In recent years we have grown very fond of borrowing foreign words to describe some of the more difficult to express ideas about wellbeing and the new era of agile, experiential and engaging work. We’ve adopted Eudaimonia from the Ancient Greek of Aristotle to describe the nuances of wellbeing, happiness and purpose. We went nuts briefly for the Scandinavian idea of hygge to describe a copy and laid-back approach to life that we felt we’d been lacking.
We’ve borrowed ikigai from Japanese to describe how we might achieve better work-life balance. And we’ve returned to Danish more recently for the word Arbejdsglaede, literally the joy of work.
One language that we’ve neglected so far is Italian, but there is a nuanced word with no English equivalent that might usefully be applied to the new generation of agile workplaces. It is sprezzatura, which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘studied carelessness’.
As is so often the case, this two-word translation doesn’t fully describe the nuances involved. It implies that although something is done extremely well and took some work to achieve, it is made to look as though little effort went into it. It is a sort of carefully calculated nonchalance that is an unmistakably Italian concept.
In English it is most commonly applied to the way people dress, but its uses may be more than sartorial. It is in tune with one of the main aims of the new generation of agile workplaces, which should be so carefully designed and specified that the people who use them can barely discern the work that has gone into creating them.
Finding the best place to work
Where once the office layout was a physical manifestation of the org chart, defined by its groupings and hierarchies with people sitting in the same place and with the same people each day, modern agile workplaces are there to provide the different settings in which people can find the best place to work and can form their own groupings based on their specific needs.