days a week back in the office. And there’s a preserve around whatever existed pre lockdown, pre COVID and people want to go back to that and almost recreate some of those working conditions because it was always there.
And maybe because they’re still paying rent on the commercial property that’s there too. So is there an argument for both sides.
[00:10:43] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Yeah, I mean first of all, I don’t think that you can innovate at scale. So yes, there will be organisations that will go back to the office as it was. And that’s okay but there should also be an appetite or curiosity for a segment of the organisations to rethink the workplace, especially because what is changing at its core is not necessarily where we work, but what work is.
The pandemic really put a question mark on the location, but AI is posing even bigger questions. What the conversation needs to evolve though is about understanding work and then the workplace. And as I say, by the time the assumption of work hit us as designers, it’s a little bit too late.
So if as designers we can be part of understanding a bit better what work is and then providing an envelope to that notion. We will have better places of work. I can understand why some people would like to go back, but I also will encourage for some organisations are ready to progress a conversation to experiment and open that not because you’re paying rent that should guide you where people work.
[00:11:53] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. It feels like one of these complex problems that nobody individually could really own. Do you feel like there’s a way in which we can equip leaders or managers of teams to be able to navigate some of these decisions because either it’s up from top down or somebody within a team saying, oh, it’s okay for you to work from home on these days, or that it’s almost self prescribed and I’m wondering whether there’s something that would help the organisation of all of that.
[00:12:17] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Yes, well I wrote a letter, an open letter to managers, not to designers even though I’m a designer but I wrote an open letter to managers, inviting them not to go back to the office. And the reasons that I said that is because, as I mentioned, it’s an invention that can be reinvented, but also try to understand why is it that you need to go back?
A lot of that is said because of collaboration, but the moment you start fleshing that out, you realise that collaboration has been an umbrella term to encompass a lot of the ways that we interact. Yes, we do through collaboration, but also we cooperate, coordinate, and we interact in other ways that benefit from other different types of environments and even we socialise and socialisation is in and on itself is very important, regardless whether we are collaborating or not. So we need to understand the attributes of being co-locate synchronous or distributed asynchronous. So once we understand all the different combinations of co location or distributed or synchronous and asynchronous, then we have four different environments, not just one, but four different environments in which we can operate to meet the organisation’s objectives.
[00:13:33] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I like that segmentation almost. It feels like you can put people into different quadrants and think about where your organisation might be placed. Are there any trends that you’ve seen around where certain types of organisation are placed or would run more efficiently if they were in that quadrant, any kind of areas of that, that you
[00:13:49] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Yeah, I mean, uh, GitLab, for example, even before the pandemic, GitLab was a poster organisation of distributed teams and it worked beautiful for them. Should we all now go follow the path of GitLab perhaps? No, because there will be different ways in which organisations benefit from each of these quadrants.
But what is important here is to understand that the quadrants complement to each other. So co located synchronous can benefit for distributed asynchronous. It’s important to be together, but it’s also important to be apart. One of the topics that I’m very passionate about is this idea of isolation as a driver of innovation.
A lot of that has been about collaboration, organisations, getting people together. But one thing that I’m passionate about, is there any benefit of using isolation of thoughts to innovate?
[00:14:40] Chris Hudson: And then you’re going to tell me there is a benefit or there isn’t a benefit?
[00:14:43] Dr. Agustin Chevez: That was another question that I had just like the X ray machine. So I came across that question pop up my head when I was traveling, between Sydney and Melbourne. Coming back from Sydney, back home, and I was reading a book on iguanas in the Galapagos Islands. It was discussing the theory of evolution. Those familiar with the theory will remember that in the Galapagos Islands, there are three different species of iguanas that evolved very differently based on the isolation promoted by the sea. Iguanas in one island didn’t meet iguanas in the other one, and through millions of years they evolved quite differently.
And as I was reading this, I came across a paragraph that really changed the way that I thought about world plane design. It argued that it was isolation that gave us the diversity of species in the planet. And then I thought if that is true for species, is that the same for thought? I start to think still on the plane that perhaps the communications that we have between Sydney and Melbourne is promoting the equivalent of a very prolific colony of ideas, like colony of the Iguanas a lot of them, but all from the same strand.
There’s no diversity. So that’s when I thought what will happen? If next time that I have an idea, instead of picking up the phone or sending an email or indeed catching a flight to Sydney, I will have to incubate that idea in isolation for whatever time it will take me to walk from Melbourne to Sydney.
[00:16:11] Chris Hudson: Okay. Yep.
And then what happened?
[00:16:13] Dr. Agustin Chevez: So what type of crazy question is that, right? But it was a little bit like the X ray machine. I could not shake that question. Uh, this This was a bit more out there because there were not many people that I could discuss this with I actually took me a few months just to be able to articulate that idea and share with others because who in the right frame of mind entertain the idea of walking from Melbourne to Sydney in complete isolation just to incubate a unique idea about workplace design because they read a book about iguanas in the Galapagos Islands.
But once you come up with those questions, and again, it goes back to what we were saying before, and you cannot shake the question, you need to find the answer. So that’s when I decided to put on my boots, my backpack and start walking.
[00:16:59] Chris Hudson: This is amazing, was it just you or there was a, there was another set of experimentation going on around the people that were able to talk about their ideas together. Is that right? And you were comparing one to the other or how did you look at the results there?
[00:17:10] Dr. Agustin Chevez: So in this case, it was just by myself. It was completely an unassisted walk. So I was carrying two backpacks. I had two rules to be alone and no distractions or no podcasts or audio books or whatever, because I wanted to be with my thoughts for the duration of that. And that was very successful because it allowed me to really incubate ideas, but also to experience boredom.
Boredom is a fantastic thinking tool, but of course we have lost it. We are in an era that we’re completely connected and we’re trying to look at our phones every now and then, and completely stimulated. I must admit that once the novelty of going to Sydney wore off, around the second day or the third day, I was bored beyond belief, like truly bored, like what the hell am I doing, so at that point, I was tempted to break that rule because I’m so bored that I cannot think about any other thing that, how bored I am. So I might as well start doing something else, but I’m very happy that I persevered because once you cross a threshold you get to experience the beauty of boredom and its utility as a thinking tool. But boredom is no joke.
I mean there are experiments that have measured that people rather administer electric shocks to themselves than be left alone with their thoughts. So it needs to be managed.
[00:18:35] Chris Hudson: I mean that, that sounds very interesting and just to recap, so how long was the journey, how long did the pilgrimage take you?
[00:18:41] Dr. Agustin Chevez: So that’s a good question because the walk from Melbourne to Sydney took me 42 days so that was the walk. But a difference between a walk and a pilgrimage is the timescale. So the duration of a walk is the time that you spend putting one foot in front of the other. The time frame of a pilgrimage is measuring years. So for example, I read the book of Iguanas in 2016. took me two years to start walking. But for me, my pilgrimage already started back then, because that’s when I formulated the question. That’s where I start thinking and seeing the world differently. Then the 42 days,
and interestingly, people that knew that I was doing this, when I came back from the walk they couldn’t wait to meet with me you know as if I was the messiah or the enlightened one with the answers of workplace design. But I could only disappoint because for a long time I thought I didn’t learn anything. took me years to be able to structure and to formulate what I learned.
[00:19:41] Chris Hudson: I guess you can equate it to other fields, if you’re thinking about sports and the training that goes into this and that before the big race or, it feels like there’s a gestation period, a period where you’re conceiving of an idea.
And then you’re thinking about how you might do it. And then eventually like the execution is actually a very small part of it. Actually quite similar to many projects that I’m sure we both run as well. You’re thinking about something and eventually you get something over the line and you’re sitting with it, like you say, and then you have to turn it into action, but I’m fascinated at this time that you spent in your own thoughts and how you manage that, because it just feels like it would be so unnatural and you’re right.
Like most people within our generation, like our kids are struggling with it. Anything that’s left alone for more than about five seconds just feels like it’s dead space and we should be doing something and there’s an impulse to want to do something. So how did you manage for one time in your own thoughts, but also how did you then also bring clarity to some of the thoughts and what was your process for bringing that forward in one way or another?
[00:20:39] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Being by oneself, being alone, can manifest in two ways, solitude or isolation. Positive one, the one that you want to cultivate is solitude. That’s where creativity flourishes and all that. Isolation is very detrimental. It’s detrimental to our mental health. I need to be managed. So which one you get to experience depends on the level of control and motivation that you have.
In my case, I have all the level of control. I could pull the pin wherever I wanted and I was very motivated, but even like that, with that level of motivation and control, I have my experience of isolation. It’s long term exposure. It happens. And another thing that I learned is that you can feel isolated amongst others because, yes, I was doing this by myself.
But if I arrived to towns, there will be other people there. It’s not that I didn’t see anyone, but even seeing others that I didn’t have a connection with made me feel more isolated. This is an important lesson to architects because we tend to think that as designers if we design an open space or a bossing environment where everybody socialises and all that we combat isolation, but we’re in fact what we might be fostering is that individuals that do not feel connected to the group might feel further isolated.
So it’s a very tricky balance of isolation and togetherness and solitude and being alone.
[00:22:08] Chris Hudson: Did you find yourself becoming aware of when you were crossing between solitude and isolation and what triggers or responses you were feeling or thinking at that time?
[00:22:17] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Yeah, I sometimes I was for lack of better word in the zone, like I was really in my thoughts the meditative state that you get with boredom I mean I I was fortunate to go through beautiful landscape, some national parks. They were incredible, but I also most of my walks were roadside just looking at
[00:22:36] Chris Hudson: the road
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:22:37] Dr. Agustin Chevez: and bored beyond belief like truly for hours for days for weeks.
No music, no nothing, but that allows to get into a meditative state that at times I was worried that I will walk Into the oncoming traffic or something. So I just needed to make sure I kept on the right side of the white line so sometimes I was like that and sometimes I was feeling isolated and of course it is very easy to get out of solitude, but very hard to get out of isolation and for that, I really needed to remind myself why I was doing this and also that I, at any time I could pull the pin and that gave me back level of control, reminded me what I was doing this and then it was not overnight or one step to the other, but eventually was able to go back.
[00:23:26] Chris Hudson: That’s fascinating. I don’t think a lot of people would make a distinction between the two consciously or even would have to think about it that much because, I don’t know, maybe loneliness feels like it, it encompasses some of those things, but solitude feels like it’s much more deliberate and you can use it to really explore your own thoughts. Isolation sounds like it’s much more social than about connectivity and belonging. And that isolation would lead to darker thoughts and darker places, and it’s probably less constructive if I’m to generalise, but that sounds like a really hard thing to navigate.
I’m just thinking of I don’t know as you’re talking about it, this might be the wrong reference and tell me if I’m just talking rubbish, in Forrest Gump, when he gets his running shoes on and he just keeps on running and running. And it’s that kind of thing. I don’t know if it’s similar to that, cause he just had his mission.
He just didn’t want to stop running because he wanted to find his own thoughts. It was in his own thoughts and he just went on and on. But there was no kind of context for that. It was just part of the film. Coming back to your thoughts and the things that you’re thinking about did you categorise them in some way?
Did you learn a lot about your thought process? That meant I’m always thinking about 120 things at once, or I’m a deep thinker because I’m very deliberate about how I choose to think about things. And then it always results in a consequence or an action or what was your thinking process?
How would you describe it?
[00:24:38] Dr. Agustin Chevez: I still remember very vividly, and I mention this in the book I started the walk in Federation Square, right? And I have taken two months off work. I didn’t know how long it was going to take me to get to Sydney, but I thought maybe around two months sounds about right. Remember when I was saying that either you think about architecture, but you cannot do architecture or you think or do well, apparently you cannot think about work and work at the same time.
So I needed to take time off work and it hit me at the, I mean, there’s a lot of preparation that goes into this, but once I started walking from Federation Square, by the time I hit the NGV the National Gallery of Victoria, which is not that far. It sink to me, really? Did I just put my life on hold?
Two months? To do this crazy thing? And then the pressure thinking. I really need to start thinking about work. And then I put a pressure on me. Like, when people ask you, tell me a joke, and then you tell the lamest joke that pressure was me like, I start thinking the silliest things.
And it was not until I allowed myself to calm down that the pilgrimage in a way started. Because it was not until I removed the pressure on myself that I needed to think about or come up with a new idea that I started to think differently. was a big lesson for me. Not just. remove the pressure, I say I might go arrive to Sydney without any lessons, and that will be okay.
Once I adopted that, then the lessons, if you wish or insights, even though it took me years to digest, kind of start coming through. Also to give a little bit of balance of isolation to collaboration, around the time that I was doing this crazy walk researchers from Harvard Business School, they were grappling with a similar idea, a question.
They wanted to know if we collaborate too much in solving complex problems. And they did that in a more structured way by experimentation. And what they found is that the best solutions were found with intermittent isolation. So they go as far as suggesting that organisations should be redesigned to isolate employees work from each other to tackle complex problems.
So it’s not only about being by yourself. It’s also about coming back. So I call my lessons signposts and one of the first signposts is about isolation and whether we interact too much or too frequently, but signpost five provides a counterbalance saying that we need to find the right balance of isolation for the quality of the idea in itself, because at some moment point in time, the idea benefits from being shared.
We need to coordinate the absurd and I’m going to talk about it later what I mean by that. But what we think in isolation tends to be absurd. And then we need to coordinate it with others ,with reality that benefits from others. And also, as I mentioned before, we also need to find a fine balance between being by ourselves and being with others. We’re social creatures, so we need to be with others. So it’s about finding that balance between time thinking by ourselves and being by ourselves, and then the right time to be with others and in the book and interviews that I did with others, a rule of thumb seems to be 10 percent exploring the absurd in isolation and 90 percent trying to coordinate that view.
[00:28:10] Chris Hudson: That seems like quite a low percentage in isolation or in solitude compared to the rest, but yeah, like you say, we’re social creatures, we need to feel like there’s a shared input and a shared output almost in the way that we work a lot of the time as well.
I’m just thinking about what you said about boredom, really. It comes up in your signposts as well. And I’d urge our listeners to have a look at the book and to listen to it or to look at the signposts on your website as well. But the notion of boredom in the workplace, it doesn’t feel like it’s a natural match.
[00:28:38] Chris Hudson: And how we think about boredom, it’s always a negative thing and you’re saying it can be used constructively. If we’re using 10 percent of our time to dedicate in time for ourselves, time within our own thoughts, time for absurdity to come out, then how can boredom be managed as a whole for good?
[00:28:54] Dr. Agustin Chevez: If we take this back to my view of the world as an architect, I’ve tried to find environments that host work. And I think ultimately what we’re trying to do is to design environments that nurture our competitive advantages over machines. Especially in this day and age with AI. So what we need to do is create human environments and environments that nurture our qualities in a way that technology cannot benefit out of it.
For example, boredom, we can benefit more from boredom than a computer can benefit from idleness. In boredom, it’s not necessary that we’re not doing anything. Just that we’re not getting as much stimulus from the environment as perhaps we initially craved, but we can use that as a thinking tool to think differently.
Also boredom goes against the notion of the employee as a clock is part of the machinery. We mentioned that the office is an invention, and it evolved to be a temple of rationality, a temple of efficiencies. Very similar to the production line. So those type of evolution of management that went with the office sits with some of these concepts, like if you tell to your boss I’m bored, you’re not going to get a pay rise, say well, that’s great because you’re going to innovate. They’re gonna say what you have been doing? What are we paying you for? Or if you tell them I have this absurd idea.
Well, not really. So A lot of these ideas, again, needs to be coordinated in an idea of work that doesn’t necessarily fit. And so I have spent a lot of my time since the walk and since writing the book trying to coordinate those insights of adversity. For example, another important signpost of the book was that we can benefit from adversity.
And yet the sign seems to be hardwired to remove adversity out of the environment. There are many instances in the literature and personally I can almost guarantee that most of us might have experiences in which adversity allows to innovate or think differently and be a useful tool. Yet we strive so much to remove adversity out of the context and environments in which we work. And perhaps the fact that I came to all these very different views on work, it was an indication of success that the pilgrimage worked. Working in isolation allowed me to see the world differently. Now the challenge is how do you coordinate that view that is so different from the mainstream.
[00:31:28] Chris Hudson: We’ve talked about working in the office, working at home and these are certain ways to- I mean, you can’t ensure that people would have that time to themselves, is there a way in which you feel it can work, their frameworks or just ways or idea pods, like thinking pods or are there ways in which you feel people could find their own space, find their own thoughts and use it productively within a working day?
[00:31:48] Dr. Agustin Chevez: I think that organisations need to take a couple of steps back. Don’t start talking about home or the office or… the faster we can move out of hybrid, the better. Hybrid makes the difference between working from home and working from the office. The best example that I can share to illustrate why that is one is, for example, green, the colour green is not blue, hybrid blue and hybrid yellow.
It’s just green. So the vision of the future of the workplace that I’m trying to put forward is that yes, it might be made up of two things or many old quadrants that we talked before, but it’s not hybrid. It’s green. It’s made of different components, both towards that. So the faster we can move about finding solutions, whether it’s from home or for office and starts rethinking the workplace, the better.
One of the reasons I think that is a problem of the office is that for too long, we have been designing task places, not workplaces.
[00:32:47] Chris Hudson: Yep.
[00:32:47] Dr. Agustin Chevez: The office has been an environment where we go to do tasks, and if those tasks, you can do them at home or at a coffee shop or whatever else, why go there? What we need to do is to infuse the nature of work into the environments that we work to start designing workplaces, not task places.
[00:33:08] Chris Hudson: Work is defined by tasks, so how would you define work and set the right environment for it if it’s driven by the tasks, After I finished the pilgrimage, then not long after that I was writing my book, the pandemic hit
[00:33:21] Dr. Agustin Chevez: and our whole world became digital. And I stumbled with a digital pilgrimage. So as it turns out, you could do El Camino de Santiago, which is a very famous pilgrimage across Spain, the north of Spain.
You could do it virtually. What it meant is that you just pay some money and then you upload your steps into a website and that website, plots your distance covered. So that got me thinking in between the difference between a walk and a pilgrimage as we talked before but also
[00:33:55] Chris Hudson: as it relates to tasks.
[00:33:57] Dr. Agustin Chevez: and work.
For example, there’s a beautiful analogy or a parallel between tasks and walking and work and a pilgrimage. You progress a pilgrimage through your walk, just as you progress work through the steps that you take. But, one, you can measure your walk, you can measure your tasks, but work and pilgrimage are abstracts.
[00:34:18] Chris Hudson: Yeah.
[00:34:18] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Harder to measure. But that is the reason why you do it that gives you sense of purpose. So the workplace is an environment that is infused with purpose with sense of belongings with some sense of identity that of course needs to allow you to progress work, but in a way that it’s in alignment, not as I was doing walking in one around my house here in Melbourne and uploading my steps to a website, trying pretend to be walking in Spain.
That’s the type of workplaces that we have been designed or task places that is separated one from the other. What we need to do is align the pilgrimage with the walk, align work with tasks. So we need to design work first. And then the workplace.
[00:35:07] Chris Hudson: Yeah, although if it’s like the pilgrimage, then, in a way, flipping it the other way around maybe work is very important to you, it’s something that you’ve thought about in relation to your values you would align to very closely, the tasks would then be structured around it.
So can you flip it the other way? So my idea of work is different to yours, or do you feel like work as a definition can be, co created with everyone considered?
[00:35:31] Dr. Agustin Chevez: into a purpose and to orientation towards work. For some people work might just be a job or might be a calling and that’s a difference whether you see activities that you do from 9-5 or whatever hours that you are working as a job to
survive? Or is it part of your identity and it’s a calling that you’re fulfilling in the activities that you do?
There’s a lot of concerns, reignited concerns, about a jobless society, since the automation in the 60s and even before people start to wondering with technology and automation, what will happen with the human nature of lack of purpose, they manifested through work. We don’t need to wait until technology replaces our jobs to have an insight into that. For example, there are environments that we can study right now what happens when we lose our ability to work.
So when you go to jail, you not only lose your freedom, you also lose your ability to work. And there’s some interesting studies done by people that study occupational deprivation.
And they look what happens when people lose their occupation. An interesting example of one of their case studies is that the researchers found out that inmates were willing to exchange cigarettes, which is the equivalent of the local currency, and exchange parts of their food and wake up early to be able to work and that work was to feed fish in a tank.
They had a tank in the prison and they meant will go and feed them and that gave them a lot of sense of purpose
[00:37:13] Chris Hudson: Yeah.
[00:37:14] Dr. Agustin Chevez: in an otherwise monotonous hours in the day. Is a fish tank. The way we need to design our workplace in the future? What I think the lesson here is we need to understand design better jobs, design better type of work and then the environment that goes with that.
[00:37:32] Chris Hudson: Yeah, because I think that a lot of people would think of work as being a job. Yeah. I suppose a job description or a collection of job descriptions that ladder up to an organisational vision and goal and direction, really, and obviously the environment then comes into it as well. And how do you house that?
And because we think in spatial terms a lot, I feel like a lot of people would think work was going to the CBD. And jumping in, through the doors and going to the floor and the desk that, you know, and, I think that association is also adding to its definition. It’s almost reinforcing that office construct that you were talking about before and how we might need to move away from that.
But it feels like there’s definitely a knee jerk reaction back to some of the preconceived definitions of the things that we- they’ve just been true in society for so long now that I’m wondering what it would take as a catalyst to actually change that. We had a lockdown.
We’ve now got this concept of hybrid work, which is, you’re saying is like a checkerboard of yellow and blue, but we want green. And I’m just thinking what can be done to actually move this forward positively and who can be in charge of helping that happen, do you think?
[00:38:32] Dr. Agustin Chevez: I think there are organisations that are asking this question
and not everybody needs to be on board with this point in time, like any innovation, you will have a segment that is innovators, then the early adopters and, all the others are fold on that curve into going back to the office exactly as it was. Equally, there should be opportunities for those that the conditions, the appetite for risk, the resources that they have, the way the organisation is designed to explore different ways.
So we should not be overcritical for those that are not following. But equally, we should allow those that are willing to explore different solutions.
[00:39:13] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I get that could give a sense of acceptance, for the different approaches that might exist, but for the people that really want to try it out. Would you have any advice in that area that people would benefit from if they want to set up an experiment or if they want to create the conditions for trying some of these things out?
What would you suggest?
[00:39:30] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Yeah, create an experiment because it’s exactly that we’re saying you need to create certain conditions in a way that you don’t know the outcome. You have some hypotheses and you hope for the best in that you meet them. But of course, you need to measure it and you need to make sure that it’s working or not, but also then you need to understand what is it that you’re measuring and try to perhaps you cannot measure this notion of this new workplace with the metrics of the office, because it might fail just by definition.
So you might need to start thinking about what are the measurements? That will make a better workplace. A lot of the measurements in the office are costs. Offices are usually seen as a cost. And what do you do with costs? Try to bring it down. A lot of the metrics in this workplace is around value.
And what you do with value, you try to maximise it. So you’re in different conversations. One is about cost reduction. And the other one is about increase of value. It needs, it demands a new framework. Otherwise, the experiment might fail just because we’re using the wrong metrics.
[00:40:35] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I mean,
there are seismic shifts and leaps in the world and discussions around metrics and how success is evaluated in one way or another, from where it used to be, like you say, it was about cost and overheads and, the usual profitability metrics and now you’re moving into a realm where, you know, that the engagement surveys are out, that the quantified workforce is something that everyone is much more aware of because they’re fitting in surveys every week or every few days and the picture that’s being built out of that data set is now much richer to the extent that you can start putting both softer and harder metrics in around other areas, what does it mean to people’s relative to people’s own purpose and feeling of belonging and a number of other things.
So it feels like that opportunity is there for not only greater expression but also in measuring some of those areas too. And one of the points I wanted to come back to in your book was around not only cohesion efficiency which seemed to be a big theme and also gamification in that sense. The way, you know, where you talk about the role of efficiency and what it can lead to. So I’d love to just maybe tie in some of those points in and around the measurement obviously. Everyone’s trying to get their business running much more efficiently and profitably. What does that lead to?
And, is it good or bad?
[00:41:46] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Let me just go one step back. We’ll end up with that. But let’s take one step back because I think there’s a lot of expectations and even hope that data in and on itself is what’s going to get us towards better places of work. And as a researcher, I understand the importance of data, but perfect data can also lead to wrong conclusions.
As an example I will encourage your listeners now if they can Google the geocentric solar system or the pre Copernican solar system, and if they do that, they will see a chart that is very alien to us in terms of describing the solar system, where they will see some dots in the centre, which is the earth and then orbits that go very complex orbits that goes like this. Like those things that we used to have, like kids that you put like a spirographs,
[00:42:39] Chris Hudson: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
[00:42:40] Dr. Agustin Chevez: And create these complex
[00:42:41] Chris Hudson: Yeah.
[00:42:41] Dr. Agustin Chevez: That is a very interesting example of how perfect data that anybody could see the sky and the planets, they have enough technology to see how the planets were moving and even the sun around.
But people use perfect data, the observation to create an incorrect model because the underlying assumption was that we were the centre comes of the universe. And therefore, very clever mathematicians and very clever people develop those orbits. Now, if we have the underlying assumptions of what work is and what the workplace is or the office is, we might be collecting perfect data, but then creating bad models to interpret that. What gave us a more accurate solar system was not a new telescope or a better app or a better sensor. It was rethinking the under underlying framework that we use to interpret that data. So that’s why I think until we don’t have those that understanding, we might be collecting as much data as we want.
And still not arrived to the right solutions, which goes back to the comment that you were making about efficiencies. So the pursuit of efficiencies come at the expense of purpose. So if you want to see an activity, you have an activity and you want to make it more efficient. Usually what you take out is things are necessary for the achievement of a task.
But, that brings a purpose to the person. For example, Weber, who was a German economist and a philosopher illustrate this with agriculture. Back in agricultural societies they have all these rituals around doing crops and all this, and someone very smart say what if we tone down all the festivals around the crops that we do, and we can be more efficient.
And yes, the efficiency of the crops increased at the expense of removing purpose of the activities. So in this pursuit of rational efficiency, you remove all that. And the comment that I make around a gamification in the book is that perhaps gamification is one way of instilling back purpose in an over efficient tasks.
So once you are stripped naked with the efficiencies that you cannot do it more, so void of reason and purpose. Then you need to start increasing the type of rituals that you do just to bring back purpose.
[00:45:14] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Okay. And that’s where you see, I guess it’s under the guise of culture building. Or other things when it’s all kind of humming along and you feel like there needs to be a greater sense of why people are there to work and why does they do what they do, that gamification is sometimes used for that. Did you look at any particular examples of that or think about any examples of that as you were coming up with the idea?
[00:45:34] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Yeah. So, the link between gamification this idea of making process more efficient came across because of the virtual pilgrimage that I was doing the one that I was doing around here my house, but I was supposed to be doing El Camino
and then the added meaning because at the end of the day, what I was doing is just loops around my house. But the purpose that I have was higher than that. The gamifications of my steps gave it the purpose that I was in fact doing El Camino de Santiago. Those type of gamifications give purpose. And in doing some background research, there are indeed organisations that offer the opportunity to their employees to be the hero of the day or to engage in adventures at work through the process of gamification.
Now, if you need a map or a platform to do that, I think it’s a problem. It will be better if you design the work and task in alignment. So it’s the equivalent of walking El Camino in El Camino and not trying to have mindless tasks and fill them with artificial purpose.
[00:46:45] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I feel that’s definitely a real life situation. I think this comes up a lot, right? It feels like if you’re an employee and you’re working happily within your team and you’ve hit all your goals, and for whatever reason, the business can’t promote you, you’re going to be thinking about how to frame up a challenge or frame up something that is over and above that.
Or maybe within a team that there’s a task or a path that’s set in relation to your goals. And you’re thinking how do I contribute meaningfully to the company and you’ll agree on this task and actually it doesn’t add up to, what you think it might end up resulting in, there’s a lot of room for misalignment, I’m thinking it happens across different departments, different teams all the time, but everyone at the top thinks they’ve got a very clear vision, everyone below thinks they’re contributing very clearly to that vision, but often it’s a warped understanding of what’s, actually required and people are going about it with the best intent, they’re going about it in the best way they think, but actually they’re treading the wrong path or a path that isn’t as well defined as it should be,
[00:47:39] Dr. Agustin Chevez: AI I think it’s going to- things that might get a bit worse before they get better with AI, but what AI is asking is in terms of the work that i’m interested on is what it means to be human. What is it that we’re going to be end up doing? And
w
hat it will do is that all these mundane tasks are going to take the AI is going to do.
And then humans, hopefully, eventually, will end up with a meaningful component of work. How far are we from that? Are we in the process? I don’t know. Because technology sometimes also push us to seek even more efficiencies and to work even longer. There’s a fascinating book about leisure time in the U. S. and the researcher she studied how much hours we’re working before the industrial revolution and after and we work more hours now that we used to before the level of technology that we have now. So those are still employed work longer hours. It might be the same that whoever was still employed after the AI revolution might work more hours, but they might be more meaningful.
So hopefully what AI does is create more human workplaces, more human work.
[00:48:53] Chris Hudson: No I’m thinking about that a lot, actually, at the moment in relation to the speed of change, the velocity at which we can naturally move both in our own professional development, but also within an organisation, like how can speed of change be enabled beneficially?
What behaviour change needs to happen? And obviously technology is going to play a huge role in making that possible. But yeah, I’m just wondering whether you know, we were talking a bit about conditions for creativity a little bit before, but from a point of view of getting over inertia and helping to overcome barriers to change.
Do you feel like there’s anything there that is jumping out as being a big trend?
[00:49:28] Dr. Agustin Chevez: You mentioned the speed of change and another interesting insight from the work was the speed at which I experienced the world was very different than if I was driving and there’s a book that I remember that I read while I was still studying architecture many, many years ago, but just came up in my mind. That is called Learning from Las
[00:49:51] Chris Hudson: Vegas.
[00:49:51] Dr. Agustin Chevez: An initial name for a book on architecture, but what the authors were doing there is they were doing a study, many things, but one of the things that’s relevant to this conversation is a study of the speed which the observer travels and the interaction with environment.
They talk about the bazaar. When you walk in a bazaar, you walk at a walking speed. It’s very slow. You get to experience the fruit, whatever is it there, the objects, because that’s the level of interaction that you have with things. When you increase the speed, those objects need to be replaced by symbols.
Perhaps a sign that says grocery shop or something like that. And then all the way until you end up with fast speeds, like in Las Vegas trip, and then you have these massive billboards because the faster you travel, the bigger the symbol needs to be to replace the objects. I think that our pursuit of speed in change is creating a gap between the symbol and the objects that it’s representing.
Slowing down my actually allows not to deal with symbols to proxies of what we’re trying to do, but to deal with the actual objects with the equivalent of the fruit or whatever is it. So yeah, I was traveling at the speed of a pedestrian and my environment was not designed for that. Signs or traffic rules, I will experience them for longer time that It needed to be, but the speed and this constant pursuit of efficiency and speed might also create a separation between symbol and object.
[00:51:27] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I really like that point of view, and I think that one thing that stands out from it is that a sign is always a shortcut for something else and you can usually decide how deep you want to go but many people particularly at decisioning level within an organisation are just looking at the signs, you know the high level facts and information without going too deep into it. And it’s the same with us, as we’re navigating our careers or you know our meetings even we’re thinking about what we want to pay attention to and what we don’t want to pay attention to and how are we Making sure that we’re consuming the right information for the job that we need to do.
So I think being quite deliberate about that, not only about what you’re looking at, but the speed at which you’re looking at is a really great observation.
[00:52:05] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Yeah, because usually the symbols are a cultural abstraction of what they replaced. So you’re not dealing with the object itself. And it’s also infused with a layer of an interpretation that might have ceased to be relevant.
[00:52:19] Chris Hudson: Just to stretch that point even further, we don’t have to go too far with it if you don’t want to, but just around change management and obviously the concept of change within an organisation. A lot of people talk about behaviour change and I’m wondering whether, the conditions for that can be set in a similar way.
What makes behaviour change possible? What makes certain things much more complex for people to understand? Does it just need more time or space or does it need to be signposted differently? Are there other things worth considering in that arena?
I
[00:52:45] Dr. Agustin Chevez: talk a little about this in the book and again I talk about it from my point of view which is also design and the workplace and one thing that surprised me is the amount of change management that went into putting into place open plan or activity based working struck me as unusually what they were trying to create.
You’re trying to create is a better human workplace. That’s so much change management is required. Perhaps it’s because there’s a big gap to cover between the environment that the humans are trying to occupy and the quality of humans. Perhaps if you bring closer the environments to the what it means to be human, you don’t need that much of a gap to fill, going back to the idea and notions of symbols.
For example there are some healthy expression of territoriality to express individuality and character and personality which people manifested in trinkets and things they used to have in their desks and the picture of the family or whatever, that whatever gives them some sort of connection.
And of course, hot desking and ABW and other type of workplace strategies that focus on workplace efficiencies might erode those ones. I remember in one of the observations that I was doing because I was working for a design firm and we were working around. how people use space and I saw a desk was full of light bulbs, all the collections of light bulbs that you can imagine with different filaments.
And I was supposed to be a detached observer, but they were incredible, the light bulbs. So I blew up my cover and the person sitting there start to explain that to me, but eventually with a little bit of- because he realised I was the architect trying to do observations of how to go to open plan and he asked me straight up.
Are you going to take us our desks? And I didn’t have the heart to say yes But I what I told him he was that we were going to give him options of where work, but those light bulbs were very useful symbols represent of objects of his identity which are important and we fail to see those connections of the humanists and how they’re expressed in the workplace, that’s when you require them big change management. And I don’t know if that’s a change management that you were referring before, but that’s a change management that I deal with in the type of work that
[00:55:20] Chris Hudson: Yeah, yeah, I mean, change management is so broad, but it feels like, you can apply aspects of it different instances and, it would be taken from the same set of principles and same approaches, but it’s obviously applied in different ways. So I like the connection to that, I guess it’s a current state of what’s already there, what people have, what they believe in, the connections they have with those trinkets or whatever it is, it feels like you have to consider the whole picture before you start introducing new ideas really.
So the conditions in which you introduce ideas or help people reach those conclusions themselves are actually really important. And I think, there’s one thing from this conversation I’m taking is that, that can be set up in a way, that can be achieved in a way that’s create the space for people to think, give them that solitude if they need it.
Let’s make the collaboration possible, the cohesion can then follow, and then all of the things, maybe lead from one thing to the next, and it’s all in line with somebody’s understanding of their place, their purpose, their person yeah, ties it all together, really, which is fantastic.
Hey Gus, I really appreciate your point of view on, on all these things tonight. And I haven’t asked you very easy questions and you’ve always had an answer to them. So for that alone, I’m really grateful. But yeah, I’d love to know what more you’re up to and, what questions are top of mind for you right now, what’s going to be next for Dr.
Gus.
[00:56:37] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Yeah, the pilgrimage is still going. So we, we mentioned before the timescale, so I’m still very much in it. But one of the things I’m grappling with is how to coordinate that view with the real world, if you wish. And if I can use a story or a lesson that I actually learned while I was walking um, Even though I mentioned that all the insights took me years to digest, there was one thing that I actually learned while I was doing the walk. And that was, I was walking in um, small roads, rural roads, and I saw a sign that says Horse Poo
[00:57:12] Chris Hudson: $2.
Yeah
[00:57:13] Dr. Agustin Chevez: And it struck me as a novelty, like who will sell horse poo for 2? I kept walking and I start seeing more of those. Eventually I realised they’re selling this as a fertiliser or whatever.
And I didn’t think much about it until I crossed the border to New South Wales. The moment I crossed to New South Wales, the sign went Horse Poo $3. And I have a picture. So now I have empirical evidence that Sydney is more expensive than Melbourne. But not only that, I start thinking because I was bored as you know, and not, not much stimulus. So I thought, well, I could become a poor merchant, right? Because if I can move a million bags of poo from Victoria into New South Wales, I’ve become a millionaire. And again, because I have all the time in my hands, I start doing the equations and how much it will take me. And long story short, I came to realise it will take me 3000 years to be able to move 1 million bags because they were very heavy from Victoria to New South Wales.
[00:58:13] Chris Hudson:
As I
[00:58:13] Dr. Agustin Chevez: was doing all these calculations, it struck me that it’s easier to develop a business plan to literally sell shit, than it is to develop a framework to implement new ideas like a scientist. But with that insight also comes that it’s not about the quality of the idea in itself, because again, you can sell anything you want.
It’s about creating the right market, the right context for those ideas to have commercial value. So that’s what I was working at the moment. How do you create a commercial value of something that is not have a commercial value, but it’s better than selling shit.
[00:59:03] Chris Hudson: That’s your benchmark, isn’t it? That’s your starting point. I’m slightly disappointed that you didn’t work out a way of just, becoming a millionaire and then telling me that story, but
[00:59:11] Dr. Agustin Chevez: No, because we wouldn’t have been this conversation. I’ll be selling horse poop from one state to the
[00:59:17] Chris Hudson: definitely want to be involved in other conversations and I’m happy to help you with some of those experiments if you get to the answer of what it is to take my, to make money and how we can do it. But really appreciate the perspective on things tonight Gus, and thank you so much for your time. If anyone from the show wants to get in touch and ask you a question maybe relating to some of the things you’ve talked about, but how would they best get in touch with you?
I guess my LinkedIn profile if you could put a link to my LinkedIn profile or my webpage, either or, on my web page they can download the book and on LinkedIn, they
[00:59:49] Dr. Agustin Chevez: can send me SMS or Whatever.
[00:59:52] Chris Hudson: All right. Thank you so much, Gus, and looking forward to hearing what’s next and what happens as a result of these further questions that you’re asking and the pilgrimage that continues.
So thank you very much.
[01:00:01] Dr. Agustin Chevez: Thanks very much for the chat, Chris.
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