Lewis Carroll’s second best known work The Hunting of the Snark is a long nonsense poem that describes the pursuit by a group of adventurers of an elusive creature called a Snark. This turns out to be a much more dangerous Boojum when it is finally seen, causing one of the crew members to vanish. The poem may or may not be an allegory for the pursuit of happiness but it could easily be about our pursuit of anything elusive, imaginary or ephemeral. The author never really explains, although the illustrator Henry Holiday believes that the poem is a tragedy, which may back up the original claim. In the parochial world of workplace design and management we can extend the allegory by claiming the Snark as The Office of the Future, the pursuit of which has been ongoing for decades with little success. We’re sometimes shown pictures of it but on closer inspection these always turn out to be hyper-realised versions of The Office of the Present. What we see in them is a Boojum.
What Lewis Carroll can teach us about the office of the future