Part I: Overview
Planning, design and strategizing have been separated from the daily work of companies for decades, despite many efforts to combine them. But the digitization of the economy, the dependence on intellectual capital for success, and the well-known increasing rate of change conspire to remove the boundary. We probably won’t see the end of the business planning retreat as a tool, but many of its components will be replaced by capabilities that are built into the normal work environment and made accessible to the general workforce.

There are three basic types of collaborative spaces: war rooms, creativity centers, and collaboration centers. War rooms represent one successful attempt to improve the collaboration between people and real time information. The best examples provide a side-by-side presentation of current operating information and models of the business and its environment that facilitate decision-making. Creativity centers hold a position at the other end of the spectrum where play, visualization, and out-of-the-box activities create lateral shifts in thinking. Collaboration centers hold the middle ground, making a nod to both the need for creative thinking and access to strategic models and operational information.

All of these examples are more or less removed from daily business activity and furthermore, their cost restricts access to only the upper echelons of senior management. New thinking in the field talks about combining these three approaches into a single capability that provides a team with soup-to-nuts services, but many of these approaches still rely upon expensive environments separated from daily work. Most of them also require dedicated teams to manage them. This approach to combination defeats attempts to provide distributed access to creativity, collaboration, operational, and strategic management tools across the organization.

A part of every organization’s work is transactional in nature and a part is strategic. Between these two lies a realm of exception management and problem solving. In some firms, people who work in this realm are al-lowed to make strategic level decisions and in other firms, they are limited to the tactical level. Regardless, they find themselves in need of technologies, processes and work places that support a high-intensity, edge-of-chaos type workstyle. The solutions that are available, usually go only to the senior management team. Other, more affordable solutions can only be found piece-meal. Furniture manufacturers, interior designers, pro-cess consultants, creativity gurus, technology compa-nies each solve a piece of the puzzle and some overlap with each other, but no one offers a comprehensive approach.

Basic Design Criteria