You-Topia: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on Our Work, Our Life and Our Environment

By Erik Veldhoen

You-Topia

You-topia is about people and about organisations. Its about the future of our society.
You-topia is not a utopia, but is based largely on experience and evidence.
You-topia is also a work of philosophy based on logical reasoning that is grounded in experience and evidence.
You-topia is a call to action. How can we become our own leaders in this promising, seductive world?
You-topia is, above all else, about the journey that we must make to regain the balance between desire and discipline. It is a world in which people and organisations perform better and are therefore happier and more successful.

Let the journey to You-topia begin. Theres no excuse to put it off any longer. It will be worth your while.

Welcome to the new world You-topia! Your ideal space!
Because its all about the choices that you make:

The moments you choose to do everyday things
The places you choose to do your work
The people you choose to meet
The relevant discipline you choose to exercise
The relevant energy you choose to spend
The inspiration that you seek to achieve a satisfactory balance in your life

This ideal place isnt yours alone, however. We share the place in order to do our everyday things. You can choose time and again, but your choices must always fit smoothly into the larger organisation to which you belong and into the turbulent society around you.

Ultimately, everyone has to see to their own needs. Everyone has to develop the discipline required to meet the obligations that they take upon themselves, the obligations they have towards themselves and towards their environment. The choices we make in that respect will ultimately change the way we look at life. And that might mean anything from orderly regularity to total chaos, from an anarchical free state to a safe haven, and from steady-as-a-rock to Bacchanalian licentiousness. We have to internalise the freedom we are given. We have to combine the playing field and the rules of the game into a single formula and give them meaning. If we do that respectfully and consciously, then all will be well.

Ever since Frederick Taylor introduced his Principles of Scientific Management, our work and our lives have been in the clutches of management. You-topia shows that severely curtailing our desire to manage everything will improve our lives. Every individual can harness his or her own energy and master his or her productivity. All organisations need do is facilitate this as best they can. Not only is that possible, but it is also going to happen, because You-topia is technology-driven.

Without digitisation, we would not have access to information any time, anywhere.
Without the virtual workspace, we would not be able to work whenever and wherever it suits us.

Modern technology has weaned us off desks and offices and rigid timetables. It has forced us to reconsider time and place. And time and place must be given new meaning in a future that will be entirely different from our post-industrial era. You-topia channels this innovation in a particular direction by looking holistically at our new physical, virtual, and mental reality.

In You-topia, less really is more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493112678

Erik Veldhoen

Erik Veldhoen is an engineer and author who has made his mark in the nineties with the Interpolis office concept in Tilburg, the Netherlands, the materialisation of a notion that attracted worldwide attention and made the flexible workplace common parlance. In 1995, he published The Demise of the Office. His organisation, Veldhoen + Company, has developed new ways of working for more than eighty clients, including Unilever, ABN AMRO, the Dutch Tax Authorities, Shell, the City of s-Hertogenbosch, the Rotterdam Chamber of Commerce, B. Braun, McKinsey, Sabic, Netherlands Railways, the Postbank, and the Hospital of the Future. Veldhoen + Company schedule frequent site visits to these organisations to acquaint interested parties with a new, different, more effective, and, above all, more interesting way of working. In the same way, The Art of Working takes readers on site visits to such examples as SOL (Scandinavia), MicroSoft, and Nortel (Toronto).

Book preview

Contents

OVERTURE

About Overture

You-Topia

The Seven Basic Principles of You-Topia

Summary and Rationale

REQUIEM

About Requiem

Requiem for the Industrial Era

Requiem for the Old Way of Working

Requiem for Old Certainties

POLYPHONY

About Polyphony

To You-Topia

Our Lives

Our Virtual Life space

Our Physical Life space

The Logic of Activity-Based Working

Humans and Their Activity

The New Logic for Organisations

Skills in the Mental Space

Social Cohesion

You-Topia and Sustainability

BIG CHANGE

About Big Change

The Digital Revolution

Revolution and Order

The New Logic of Working

Changes

From Paper to Digital

In Search of the New Workspace

In Search of New Relationships

In Search of New Certainties

The New Logic of Living

ETUDES

About Etudes

Value in the Virtual Space

The Power of the Virtual Space

From Paper to Digital

Connectivity for Everyone All the Time

Devices

Automation and Robots

Collaboration

Activity Analysis

Activities

Activities in the Future

The Circle of Trust

Leaders in Transition

Leadership

Personal Leadership for All

New Employment Relationships

Discipline

Fundamental Needs and Abraham Maslow

Purpose, Meaning, and Spirituality

Life–Work Balance

The Logic of Activity-Based Facilitating

The Demise of the Office

An Activity-Based Building

Architecture

Value in the Physical Space

The Relationship Between the Physical Environment, Behaviour, and Performance

The Integrated Approach and Fundamental Change

About Interpolis

About Orbis, the Hospital of the Future

About Macquarie

About the Dutch City of ‘s-Hertogenbosch

The New Society

FINALE

About Finale

The Big Change

Final Reflections

Rationale

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

(Aristotle, Ethics, approx. 340 BCE)

Overture

About Overture

‘An instrumental composition intended as the introduction to a work of music, opera, or film.’

‘An initial proposal made with the aim of opening negotiations.’

The digital revolution is well underway. People are facing enormous changes. Are we capable of rediscovering the logic of events? Are we ready for paradigm shifts? Are we capable of designing our ideal place in the physical, virtual, and mental space? You-topia to the power of three.

You-topia: It is the society of the future. There are seven basic principles of You-topia, for people and for organisations.

You-Topia

You-topia is about people and about organisations. It’s about the future of our society.

You-topia is not a utopia, but is based largely on experience and evidence.

You-topia is also a work of philosophy based on logical reasoning that is grounded in experience and evidence.

You-topia is a call to action. How can we become our own leaders in this promising, seductive world?

You-topia is, above all else, about the journey that we must make to regain the balance between desire and discipline. It is a world in which people and organisations perform better and are therefore happier and more successful.

Let the journey to You-topia begin. There’s no excuse to put it off any longer. It will be worth your while.

Welcome to the new world—You-topia! Your ideal space!

Because it’s all about the choices that you make:

• The moments you choose to do everyday things

• The places you choose to do your work

• The people you choose to meet

• The relevant discipline you choose to exercise

• The relevant energy you choose to spend

• The inspiration that you seek to achieve a satisfactory balance in your life

This ideal place isn’t yours alone, however. We share the place in order to do our everyday things. You can choose time and again, but your choices must always fit smoothly into the larger organisation to which you belong and into the turbulent society around you.

Ultimately, everyone has to see to their own needs. Everyone has to develop the discipline required to meet the obligations that they take upon themselves, the obligations they have towards themselves and towards their environment. The choices we make in that respect will ultimately change the way we look at life. And that might mean anything from orderly regularity to total chaos, from an anarchical free state to a safe haven, and from steady-as-a-rock to Bacchanalian licentiousness. We have to internalise the freedom we are given. We have to combine the playing field and the rules of the game into a single formula and give them meaning. If we do that respectfully and consciously, then all will be well.

Ever since Frederick Taylor introduced his Principles of Scientific Management, our work and our lives have been in the clutches of management. You-topia shows that severely curtailing our desire to manage everything will improve our lives. Every individual can harness his or her own energy and master his or her productivity. All organisations need do is facilitate this as best they can. Not only is that possible, but it is also going to happen, because You-topia is technology-driven.

• Without digitisation, we would not have access to information any time, anywhere.

• Without the virtual workspace, we would not be able to work whenever and wherever it suits us.

Modern technology has weaned us off desks and offices and rigid timetables. It has forced us to reconsider time and place. And time and place must be given new meaning in a future that will be entirely different from our post-industrial era. You-topia channels this innovation in a particular direction by looking holistically at our new physical, virtual, and mental reality.

In You-topia, less really is more!

The Seven Basic Principles of You-Topia

You-topia is based on logic—the logic of working and the logic of living. That logic can be embodied in a number of basic principles that, taken as a whole, will shape the logic of the future. There are seven basic principles for individuals and seven basic principles for the organisations to which they belong. The two sets of principles are interrelated, and each one has meaning for the other. These basic principles offer us guidelines for shaping the future. It is up to each one of us to find our own balance and to attribute value within that context.

You-topia is thus embodied in seven basic principles for people and seven basic principles for organisations. These principles are concise, interrelated, and mutually conditional. They allow us to come full circle, reassuring us.

The seven basic principles for people in You-topia:

1 Accept the virtual space as space in which to live, work, learn, and shop, on your own or with others.

2 Make sure that all the information you consider important is accessible in the virtual space; share what you do, what you know, and what you produce with your co-workers and employer there.

3 Use wireless connections and mobile devices so that you’re always connected and online.

4 Create your own daily routines and manage your own energy.

5 Decide every day what places are the right ones for the work you have to do.

6 Cherish physical encounters by choosing the right time and place for them and by preparing for the encounter. A physical encounter must be worth the journey.

7 Bring enough discipline into your life; be conscious of your goals and what you need to do, day after day, to achieve them; and remind yourself that you, and you alone, are responsible. What you get in return is autonomy.

The seven basic principles for organisations in You-topia:

1 Make the virtual space a fully fledged workspace.

2 Organise the work and the workflows in the virtual space by digitising everything and by managing all the information required by your organisation and all your stakeholders.

3 Give everyone the freedom, personal leadership, and virtual skills to organise their own work and help them when they run into problems.

4 Organise and facilitate everything by focusing on the activities that have to be carried out.

5 Only create meaningful activity-based physical environments, e.g. for encounters, collaboration, and communication; for unusual tasks and special moments; and for everyday things. Doing this will make new demands on the location, the building structure, and the interior design.

6 Show leadership by identifying the course, the playing field, and the rules of the game. Help everyone in their quest to find themselves and to identify their inner skills.

7 Forge relationships by being there for one another when necessary, in both the physical and virtual space.

If an organisation’s staff can develop the will to put these basic principles into practice, they will create a dynamic environment that crackles with vitality. We are going to work in a new way. The relationship between the virtual, physical, and mental environments will become meaningful.

Once we’ve fulfilled these basic principles, a new society will emerge that can move forward sustainably, with integrity, in happiness, and in a new life space.

People—all people—will shape their own destinies out of a deep sense of responsibility and do only the right things in the most effective way. A healthy life–work balance will be within everyone’s reach.

image%20no1%20copy.jpg

The figure on page 19 is a diagram of the seven basic principles for people and organisations. The outer text describes the principles applying to people, and the inner text, the basic principles for organisations.

Summary and Rationale

A new space is being created in our world: the virtual space.

Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as the virtual space. It’s new, and it’s up to us to explore it.

Today, the virtual space is thriving and expanding. It’s an exciting time to be alive. The virtual space is turning the world upside down. By living our everyday lives in this new space, we are creating brand new opportunities. The fact that we are always ‘present and accounted for’ in the virtual space is changing the way we ‘keep in touch’. We are learning new methods as we go along, in fits and starts. The virtual neighbourhood is an endless one; it stretches to the far corners of the earth. We can be in touch with everyone on the planet. We can be friends with everyone in the world; we can work with everyone in the world; we can learn from everyone in the world; we can buy things from everyone in the world; every doctor in the world can heal us; and everyone in the world can inspire us to lead a better, more fulfilling, healthier life. None of these was possible yet in 2005.

Before we had the virtual space, we made friends with the people who lived in the neighbourhood and worked with us, our colleagues, at the office. We went to designated buildings and rooms to do our everyday things—our house, the office, the factory, the school, the shop, the pub, and so on. We had a rigid schedule, with enforced regularity, and were chained to a particular time and place. But there is good news: the arrival of the virtual space means we can let go of some of the rigidity, some of the regularity, and some of the chains. We will live in the physical space and in the virtual space. We will discover what we can gain by doing so, and history teaches us that society will change as a result.

But how do we find the perfect match? How do we strike the right balance? What do we do in the physical space, and what do we do in the virtual space? How are we going to change our everyday routines? How will we reorganise our work? And what will we need to do something of value—something fulfilling? How are we going to find the new life–work balance that will give us energy? How will we find the right people to help us move forward?

These are all new skills that we must acquire, and these raise many different questions. In the past, we had to learn how to get along and how to behave in different environments: in the neighbourhood, on the street, in our family, at work, at a party, or in the pub. Now, we have to learn to do those things in the virtual environment. We’re sure to pick that up very quickly, because everyone around the world is doing the same and moderating everyone else’s behaviour. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Messenger, email, iChat, and Skype are where we develop those