I grew up in a time of wild experimentation, although I did not know that at the time. It was the 1970s. The school tried to foist “soy burgers” on us, but the kids knew better. We wouldn’t eat them. There were experiments in new diets that tried to get us to give up eggs and butter and eat more grains. There were new types of clothing such as the “leisure suit” and “big bells.”
In classroom pedagogy, the students were used as guinea pigs for new schemes such as “new math.” “Language experience” replaced phonics. Diagramming sentences was out. So was spelling. I might have been the last generation to learn cursive, so I was spared the movement to get rid of it.
Among the experiences was the open classroom. Some crazy consultants prevailed on our school and they tore down all the walls between classrooms. I have a vague recollection of showing up to strange land. It was one huge space and we were all positioned into groups. The cacophony was unbearable.
That might have lasted only a week or so before teachers started buying bookshelves and setting them up between classrooms. The shelves grew higher and higher. Eventually, they became walls, so that at least we had visual containment. Still, the noise was unbearable. By the next year, all the walls were back.
I marvel at how idiotic that experiment was. Who came up with this idea? It was one that swept academia and progressive education circles. The theorists were not actually teachers but only intellectuals. They conjured up a world of emancipation from walls that would somehow cause students to feel emboldened. It was really just a way of repudiating the past in the most absurd ways.
Leaping forward decades later, the idea swept the corporate world, too. It stemmed from an insight. The most important conversations, where the real work gets done, are around the water cooler and the coffee pot in the kitchen. This is where the collaboration happens. What if we made the entire office a water cooler space and a kitchen-like spot?
What an insight! But not really. Sure, those conversations are important, even crucial, but the work itself does not take place there, only the “brainstorming.” It is seriously distorted to imagine your entire office consisting of nothing but people blabbing with each other, a nonstop meeting, and formalizing that within an office space.
I once went to work for an office that was set up the traditional way, with cubicles and offices and various moveable walls so that teams could be grouped. Everyone was happy. Then tragically, the company got more funding and decided to move. Some egghead was in charge of imagining the new office space.
The result was a huge “collaboration” space with long desks. You could observe everyone in the office from wherever you were. If someone blew his nose, you could see it. If one’s phone rang, there was nowhere to go to answer it. You had to excuse yourself and go outside and everyone watched. We knew how long people were gone and when they came back.
At first it seemed exciting and progressive. But after only a few weeks, it became oppressive. People started showing up with noise-cancelling headphones. They would take every possible sick day. They would bury themselves in their computers physically in order to regain the sense of privacy. If you wanted anyone’s attention, you had to text them. They would text back.
There was zero collaboration. It was just the opposite. Everyone in the office began to think of everyone else as a spy and an enemy. The place was dead quiet with only the sounds of keyboard clicks. Otherwise everyone struggled to create an isolation tank for themselves. Teamwork was gone. The panopticon-like environment generated extreme isolation.
None of it worked and we all knew it. But the investment had been made and we were stuck with it. No one complained in public because it was the boss who had hatched the cockamamie scheme. Here again, we were all used as guinea pigs in an elaborate plan that disregarded the realities of work life.
The guy who masterminded the scheme eventually left the company. COVID-19 rescued the staff from coming in and the place became a ghost town for years, with employees deploying the excuse of infectious disease in order to be liberated from the commute to the panopticon.
After all, by this time, every office was using Slack or Teams or some other communication tool anyway. To be physically present offered only cost and no benefit. It was a failed experiment born of theory that had nothing to do with the way people actually work.
What everyone wants now is an office with a door. If not that, at least you want walls in front of you and barriers next to you. These were once derided as “cubicles” but at least these defer to a humane sense of the desire for some modicum of privacy.
This explains why so many in the professional class were thrilled to work at home.
Following that corporate disaster, another fashion seems to have taken its place; namely, the meeting—glorified in theory but much hated in reality. These occur either in person or on video call. I’ve never met anyone who likes them or finds them valuable. But every office has a manager without talent who likes meetings because they pass the time and create the appearance that someone is in charge.
Office meetings are occasions for all sorts of peacocking and passive-aggressive signaling systems. Everyone becomes aware of the liars, the suck-ups, the preeners, the corporate blatherers, the schemers, the backstabbers, and the double-crossers. Also, they are exhausting. After a three-hour meeting, everyone is essentially done for the day and hits the fridge or the bars.
A serious corporate challenge over the past two years has been coaxing employees back to the office. What managers and CEOs have discovered is that employees prefer private spaces. They like offices. They want dedicated spaces to focus, like they have at home. As a result, the open office has largely gone away, replaced by a more humane model.
These schemes have all failed the market test. They are inconsistent with how people go about their productive lives. They don’t always want to “collaborate"; sometimes people just want to work. The managerial theorists here clearly did far more harm than good.
Why must we keep experimenting and learning the same lessons over and over? The 1970s were a time of huge experiments that failed. The decades pass and the dumb idea gets resurrected all over again. Consider the soy burger. Sure enough, that too came back under some new name and it failed yet again.
The fashion for the new and ultimately unworkable idea never quite goes away. Our desire to “innovate” in ways that are preposterous is apparently irresistible. We seem to be living in times in which there is a burning desire to recover what we lost when the intellectuals were put in charge.
