Dr Craig Knight is an occupational psychologist and managing director of Prism, which sounds a little bit like a modern-day Spectre (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion). Truth be told, Prism is a consultancy that specialises in something almost completely different – Psychological Research into Identity and Space Management. I say almost, because even Knight points out that psychologists, at times, can be a fairly “amoral” bunch of characters. 

Once an office designer, Knight now works in a specific realm of psychological speciality. To paint a general picture of his work, he undertakes research that helps to improve people’s working and living environments, and consults companies on ways to increase business productivity using scientific rather than heuristic methods. He readily admits, down the line from Exeter during our post-presentation phone conversation – he recently spoke in New Zealand at a CoreNet-hosted evening – that psychologists have a lot to answer for when it comes to the subject of “lean” workspaces. Knight has published a number of papers on the subject, and his doctoral dissertation on the psychology of office and living space resulted in academic, governmental and commercial backing for Prism. 

So, anyway, what’s wrong with lean? One would imagine that in these recessionary times the concept would be the ideal balm to apply to a world wounded by corporate greed. Lean, as made popular by the Toyota Production System, which turned a small Japanese car manufacturer into one of the world’s largest, is a methodology based on elimination of waste. Knight says, Toyota’s system is rooted in the early 20th century principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the godfather of the modern office, but from a worker-centric rather than a managerial point of view, there are a few hiccups with a system of efficient production when applied to work and living spaces rather than a car assembly line. 

Knight has done plenty of research, conducting controlled experiments and developing specific and tested measures for well-being and productivity. This work has shown “unconsciously incompetent space-management and design techniques proliferating in global business of all kinds.” 

The good news? It’s not necessarily the designer’s fault. Knight says designers and managers providing staff with “enriched space” are trying to be the good guys. Psychologists, it seems, must bear some of the responsibility for perpetuating the myth of lean spaces, for the most part by not showing any interest in the subject, or by spouting pop psychology that works only as an adjunct to management.

Because of his background in office design, Knight has always been interested in how space is used. From a business perspective it’s really clear how lean works. “You take the photographs from people’s desks, because that’s going to distract you from your job, take out the plants and flowers. All you leave are the things that you need to do the job. That way you can focus on the job and you’ll be more efficient. But psychologically that shouldn’t work at all – you’re putting someone in an impoverished space. If you put a gorilla in a lean zoo or even an ant in a lean jam jar, then they will be really unhappy.” 

With this in mind, Knight and associates started to experiment, doing simple things to start with, like enriching workspaces using plants and pictures. “We went from lean to enriched, and we compared that, and then we thought, ‘Let’s give people a choice – this is your office, why don’t you decorate it as you want.’ So we empowered people to decorate their own space. So we went from ‘lean’ to ‘enriched’ to ‘empowered’. And we’ve been doing that now since 2003. 

“Every time we’ve run an experiment, lean has always been the worst space in terms of both well-being and productivity. And the empowered space has always been the best space; sometimes the equal best, just like lean is sometimes the equal worst. But lean has never been anything other than the worst space you can put someone into.”

Knight’s research points to the benefits of “identity realisation”, which sounds like psychological claptrap but is simply explained. 

“If you are in an empowered space, you can put up your photograph and other things you like around you. That realises your identity in that space. That’s why we think it’s so successful. The best space is not the fantastically designed space; it’s the space in which you see your identity reflected, a space in which you feel the most comfortable. With lean, none of your identity is realised, but it does realise the identity of your boss, because it’s their idea. They’ve probably been trained in 6 Sigma, which is a lean philosophy. They therefore know what to do with the office. And like I say, it realises their identity perfectly. While it might emasculate the rest of the workforce, it’s fantastic for the people that implement it.”

Of course, nothing is ever cut and dried. Some people prefer lean, some don’t, and Knight says there’s no statistical difference between the two. “To force a lean desk on someone who naturally likes stuff all over the place is a bit like forcing a messy desk on someone who wants a completely lean space.” 

TKnight is full of anecdotes; our conversation could almost redefine wide ranging. On the subject of employee trust, Knight explains the concept of the panopticon, a conceptual prison thought up by renowned utilitarian Jeremy Bentham in 1783. Grimly poetic, he described it then as a “mill for grinding rogues honest, and idle men industrious.” It can be simply imagined as a small circle within a larger one, the smaller concentric circle in the centre is the guard tower. The design means that a guard can look into any cell, at any time, to see what anyone is doing. Obscured glass means the guard can look out but nobody can see him, so the prisoners don’t know whether or not they’re being monitored. 

The beauty of this, explains Knight, is that two guards can look at twice as many cells as one guard; four guards, four times as many. 

“But you can also get away with no guards. Foucault called it the perfect surveillance system. Now think about the last time you phoned up to pay off your credit card. You probably heard: ‘This call may be monitored for training purposes.’ It’s that system reintroduced, and it only happens to people at the bottom of the scale. It doesn’t happen when you phone up the solicitor or accountant.” 

And this is where we get back to trust. The modern condition is that we don’t trust the people that we employ and, in particular, we trust the people at the bottom of the food chain least of all. The Taylorist wheel just keeps turning. 

“There’s a chap called Paul Morrell,” says Knight. “He’s the chairman of the British Council of Offices, and he’s said that we have a workforce that’s divided between the over-monitored, over-managed majority, and the over-privileged self-directed few. Almost all of the ‘sexy’ design is aimed at the privileged, self-monitored people – the people that can work in coffee shops, the people that have got iPads, the people that can be flexible as to where they work, when they work. Most people are still stuck in offices that haven’t changed for 100 years – the people that have their phone calls monitored, the people that can’t use their Hotmail account or go on Facebook because they’re banned from doing it by management. There’s a big split in the workforce.”

Prism’s research isn’t just limited to office spaces. The principles have been researched and applied in other sectors. One study was into care homes, a sector that Knight says “left offices a long way behind a long time ago.” 

Disturbingly, at some point in the past, there was such a thing as a lean care home, he recounts. In such places, occupants’ personal possessions were taken away, uniforms were worn and beds were racked up in wards. This standardised model was popular because things could be kept spotlessly clean, but for obvious reasons it was dispensed with in the UK in the 1940s. Today’s care homes run on a hotel model. Where it starts to get interesting is that “there’s an inverse correlation in care homes between length of stay and life satisfaction.” That is, the longer people stay, the more miserable they become. 

“Another issue is that when people are moved in care homes, or from one home to another, they tend to withdraw into their own space. That’s fine, because in their own space they can see things that are familiar, but one thing that keeps older adults alive is social interaction.”

The cue for research into this sector came from Somerset Care, a UK company that was having issues with the movement of occupants. The problem it was experiencing was with withdrawal. “People withdraw into their own rooms and then come back out again once they get used to the space,” – which, for a period of time, meant a large dip in social interaction, with the associated implications on quality and length of life.

“We said to the residents, you’re going to move with all the great care you’re accustomed to, your one-to-one care and we got all the relatives involved. We said, ‘This social space that you’re going to move into, we want you to help design it. We’d like you to tell us what pictures you want, what plants you’d like, and where you want to put them.’”

That was done and a control group was also monitored (that does seem like a slightly inappropriate way to define a group of elderlies). At the start of the experiment it was found that just after the move, the control condition dipped, while people in the home who had developed the shared space were using it four times as much.

“There was no dip at all. By the end of the study you could go into that space at any one time and 50 per cent of the residents were there.” 

Knight says this study went on to form the basis of a programme for the BBC. It was repeated with  some cognitive testing as well. That study found that involving people in the design of their space also increased their cognitive scores by 19 per cent.

Back to work: Knight says that, most often, what we’re providing people with is a beautifully enriched office space. “If you give people a say in their space, then it’s even better still. Let people say what they want; it’s a simple, but fairly fundamental concept.”