We should return to the office full time ... or not

With lockdowns and stay-at-home orders easing and vaccinations rising we are in the midst of a vigorous and timely debate about the future of knowledge work. A major point of contention is the future of the office. Some people want to return to "the before times" where the preferred norm was full-time office work. At the other extreme there are those who would rather work remotely and never go back. Most, like me, fall somewhere in between.

The fun (or at least conventional) thing to do would be to jump straight into a vigorous debate, and pump up our own arguments and debunk opposing positions. But there are other and better ways. Let's instead explore the issue systematically and positively, with the goal of finding satisfying win-win solutions. I'll be using Eliyahu "Theory of Constraints" Goldratt's evaporating cloud technique.

You can already see the completed (though not resolved) cloud above. In the remainder of the article I'll show how it was set up. This should be enough to enable you to read clouds — building effective clouds takes lots of practice and expert tuition on the finer points. If you want to learn do this for yourself: I recommend Graham Scott's course.

Setting up the Conflict

We will need to be specific, so let's start with the statement "We must return to the office full time" and its logical opposite "We must not return to the office full time".

What are the benefits of these positions? To me, a big benefit of everyone going back to the office is co-location with team members, while the prospect of not going back anecdotally makes at least some people happy. We could choose other benefits to focus on, but these will do for now.

Let's draw our first diagram ...

We read the completed boxes as follows:

• In order to have happy team-members we must not return to the office full time.
• In order to have a co-located team we must return to the office full time.

Now, you may well be ready to challenge either or both of these assertions. Please do! Write down your solutions and when you're ready read on and see how your solutions compare with following a few more steps of this technique.

Finding a common goal

What about the common goal? We don't really have a conflict if there isn't a higher shared purpose. For example: if you want to go out for Indian food and I want to go out and eat Italian food there is only a conflict if we also want to share the meal; otherwise we can happily go our separate ways.

So, what do we get when we have happy team members in a co-located team. I'm going to suggest that we have a "high-performing team" or at least potentially so (there are other elements!) and given that high-performing teams are both intrinsically and extrinsically desirable (i.e. fun and productive) this is a sensible goal.

We now have four statements:

1. In order to have a high-performing team we need happy team-members.
2. [Also] In order to have a high-performing team we need a co-located team.
3. [And] in order to have happy team-members we must not return to the office full-time.
4. [But] in order to have a co-located team we must return to the office full-time.

Already you are probably questioning some of this logic:

• How much happiness is tied to not returning to the office?
• How essential is co-location to high-performance? [What has measurable performance been like during remote work?]
• Could we co-locate elsewhere?

And indeed we could resolve the cloud right now, but let's keep going! We will find more creative solutions by continuing.

Uncovering assumptions

What are the assumptions behind each arrow?

We uncover assumptions by extending each of the four sentences with the "becauses". You can probably brainstorm lots of these. The more the merrier.

"In order to have a high-performing team we need happy team-members because only happy team-members are energised to contribute."

Or as a list:

• only happy team-members are energised to contribute
• only happy team-members are loyal to the organisation
• only happy team-members help each other out
• only happy team-members care about each other
• etc.

We can do this for all four arrows.

Questioning assumptions

To question our assumptions (the secret of creative thinking!) we reverse the logic of each and every one and look for the interesting assumptions.

Consider:

• Not only happy team-members are energised to contribute
• Not only happy team-members are loyal to the organisation
• Not only happy team-members help each other out
• Not only happy team-members care about each other

Perhaps not as promising as the other arrows, but we can recognise strategies that find other ways to motivate performance that are not reliant on happiness: some otherwise unhappy people are undoubtedly energised by purpose or financial rewards, for example.

By repeating this exercise for all four arrows we generate a large number of possible injections for all four statements / arrows:

Reviewing the completed cloud, I came to the following suggestions for the future of office-work:

1. Make the office more attractive so people will want to come in.
2. Explore alternative places to co-locate or make more selective use of office time.
3. Should we primarily focus on employee happiness or (say) employee purpose and meaning?
4. What are the other necessary conditions for a high-performing team besides co-location and happiness?
5. Could we get rid of the office completely or down-size it, with employees working from home + nearby co-working spaces?
6. We should explore giving managers training in remote supervision.

Regardless of whether the policy levers are pulled one way or another the final cloud gives lots of ideas for how to make return to office, go remote, or various hybrid models better for all concerned.

Take-aways

• Well-handled conflicts can generate progress
• Conflict clouds are an excellent tool for combining analysis and creative thinking to crack open conflicts
• We do not need to fall into polarising and triggering debate to make progress
• We can get much further using visualisation than by holding everything in our heads
• With superior tools and complementary skills we can get more win-win outcomes and fewer win-loss outcomes and poor compromises.

Going further

Are you in the midst of a conflict? Find someone experienced to coach you through the process.

For me (and I suspect most people) getting effective with clouds requires a lot of practice to get the hang of it, plus expert tuition to master the finer points. Although I've walked you through the process of constructing a cloud there's a bit more to it than you might think, but you will surely discover when you try it yourself.

The above cloud was my final assignment in Graham Scott's brilliant online course High Performance Thinking using the Conflict Cloud, which was exactly what I needed to really get the hang of the method. It's a short course, but you will need to do a lot of clouds to complete it ... and then hopefully keep going.

Although I have known of the evaporating cloud technique for many years I didn't realise until recently just how powerful it could be. Thanks to Karl Perry, who has built out a whole coaching method around the cloud, for winning me over.