What is ironic about this now is that the world is awash with data. We could easily assume that this would make the truth, or at least facts, less disputable. But the converse appears to be true. The more information we have, the more we fall back on narratives. This is often the case in the field of workplace design and management. We’ve never had more data about what makes people productive, happy, well, engaged and motivated. We’ve never known more about what makes buildings function and how to optimize their systems and performance. And yet narratives persist that do not match the data, or at least oversimplify them.
Perhaps the most prevalent of these is that flexible working offers some sort of magic bullet to most of the problems we encounter at work. When it comes to finding solutions to the workplace’s most complex and intractable challenges, the idea of a ‘magic bullet’ is obviously something we find compelling. The term is nearly as old as gunpowder itself, dating back to a piece of German folklore in which the Devil grants a sharpshooter six bullets which hit whatever target he chooses, while the Devil reserves a seventh bullet to do with as he pleases.