I had stepped outside of her room and was standing in the hallway passing time.  There happened to be a bulletin board in the hallway—it is hard to believe that in this day of email, texting and tweeting, bulletin boards are still used as a means of communicating, but they are.

There was a very nice looking poster on this bulletin board that caught my attention.  It was a call for nominations for employees and doctors who reflect the highest ideals of the institution.  The award was named after the founder of the institution.  Done well, these kinds of recognition can remind employees of the ideals on which the organization was founded, but done poorly they can be a disaster.

I read the traits of the people that they were looking to recognize.  Then, as I continued to read, I was struck by a frightening reminder about quality and safety in hospitals.  No, the poster wasn’t dangerous.  It wasn’t even what it said—it was the date on the poster.  This was a poster for the 2009 award!  The deadline for submission of nominations was February 2010, two years earlier.

Now that may not seem so frightening to you, but to me it raises the question, “If their management and operating systems are so bad that they can’t keep a posters on a bulletin board up to date, how timely are they performing clinical procedures, and how accurately are they administering meds?”

I am not sure who said it first, but the adage that came to my mind was, “The cleanliness of the dropdown trays on an airplane tells you a lot about how well they do engine maintenance.”  Or, perhaps another way of saying it is, “It is the details, stupid.”

Great execution and great quality do not come by accident in organizations.  Now I know some of us are obsessive compulsive and detailed oriented.  But that is not what quality that produces great hospitals and great airlines is about.  It is about an intentional design of quality into every single aspect of how the organization functions.  It is about an attitude and culture that is focused on meeting customer needs and continual improvement in meeting those needs.  But it is about a lot more than attitude.  It is about measurement and feedback and systems that enable improvement every single day.

The details really are not the point.  The drop down trays are not the point.  The bulletin board is not the point.  They are simply indicators of how well we are doing on the real point!

Toward the end of last year Josh Bowling and I attended a conference on mobile work in San Francisco.  It was held at a conference center on the campus of the University of California San Francisco.  And it was a great conference extolling the virtues of technologies that allow us to be mobile and work virtually.

As I was exploring the conference center, I came upon a visual image that challenged my mobile paradigm.  The conference center was in a building next to an academic building with what I assume were professors’ offices.  The offices had large windows and the lights were on.  I was able to see clearly and what I saw were not offices, but nests.  Yes, NESTS!  You have seen them–papers stacked everywhere.  Hardly room to walk or find a place to sit.  It may remind you of your professor’s office, or perhaps your own office.  The NEST is certainly not limited to the academic world.

I am not an anthropologist, but it made me wonder how ingrained in our genes and psyche is the need to NEST.  Is it just a workplace thing?  Do we build NESTS at home and at work?  Do the forms that the NESTS take give us insights into who the person is?

But the real question that stared me in the face was how do we NEST in a paperless, mobile, virtual world?  Will this need derail the building momentum toward what seems like a much more appealing way of working.

As someone having a lot riding on developing world-class places for mobile workers to LAND, but not NEST, you can imagine this was a disconcerting moment.  So what are the implications of the seemingly pervasive need to NEST—although some people obviously have more serious cases than others—for the mobile workforce?

Having caught my breath, I would argue as I stated in the opening that “place” is still important in a virtual world.  Being totally virtual just doesn’t work.  Think about it.  Most people who work virtually celebrate the fact that they can go around and meet in their clients’ or other people’s offices.  But if everyone is virtual, then there are NO offices to meet in—gotcha!

Physical place is still important.  It may be a coffee shop or a place specifically designed for mobile workers like E|SPACES.  But how do you satisfy the need to NEST in a place that is designed for LANDING?  Perhaps it is a design that creates defined spaces and a cozy, safe feeling even in an open environment.  Perhaps when a person finds exactly the right environment, they build today’s NEST on their desktops and displays.  And an advantage is they can take their NEST with them to the next PLACE they LAND.

Maybe those professor’s offices were not as chaotic as they appeared. OK, I confess.  Sometimes I too work in environments like those and I sort of know where things are.  Maybe it is not the chaos, or the NEST, but the familiarity.  If that is the case, I can create familiarity with apps, icons and electronic folders just as I can with stacks of books, binders and papers.  Come to think of it, my files in the Cloud are in about as much disorder as my paper files.  The difference is that the search functions allow me to find what I need much faster.

So what are your thoughts?  How can we satisfy this need to NEST in today’s mobile, virtual world of work?

Which reminds me, I hate “waiting rooms” even more than waiting.  Why? Because somebody put them there on purpose for the specific purpose of making me wait!  And they are everywhere—office buildings, drivers license testing centers, doctors’ offices and hospitals.  Just think about it, they designed “waiting” into the system when they built the waiting rooms—why else would you build them?  That means that when you go to use their service, you know they are going to tell you to take a seat and it will be thirty minutes to an hour before they see you.  And to add insult to injury, they try to fake you off by putting magazines and TV’s and aquariums in the waiting rooms to make you think an hour is not really an hour.  I am sorry, but watching a Piranha swim in circles doesn’t do it for me.

The really sad thing is it doesn’t have to be that way.  Just as we have made great progress in taking warehouses out of manufacturing with pull and just-in-time systems, we can take waiting rooms out of services.  Think about it, if service providers can consistently be thirty minutes late, they can consistently be on time.

But I digress.  E|SPACES Cool Springs is about to open and I am tired of waiting.  We are actually pretty much on schedule, but that doesn’t mean I like waiting.  I am counting the days and hours.

We did the punch list last week.  The furniture was delivered on Saturday and will be assembled this week.  Most importantly, the Starbucks coffee machines—that is right, two—and the enterprise-grade Wi-Fi are in.  But the cork in the lobby is not, so we have to enter through the back doors.

By the way, there is no “waiting room” at E|SPACES.  There is a small lobby where visitors sign in using an iPad, which generates a phone call to the member they are visiting, or to an E|SPACES Concierge.  If the visitor is not greeted by a member quickly, a Concierge will see that the visitor is greeted.  There is almost no waiting!

So when will the front doors be open at Cool Springs?  Hopefully by the end of the week, but definitely the beginning of the next week.  If you would like a tour before then, let us know and we will be happy to schedule a tour—if you don’t mind going in the back door.

If you are like me and hate waiting, please share your favorite waiting story or perhaps the best excuse you have heard about why you had to wait.

This is about a new way of thinking about work and organization and jobs.  It is interesting to explore how far the movement away from the traditional job could take us—will we recognize the world of work as we have known it in the next few years?

Maybe it is helpful to realize that people have not always held jobs as we think of them today—certainly not jobs in large organizations.  Jobs that define our hours of work, our health insurance, our dress, our relationships with bosses and peers, our compensation and standard of living, our title and prestige in the community, our vacation time, and our career path.  It is a little shocking to realize how much of our “lives” are controlled by our “jobs”.

It hasn’t always been this way.  Back before I was born, people were hunters, fishermen, farmers, shepherds and warriors.  There were carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers and merchants.  There was plenty of “work” but few “jobs”.  There was compensation but no payday.  There was time off but no vacations.  There were demands of the work, but no bosses.

Wait a minute—did I mention warriors?  There were great warriors who organized and led large armies to defeat enemies.  They had paydays, often at the expense of a defeated enemy.  There were uniforms.  There was a well defined hierarchy.  There were procedures and rules.  So maybe all this began with warriors and armies!

As tasks became larger and more complicated, we copied the armies.  We developed elaborate rules and appointed bosses to enforce them.  We decided what dress was appropriate for work—don’t you just love “business casual” as a description of dress outside of work!  We set the hours we expect people to be at work.  We did psychological studies and then handed out rewards for people performing work as demanded.  And we had the nerve to measure “job satisfaction”!  Oh, I forgot, we enacted laws to govern what was appropriate to do and not do at work, and hired lawyers to fight with each other over enforcing the laws.

So what is wrong with this picture?  Sound like progress to you?  Not me!  A return to hunting, fishing and farming sounds pretty good.  Maybe it is not the hunting, fishing and farming of our ancestors, but it is designing, modeling, coding and marketing using state of the art technology.  And it is accomplished by people working independently but tied together as never before by sophisticated information systems.

Sounds interesting!  No job, but an abundance of work.  No boss, but plenty of demands from the work.  No paycheck, but compensation for the work.  Could this be where we are heading?  Should people be looking for opportunities to work, rather than looking for and sometimes demanding jobs?  You have to admit, it is worth a little dreaming.

I get the feeling that is what is happening with how we work. All of a sudden there is a massive wave of change. Now it seems like everyone—entrepreneurs, small businesses, and corporate warriors–has become a mobile worker. Armed with smart phones, tablets and laptops, they are working from home, coffee shops, cars, hotel lobbies and wherever they can find.

So what happened to the office? Do people still use them? Are they rapidly becoming relics like the typewriter that used to sit in the office, or the fax machine for that matter? The term “office” is ingrained in our language—“I’ve got to go to the office.” However, in many organizations, the office serves little practical use. In fact we talk about “going to the office” because we are rarely there. Don’t believe it—just do a quick check of virtually any building and you will see how many offices sit empty most of the time. The cynic might say the only real use for the office is to tell where the occupant fits in the hierarchy.

So, how is the change working out? Have the newly mobile workers found places that function well for getting work done and meeting with colleagues and clients? The home office works well for some things but not for meeting with clients, and often there are interruptions—like the dog barking during an important call. The casual environment and energy of coffee shops can be appealing, but they are often crowded and loud.

For an analysis of “third place” options, check out Andrea Pirrotti’s blog post starting with, surely not, McDonalds. McDonalds: the next great 3rd Place. Hmm…

A lot is being written about where we are beginning to work and live. One of the most intriguing examples is an excerpt from the book Aerotropolis, published in the June Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine. In this article, the search for the new place to work moves to the “fourth place.” The Corporate Latter

The change is happening so fast, some of us didn’t even know we had the option of a “third place,” much less a “fourth place.”