The enduring but changing struggle to improve the working conditions and performance of people through workplace design and management has more than a whiff of the Enlightenment of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries about it. The Enlightenment marked a new era in which the old superstitions and dogmas were to be overthrown by pure reason.
This intellectual development was seen by its proponents as enough to convince the world of the ways in which we could improve the human condition.
It’s a battle that was won in some ways but which continues to this day, as you can tell from the work of the most prominent modern day evangelists of pure reason such as Richard Dawkins, Ben Goldacre and the late Christopher Hitchens. Conversely, we can also discern it the enduring ability of people to believe palpable nonsense. You can see the same appeal to reason in many of the ways firms and facilities managers make the case for a progressive approach to workplace design and management.
A regression
They believe, for example, that by quoting the results of surveys about the impact of various factors on the performance of firms and individuals they can convince them of the need to do things in a particular way or – more tenuously – buy certain products.
Yet it leaves the approach open to criticism based on one of the most common objections raised against arguments based on pure reason. Namely that we are left with unanswered questions about the role of abstract notions such as spirituality, love and beauty. This was a challenge for the great thinkers of the Enlightenment such as Hume, Voltaire and Kant who overcame the objection by working on the basis that there was no contradiction. Indeed one of the best measures of mankind’s progress was how much beauty was spread around by the arts. We can extend the same principle to the design of the places we work.