'Mass migration: The BBC story'

The British Broadcasting Corporation (‘the BBC’) needed to rationalise its portfolio of properties in London. So it embarked on a major relocation programme. Amongst other things, this involved moving about 2,000 people from numerous locations, mostly in central London, to a new single site location in White City, West London (- a site regarded fondly by older Londoners for the dog racing track which used to be there).

The property team at the BBC (‘Property’) charged themselves with the responsibility of making this transition as smooth as possible. Property were aware that some staff might take longer to adjust to their new environment and in particular the concept of ‘open plan’ working. The concept of open plan working was to be applied throughout the new building for all staff, irrespective of seniority or discipline. This principle included shared spaces both formal and informal which meant many of the movers would need to consider new ways of working. Right from the outset, emotions were running high and there was some scepticism about the value of any kind of consultation.

All the same, Property felt this too important a move to do a ‘lift and shift’. So they decided on a bold and intensive approach even though they knew they would run risks as a Division doing so. They would consult as many of the movers as possible as to what they would like from their new space, with the explicit commitment that these needs and hopes would be embedded into the shaping of their new home.

Property also hoped that this level of early engagement would prompt movers to see that the move was a combination of physical space, and of the psychology and changed habits which people were willing to bring with them to make the new space work. Property were convinced that they needed to get people to understand this was a very real opportunity to create an environment that would improve the way people worked as individuals, within their teams and as a whole, organisation or “One BBC”.

NOTE: All client quotes are in italics

Situation

Sparknow had worked with the BBC before at a much smaller departmental scale in the BBC, with a space project where we looked at redesigning a work environment to include some of the elements that were to be applied to the White City project. We had also been asked by the head of knowledge management to run a short workshop session on other case studies of our work in this area.

This early work resulted in Property commissioning Sparknow to help towards the fulfilment of their ambitions. Our role, as they put it to us, was to act as “honest brokers” between the movers and those parties or “implementation teams” who would create the finished product. We were to be on the side of the movers when it came to making sure the implementation teams were really taking on board their wishes. At the same time, we were to nudge the movers into making the most ambitious changes in their work practices that we could. We were also to facilitate the creation of a community amongst the nominated Move Champions which would outlast our presence, and create a core dynamic which would help in the management of the transition, which should continue to be a balance of provocation and support.

This was a pretty risky position, both for Property to commission and for Sparknow to assume. The risk was increased by both the shortness of the time possible within the project to attempt something like this, and by the wariness of some of the suppliers of the move as to how our role as provocateurs and advocates might impact on them.

We agreed at the outset to try and mitigate some of this risk by de-branding Sparknow, and putting the Sparknow work under the banner of ‘White City Project Team’ in a bid to create more of a sense of communal ambition.

Intervention

So what happened in practice?

Over a ten-week period we had to draw out the movers’ needs and wishes and translate these into a timely brief which married ambition with concrete requirements. Each “intervention” or action was designed to build upon the last so that the whole represented a cohesive body of work.

Move Champions to represent each of the 12 migrating divisions had already been nominated. We decided, with Property, to regard this as an embryonic ‘Community of Practice’. Each individual Move Champion would be serviced by a Sparknow relationship manager (based on investment banking principles), and the overall programme would be intended to create relations of trust and confidence between them so that they organised themselves into the community which would help effect an, at times, uncomfortable transition. We kicked off with an event which brought the Move Champions together for the first time and made clear the roles and responsibilities inherent in the project.

The event was designed to generate ‘serious’ outputs while retaining a sense of fun for the participants, something that Sparknow attempts to impart to all events and workshops. Given that the BBC is a vast media enterprise with a strong emphasis on the development and management of talent, we decided early on that the creative aspects of our design approach would need even more attention on this occasion, while not losing sight of the rigor and methodological approach which Property and the implementation teams needed. Together, we looked at what was unique and what was similar about the way each division worked, what were the enablers and barriers to a successful relocation and ideal qualities to a work environment. On the lighter side we considered what fictional and or historical characters would make the ideal Move Champion, which invoked people as diverse as Machiavelli, Moses and Mary Poppins (and that is just the M’s).

The initial event was one component in a cumulative set of components which combined products and experiences. The first component to follow the kick off event was a diagnostic process which involved interviewing approximately 12% of all the migrants. To ensure we had a representative sample, the Move Champions provided breakdowns of their Divisions into constituent teams/departments and we worked closely with the BBC property team to design the interview template. Using a brief entitled ‘Never mind the width, feel the quality’ the Sparknow interviewing team were tasked with holding a mirror up to movers, asking them to reflect on their current space and working practices and to think about what they might like to change. We sought to create interesting brief encounters, not interviews in the traditional sense. The conversations were based around a small number of open-ended questions such as ‘if you could have someone else’s workspace, whose would it be and why?’; ‘where do you hide?’; ‘is tidiness an issue?’; ‘what reaction would you want visitors to your work space to have?’; ‘How would your ideal space feel?’ which people were asked to answer as themselves. Using an appreciative style, the desire was to capture as many voices as possible and uncover rich seams of personal meaning, information, views and ideas which could then be knitted together later into a bigger, more startling cultural picture – to increase the likelihood that the final brief would resonate with the migrating staff.

This approach complemented the other activities such as the online research being done simultaneously, which, though not devoid of personal meaning, sought more quantitative data and asked people to express preferences for very concrete things. By contrast to the questionnaire, the face-to-face conversations gave migrating staff the possibility to express fears, anxieties and vulnerabilities, as well as enthusiasm for possibilities.

In three weeks 157 interviews were carried out, taped and transcribed to build summaries of key points and pivotal themes. These findings were distilled (but not diluted) into an Analysis Framework which was done on a divisional basis (12 block analysis), according to the principles of emergence. The analysis framework then helped to create the supporting structure for the Final Brief While this was going on, the Sparknow relationship managers, known as the Links, arranged induction meetings and worked with the Move Champions to set up “mood boards” in team spaces to invite wider participation. The resulting collages of words and images were photographed and used as provocation and stimulation devices for the planned Decision Forum events.

“This proved a good way to engage staff not previously involved in the interviews and has remained a focal point for communications” - Move Champion

Representatives from each division were invited by their respective Move Champions to attend their own Decision Forum events facilitated by Sparknow. (They were deliberately renamed during the design process, to make sure that they were not just another workshop.) Over a three week period, some 132 attendees at 12 forums used narrative and visualisation exercises to explore identity, values and working practices with input from the key themes from interview analysis, and to conclude by making concrete decisions regarding the design of their future workspace. All the assets were digitally recorded, printed and laminated and sent back to the Move Champions (in most cases) for their mood boards, again encouraging wider communication and ownership. The outputs from all these events would also form part of the brief content.

Running concurrently throughout this diagnostic process and event series was a communications campaign which was conceived as a series of posters and site specific installations designed to provoke people to think differently about their workspace and to steer them towards a website intended to act as a central communications hub for the project. The website included a friendly FAQ and straightforward guidance which built into a repository of information for all the movers.

“Interesting and fun too. I don’t know if it made anyone actually think about their space but it was definitely an interesting concept" - Move Champion

“The Communications Campaign was a great idea, with its combination of physical presence, whimsical imagery, and leading towards a digital space where questions and answers could be evolved in a frank and open way. Fully implemented this approach would have created all that would be needed for an induction to the new spaces and their work etiquette, and one which would really have engaged people and made them take responsibility for their own contribution” - Email conversation between Victoria Ward and Will Ross of Sparknow

All of the assets, information and narrative outcomes from these processes were then condensed into a brief template(s). Sparknow and the Move Champions worked together to create the best possible statement of each divisions aspirations, decisions and requirements. The brief template was used as a framework to enable consistent writing and to ensure that each divisional brief could be put next to one another, dissembled and rearranged to suit the implementation teams. The finished briefs were to act as portfolio carriers, owned by the Move Champions and their respective divisions which would become a repository for all the elements around the move process up to and after the actual move in dates.

“The brief template was really hard to evolve and get right. It was conceived of as a way to negotiate a really shared understanding between movers and Move Champions as to what they wanted to say, and then between implementation teams and Move Champions as to what implementation teams needed to do. That is to say, the template was intended as a kind of interface which would be the glue between 3 key communities – movers, implementation teams supplying the move, and the White City Project Team. The idea is inescapably right. Again, shortness of time did not allow us to use this as effectively as we could have done on this occasion as an intervention to create shared understanding and community. However, the potential is enormous” - Victoria Ward being interviewed by Stephanie Colton as part of Sparknow lessons learned process

There was also an on-line questionnaire which was sent to all the movers with two main objectives. Firstly, it gave all the migrants previously untouched by the process to date, an opportunity to have an input. Secondly, the analysis of these questionnaires was also broken down by division and was used as a cross check and to provide quantitative statistics to back up the narrative within the briefs.

Very important to us, as a principle, was to seek to retain the rawness of the thinking, rather than polish it wrongly. We left gaps where there were gaps. We highlighted uncertainties where these existed. We tried to assemble all the raw materials and re-present them in such a way that the designers could get under the skin of the fears, needs and ambitions of a particular community and then respond to this in the design process. Where the visualization exercises and narratives in the Decision Forums had been rich experiences, we sought to recreate this as a kind of walk-through scenario of the space which would help the designers get a picture into their heads of what stage individual divisions were at. We also intended to use the negotiation of the brief, through the template, to become a dynamic three way process between us, the Move Champions and their Divisions, and the implementation teams. We did not, on this occasion, manage to make the brief development process as interactive as this. We would next time.

“A very comprehensive document was provided by Sparknow – all our needs, ideas, suggestions etc were included in an easy to read style” - Move Champion

We then began the handover process to remove ourselves from the project and to hand over ownership of these portfolios to the Move Champions for them to share with the implementation teams. The handover process was formally concluded at a Final Event attended by all the Move Champions, implementation team representatives and the BBC project team, facilitated by Sparknow. The event was also used to celebrate the achievements and work that had been created to date and to build upon the successful community of practice that was the Move Champions so that it included at least one representative from each of the implementation teams.

“When I get back to the office with all the work you have done, my team are all going to take me out for a drink because what you have created is going to make our job so much easier” - Leo Falcone DEGW account manager for the BBC White City 2 project addressing the audience at the final handover event

“This was a very useful day – it really brought this group together and made us realize we all had similar problems in our areas. It was a good forum for talking about the building as a whole and how we could make the most use of it” - Move Champion

Finally all the briefs were put onto a CD-ROM, organized in a transparent matrix format so as to be readable horizontally and vertically which was then presented to all the implementation teams and the BBC project team. We intended this to have some immediate impact, perhaps drawing people across Divisions to see what others had said and pick up ideas or open conversations. We also intended to act as some kind of reference point for later reviews: ‘for better or for worse this is what we said at the time. How does what we have actually done differ from it?'

Impact

The main impact was the sheer number of people touched by the process either directly or virtually in a necessarily compact time period. It was also clear that these people were very pleased to be asked for their input, something that the vast majority had not experienced before at work.

A cohesive Community of Practice is formed and is working well in marrying aspirations to finished workplace environment.

The BBC Property team are considering reusing, in an adapted form to take account of lessons learned, the process we jointly developed, as a blueprint for all future moves involving BBC staff.

“In conclusion, I thought the whole Sparknow process was very useful. It really made us look at what we needed and what we desired for the new office. It made us discuss as a group what we require from the new building and how we can make some changes to the way we work” - Move Champion

“Overall, I would say one of the key contributions made by Sparknow was the fact that they significantly helped to reduce the fear factor about the move as their gentle consultative approach made the users feel they were in control, not being controlled by the migration project machinery" - Implementation team leader

“Aiming high while also recognising risk will give us the chance of achieving way beyond the ordinary. The building needs to feel like something you have never worked in. We as a team will do everything in our power to match that aspiration" - BBC White City II Move team