What is on your walls?

When talking about how we innovate and the setting in which we worked, a professor from Berekely asked, "tell me, what is on your walls at the World Bank." On our walls are beautiful photos of diversity represented by numerous cultures that could be featured in National Geographic. In a sense, the people in these photographs are an abstraction - degrees of separation from government officials that serve as our primary clients - and are hardly factored into the work we really do.

Aside from photos there a lot of walls, a huge departure from all of the open spaces and white boards that were present in almost every organization we visited. At both IDEO and Stanford's Design School (both bore the mark of David Kelley's design ethos) we saw temporary team place that served as mini-workshops or "collaboratories" for collaborative work. Workers were mobile and only use their more individual work stations on an as needed basis rather than as a tethered location.

We all remarked on the freedom this offered, but also the energy that sprung from these spaces. We at the Innovation Practice are trying to influence the way our workspace is designed and visiting other organizations gave me a lot of ideas to bring back.