Few in our industry would dispute the importance of the convergence of place and work. We all likely ascribe to the posture, pun intended, that place can significantly impact the performance of work, the output created, the success of the organization, and the overall well-being of the person at work there. For a few paragraphs here, I’d like to consider a slightly different perspective on this convergence of place and work.
Starting with place. The University of Notre Dame. I first visited that renowned campus in 1965. It was the summer of my 7th grade year, and I had boarded a bus for South Bend joining classmates who would serve as child-care volunteers at a parenting conference being held at Notre Dame. At the time, the place struck me as exceptionally special, distinctive, though largely in ways I could not articulate at the time. Admittedly, I had not had a wealth of experience on college campuses. I returned there over 40 years later to do some consulting work on a capital campaign for the University’s Development Office, this time more capable of putting words to my sense of wonder at the place and the perceptible aura it cast. Another 15 years passed, and I received a Fellowship to study in the Inspired Leadership Initiative at Notre Dame, a program for senior leaders who want to figure out the next phase of career and life. During that year on campus, I even wrote a piece for officeinsight on some observational learning about how students were working on campus, specifically the places and settings they were choosing for their work and the potential implications for the business workplace that their generation would eventually occupy.
Most recently, I was accepted into yet another program at Notre Dame, this one a year-long course created by their Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society to explore the learning dynamics for teaching data science and Artificial Intelligence, we all facilely call it AI, to non-STEM learners, both undergraduates and adult learners in the same environment. No question into which group I fit. The intent of the program is to envision real-world workplace applications for the power and potential of AI and to explore the most effective ways to teach about it to non-computer scientists. A few times a month I am again back at Notre Dame, that place that just won’t escape the pathways of my life.
Now, about work. During my year of studying in the shadow of that famous Golden Dome in 2022-2023, I took a course called Work, Meaning & Happiness taught by a philosophy professor named Paul Blaschko. It was fascinating to experience the outlooks on the nature of work and their futures in the workforce from the young but amazingly mature students, and to see work, courtesy of Blaschko, through the lens of a long arc of philosophical thought. An aside, Paul Blaschko and I became fast friends from all of our dialogues on the working life, and he just shared with me this month the latest version of his manuscript for his next book, tentatively titled: Worklife: A Philosophical Guide. It will be well worth your read when it is published, likely next year.
The academic focus on the nature of work was instructive, particularly for the application to place, and specifically the knowledge workplace. In our industry and profession, we tend to immediately jump to considering work in the context of space and furniture and floorplate layouts and the rhythms of daily working. For example, is work now “hybrid” when it comes to place, and what does that look like? Perhaps, instead, we would benefit from grounding our thinking in a larger context, namely the underlying foundations of the very nature of work. What are the philosophical origins of the notion of work itself? What is its fundamental meaning? Where does it fit in the context of an outlook on life itself? How should we understand the nature of work even before we try to consider its form in our lives, let alone the place where it happens?
I thought of all those sorts of questions when I listened again to a TEDx talk by a colleague and friend, Amanda Schneider. You all likely know Amanda from her exceptional work leading ThinkLab and her contributions to the research that informs a thorough understanding of our industry. Amanda delivered an insightful TEDx talk in 2024 that is unmistakably worth the 12+ minutes of your time; look it up, lots of good insights. However, it won’t surprise Amanda that I found a bit of a quibble with one of her observations. She knows well, I’m afraid, how knit-picky I can be. At one point in her presentation Amanda said, “Work is broken.” She goes on to justify that statement by referencing how wedded we seem to be to outlooks and practices around work that are clearly out of alignment with our current realities and needs. The point she makes is largely irrefutable, that we are burdened by some pretty outmoded outlooks and practices, concepts and structures that we would do well to question, if not abandon altogether. However, that headline statement she articulated is, I’d submit, false. Work is not broken. The fundamental meaning of work, its role in human flourishing, and its contributions to a meaningful and satisfying life, is not at all broken. In fact, it likely needs revisiting so that we can benefit from a deeper understanding of its foundations and can thus create a richer context for how we move through our days. Our conceptualization and practice of work might be severely damaged, and Amanda is likely right about that, but the basic idea and meaning of work is entirely whole and robustly healthy. We just need to understand it more thoroughly and apply that understanding.
This began with a focus on place and work but meandered beyond the office workplace to a university setting, beyond considerations of the rhythms and processes of knowledge work to the philosophy that underpins the larger concept of work. With any luck, it creates a context for us to have even more meaningful conversations about an arena where we spend so much time and energy.