Forget rehearsed soundbites. This is the kind of conversation where you lean in, lose track of time, and walk away seeing the world differently. Recorded on an iPhone in the lively chaos of Design Days at the MillerKnoll Showroom, Rex Miller and Ryan Anderson dive into an unscripted exchange about what the future of work really looks like when you zoom out — and then in.
As MillerKnoll’s VP of Global Research and Insights, Ryan gathers input, research, and conversations from across the globe, spotting patterns others miss. He likens this moment to standing before a Monet — the colors, textures, and brushstrokes of the human experience of work are blurring old certainties and reshaping how we see the workplace.
Listen for how Ryan is seeing the office anew — as a counterbalance to digital overload, a stage for unplanned human moments, and a canvas for building belonging. You’ll hear the questions he’s asking leaders to help them rethink not just the space, but the purpose it serves.
Monet’s work transformed the way people understood art, forcing viewers to step closer, look differently, and rethink what was possible on a canvas. Today, we’re at a similar inflection point — one where the way we see, design, and experience the workplace is ready to be reimagined through entirely new eyes.
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This transcript was made in part by an automated service, in some areas it may contain errors.
Rex: Welcome back to the Resilience Lab. I'm Rex Miller,
What if your people aren't resisting the office? What if they're resisting irrelevance? What if they've stopped coming back? Not because they don't care, but because they don't believe the space was ever designed for them. What if the future of work has less to do with where we sit and everything to do with how we relate?
In today's episode, I sit down with Ryan Anderson,
VP of Global Research and Insights at Miller Knoll.
Ryan is one of the few people I know who can talk Neuroaesthetics. Organizational networks and elevator hugs in a single conversation and make it all feel like essential listening.
We recorded this live at NeoCon and it was one of those rare conversations that swings from the practical to the [00:01:00] profound.
We explore how leaders are or aren't listening, why most organizations fear real engagement. And how to use space as a counterbalance to the isolating effects of screen-based work. One thing you'll want to catch Ryan's reflection on how to design, not for control, but for connection. And what happens when we shift the conversation from occupancy to belonging.
This episode is a reminder that resilience isn't just built into our systems, it's built into our relationships.
Now let's dive in. I.
Rex: So let's get some context. We're in the Meno showroom during NeoCon. I want our conversation to be a little bit like a Monet painting
Ryan: Sure.
Rex: So where would you like to begin in terms of the conversation you had that got you excited, that gave you an aha?
Ryan: Oh boy. I've had a lot. I mean, this is part of the perk of my [00:02:00]job, is I get to, I have an excuse.
To dial up the smartest people I know and ask them questions about the way they're thinking, which is such a blessing for us. So I, I'll start with a few things because actually a lot of your lead up to me was closely related. Our team, 'cause I am fortunate to lead global research and planning. So that's research, but it's also the workplace strategists and designers that are working with the researchers to help real customers with their space.
We see a lot of patterns in terms of what's working, what's not. It was really evident to me, particularly like a year and a half, two years ago, but more recently this has even been more pronounced that what we used to think of as progressive office design or more traditional was not really correlating with what I saw in terms of vibrant, loved, active spaces sometimes.
There were progressive designs that were really awesome and people loved them and they were doing great, I think of Atlassian's Austin [00:03:00] facility. Oh yeah, right. Other times there was more traditional spaces that were equally as vibrant and loved, and then there were examples of both that were just dead.
And so where I see some of the dots connecting in this Monet, is the organizations that I've really enjoyed getting to know are the ones that figured out how to engage their employees. And pause on the word engage.
Rex: Okay, so what do you mean by that?
Ryan: Yeah. I would say take an interest in how the employees are doing.
Ask them about their work experiences, begin to understand the role of physical place and improving those work experiences, and then communicating. And by communicating, I don't just mean talking, listening, creating, shared understanding in particular, focusing on intent. This is what I hope our space does for you.
This is what we're trying to do with the space. 'cause no design is perfect and there's a lot in flux, but what seemed to be producing the most consistently positive results were situations [00:04:00] where the facilities, real estate, or HR and other teams were learning about where the employees were struggling in their work experience and coming back and saying, we're gonna try to use these spaces to help you.
And I think part of that is just conveying to the employee that the purpose of this space is for them, but also trying to unpack why some changes are being made at all. And I know I'm jumping a topic here, but this is where, for me, deeper cuts, deeper topics like inclusive design, designing for neurodiversity.
Neuroaesthetics and I can get into what I mean by all that are actually probably a subset of the bigger idea, which is the space for the leaders, or is the space for the employees nice? And if it's for the employees, let's make sure they know it
Rex: and know why. So what are some of the things that clients are hearing?
How space gets in their way? I remember a conversation with a client wanting to build a new headquarters [00:05:00] in the Carolinas. Uh, sister headquarters to the main, and her comment was, we've got the best design in the world, but it's not us. And she felt like someone going through a divorce in terms of communicating that was a bad experience.
Mm-hmm. And I don't wanna repeat that bad experience here. So what are some of the things that people are listening to that say, this doesn't work for me, and how do they adapt and. Create something that does,
Ryan: there's a lot more examples of what we hear than people might think. There's some common experiences with people showing up to offices that feel dead and having that be something that interrupts their motivation to come back.
It's a vicious cycle, right? I came in, there weren't that many people, so I didn't come in tomorrow. Somebody else comes in tomorrow, you're not there. Those sort of things are common, but the underlying issues are a little bit more diverse than I think maybe we've realized in the past, spending too much time on video [00:06:00] calls is one of them.
Not understanding the nature of how distributed the teams have gotten is another, having spaces that feel like they convey the importance of individual task-based repetitive work, just rote stuff. When in fact what people are trying to do is do all the stuff in the office that they can't easily do from home.
People find disconnects between what they read, the intent of that office as. But then there's other things. There's like very specific things to what a team might be trying to do, and it's just, it's not fit for purpose. The space is just designed with some sort of template or workplace standard in mind.
And you and I have talked about this in the past, but it's particularly dangerous at this moment of time for an organization to say. What are other organizations doing? Give us the blueprint for the quote unquote hybrid office, which there isn't such a thing. And then to try to follow somebody else's playbook.
'cause that's really out of context for the employees who are like, hang on, how does this relate to what [00:07:00] we're facing at all? And so the remedy to all this is to try to, for lack of a better term, personalized or contextualize what's happening in a given building or in a given space with the people there.
And yes, they'll change over time, but at least the sort of work. It happens in that sort of building so that it feels right. That's complicated. More complicated than using a template, but that's the path to success. That's the discipline we have to get in, involved in.
Rex: And it seems that people are afraid to make a mistake.
Ryan: Yeah,
Rex: they're risk averse. Amanda Schneider's research that 80% of clients are waiting for their competition to make the first move to feel safe. So let's go down this road. How do you engage a client because. The challenge with the template is cost.
Ryan: Yep.
Rex: So not enough fee for true design. True discovery. So how do you help a client go into the kind of discovery where [00:08:00] you can help them see what their current reality is?
Mm-hmm. And what's holding them back? And then how to create something that's not a template.
Ryan: It's through the questions we might ask. And we're also trying to be advocates for. Those in the architecture, interior design, and commercial real estate communities who have problem solvers who know how to do some of this.
And sometimes organizations just don't want to invest in it. But asking higher level questions around what value do you expect to get from this space? What experiences do you expect employees to have here that they're not gonna have at home? How are you going to communicate to the employees that the sort of things that are meant to be accomplished or achieved in this space are different than just doing it from their spare bedroom?
It is usually enough to cause a group of people to look at each other, and we're really fortunate. We've had more C-Suite level engagement in the last year than I've ever seen. Why? I think both because the concerns about real estate investments not paying a good [00:09:00] return is part of it, but also it's our emphasis on relationships, right?
So we've been looking at social science frameworks like strong ties and weak ties, place attachment, psychological safety. And trying to associate how the design of space produces real positive effects on relationships and teams. And I think for the average CEO or CHRO, they don't want to hear about activity based design or agile or anything that feels like a design strategy.
They want to know like, what positive effects do we expect to happen if we improve this space? And if they think that their people are gonna be relating to each other in a more positive way, they're eager to have this happen. I'll give you one very specific example. I was talking with a CEO of an organization in the Midwest large organization, and I said to her, what types of interactions do you hope to see more of in your space?
This is one of my favorite questions to ask. I love that she said, I've been seeing people hugging in the elevators and it makes me really happy. And I said, why? Tell [00:10:00] me, and of course, in my mind, I'm thinking of the concept of weak ties, which is how extended networks, which are really critical to our sense of belonging and security, they tend to atrophy over time.
So when people are hugging in elevators, that's the strengthening of weak ties. That's somebody just like an event like this who hasn't seen somebody else for a while and being like, let's bond. And so it wasn't a difficult conversation then to say, where else can we spark these kinds of connections, if not in the elevator?
Should we have a little space near the elevator?
Rex: Have mocked up elevator spaces around, something like that. So
Ryan: I think those sort of questions, which are not just like theoretical and visionary, they're pretty practical. What do you expect to happen here? What do you think that the organization's missing that this space needs to deliver on?
If the answer is we need to have more people show up, we can't stop there. We have to say why. What is it that people are meant to be doing? Why is this more meaningful than doing something from another environment? And yeah, so long story short, like the [00:11:00] more that we have those interactions with higher level teams, the more we're really forcing them to even gain a little bit of alignment in terms of what the value of this real estate is.
And then it's like just a matter of taking it deeper to say, okay, what does it look like to, as an example, en engage your employee resource groups? To me that's like low hanging fruit. A lot of organizations already have self-assembled groups of employees that might be working. Parents, people of color, veterans, go ask them, how's your work experience?
What part of the space do you feel the strongest sense of belonging in? What parts of the space do you feel like are unusable or just not enjoyable? Those are not super time consuming sort of difficult activities, but the key is. It's getting the organization to engage with their employees to talk about work, not necessarily the space.
Let the space experts figure out what the space needs to do and then go back and say, this is our intent to deliver on some of the things we talked about. But I think a lot of organizations are afraid to engage. Why? [00:12:00] They're afraid that the employees will ask them for a bunch of stuff that they can't deliver on, which is why you don't open up that can of worms.
I also think that return to Office has become so sensitive that I personally have had conversations with many organizations. That they're not saying anything. We'll say, what are you intended to communicate? How are you gonna proactively get in front of the concerns about this and this? And I've had very senior level executives say to me, we're avoiding it like the plague.
Like it's gonna be a plague unless you stop avoiding it. We have to use sound change readiness principles to be able to go communicate effectively. So all of this falls into that bucket of, it's as much about the engagement as it is about the design. Great.
Rex: So I understand Atlassian having a cool distributed remote first culture because their DNA is software [00:13:00] and development.
Do you have any stories of a more traditional company?
Ryan: Yeah,
Rex: that really got it, had that engaging conversation and has crossed the bridge over to. We're moving into this healthier, newer, more fluid life
Ryan: integration world. Yes, and actually because finance, insurance, legal have been among the highest categories of lease signers in the last few years, really I'm seeing innovation within those sectors.
In fact, I'd argue that I'm seeing more innovation in some of those than maybe in the tech world. I love Atlassian and they're a great company, but I do recognize they're a bit of an outlier. Take standard insurance. Okay. Or First National Bank of Omaha. These are examples of organizations that just chose to engage differently based on the changes in work where they took more time to go talk to their employees and say, Hey, we're thinking about redoing our space.
Tell us about what you're struggling with in terms of your [00:14:00] teams and how this space might be able to provide you some experiences that you feel like you're missing. I would say while they're a life sciences company, Genentech, which is a Roche company, may be the best at this. Really. I mean, Sarah k Clus and the team there, the name of their team is now Corporate Real Estate and Workplace Effectiveness.
They are as focused on going and having those conversations with groups, even to the point of signing team agreements. Hey, you said this is what you need more of. If we come back to you with a design, this is how we expect you to be able to use it. It's an example and one of the few of real estate, not just supporting work, but actively changing the work.
But I don't think anybody would walk through those spaces and say, this is wildly out there. Genentech still has wet labs with people doing like lab work there, and they need desks and other things near it. It's First National Bank of Omaha is still a regional bank with several thousand people. It's mostly workstations, but they've created that link [00:15:00] between the employees.
Seeing the value of the space and knowing that while the space might not be perfect, it's designed with intent.
Rex: You spurred an aha for me. Okay. A lot of my work is on large capital projects with project teams.
Ryan: Yeah.
Rex: A couple of the things we do on these more trust-based early collaborative projects is, first of all, we have the stakeholders share.
Why this job is important to them and what does success look like? Then we go through a process of what we call conditions of satisfaction. When this job is over with, what are the conditions that would make it a success for you?
Ryan: Nice.
Rex: And we start talking about that. Then we go into what are the behaviors that we need collectively to achieve this success?
And that gets put into what we call a charter. So we go from stakeholder's vision of why this job's [00:16:00] important, from the owner to the architect to the contractor, and some of the key subs. Then what does success look like to each of the stakeholders? What are the conditions that support that success? What are the behaviors needed to get there?
And then they create a charter that goes through, here's our values for this project. Here's why we're doing this. Here's what success looks like.
Ryan: Nice. Yeah, it is. It's participatory and inclusive design, to get back to that is participatory design. Those two things are essentially synonymous, so the more that you gain greater participation in the process, the more inclusive you are by nature.
I
Rex: like that.
Ryan: And by the way, that is for me, the key to creating an inclusive design. It's not getting some unique set of design principles that are out of a textbook. It's about engaging with people, understanding unmet patterns of need. But in the example you shared, you can call it a visioning workshop or an alignment workshop or whatever.
But I like the way you framed it 'cause it feels more pragmatic. And I think [00:17:00] that can be done with focus groups, that can be done with people who really would never be asked typically for their input on a workplace project. It doesn't have to be everybody, but just even a representative sample of folks that say, this is what success looks like for us.
I think it's a really good idea.
Rex: Phrase that we came up with back when we did the Change your space, change your culture. If you want a social and engaging workplace, you need a social and engaging process to get there. I
Ryan: love that.
Rex: Yeah. For you, where's your kind of focus and interest? I feel like we can almost see what that better future looks like and what really captivates your time interest.
Curiosity, yeah. About
Ryan: where we need to be. I'll start by saying, across the global research and planning team at Miller Knoll, there's quite a few facets of that answer. As an example, [00:18:00] we've done a deep dive into hospitality and what it really means to be hospitable in terms of making people feel safe, fostering intellectual welcome.
This falls within that greater scheme of relationships. I think our inclusive design research, which is now going into its 13th year formally, is for me, it's such a passion project. We've worked with lots of different groups, most recently, a couple years focused on supporting women in menopause and perimenopause in the workplace.
Huh. But if I had to put my finger on one just because of the timeliness of it, and this is gonna sound a little unusual. It's how to use our physical spaces to counterbalance the negative effects of technology. So I've spent a lot of my career bridging tech and space. I was VP of Digital Innovation at Herm Miller, right in my past life at Steelcase.
I launched a product for them called mediascape, which was a tech product. I'm not a Luddite, I'm not anti-tech, but we have so far gone off the rails as far as the balance of using tech in our [00:19:00] lives, that social isolation, burnout. Mental fatigue, just straight up loneliness is such a chronic issue, and I had Amy Edmondson from Harvard who's popularized the concept of psychological safety in our podcast.
Incidentally, she did her PhD studies studying 52 teams at her Miller, so she knows her Miller very well. Talking about how too much screen time is even decreasing our sense of psychological safety, which is causing organizations to not take smart risks if we don't address. The amount of screen time people have.
We risk designing spaces where people just sit on those screens all day, which is a total waste of time. We need to support the tech, but we need to give people these moments like you and I are having right now, which bring a degree of joy, safety relief. We're relational creatures and we're suffering, and so for me, it still falls within that greater banner of relationship based work and fostering belonging.
But I'm getting very specific now in terms of. If there's [00:20:00] tech in the room, how do you make sure it doesn't dominate? If it's a video space, how do you make sure everybody's not staring at the wall? I, is there a few spaces or are there a few spaces where clearly you should put the tech away and just make eye contact with somebody who you don't know that Well, we need to be super intentional about this.
Rex: It reminds me, of course, I've got lots of, it reminds me of the good old days type of things, but when Herman Miller introduced Ethos Space,
Ryan: yep.
Rex: I think 1986 or so. They gave a reprint of a chapter in John Nesbit's book called Mega Trends, and the reprint was high tech, high touch. And the same argument you're saying to the degree we go high tech, we've got a counterbalance with the human side of things.
Yes, the high touch.
Ryan: That's so interesting you bring that up because you probably knew Jack Kelly, who was the lead designer for Ethos Space and years ago I said something and Andy
Rex: McGregor too, who
Ryan: was the product manager? See, I didn't know Andy. Yeah. Jack also [00:21:00] is probably more famous for designing the space for the first personal computer that Stanford showed the world in 1968 in an event known as the mother of all demos.
So when Stanford showed the world the first computer, her Miller designed the environment for it. Jack was the lead. Cool. But when I was talking to Jack specifically about Ethos Space, I was like, boy. That product to me was the first to deliver tons of network cabling to different work points. It did that, but the primary goal was to bring natural light into the space because after designing action office and testing at University of Tennessee, they loved it, but said we accidentally blocked all the light from the windows.
And so the systems product that, at least for me growing up in the industry in the nineties, was known as the solution to get a bunch of cabling. Its primary goal was to give a natural light to people.
Rex: Wow. Yeah. That's neat. So let's wrap up with Neurodiversity. Neuroaesthetics and then what's next for you.
Ryan: Okay. I'll start by saying the big banner for me is inclusive design. And what I mean by that is literally including [00:22:00] people, and this is everything we've been talking about in a more participatory way in the design process, employee resource groups and other ways of organizing input are a way of beginning to understand patterns of unmet need.
And what's so magical about it is when you begin to unpack the needs, you begin to realize that solving for a group very likely solves for another. So if we're talking women in menopause, yes, we might have to deal with hot flashes. Have we ever addressed thermal comfort? Yeah, we created Aon in 1994 for, let's face it, larger guys wearing suits that didn't like sitting on upholstered foam.
But we might also talk with menopause about joint pain. Have we addressed joint pain? Yes. We have through sit stand stations, through recliners and wellbeing spaces. Likewise, you get into opportunities to support those on the neurodivergent spectrum with different levels of sensory input. Something as simple as a respite space with a curtain.
Can that curtain also then help somebody with an anxiety disorder? Or if it's a completely private environment, a nursing mom, yes, [00:23:00] it's a funny thing, but the more you understand each unique group and what it takes to help them to get to a goal, the more you realize that you can land on solutions that solve everyone.
So that to me is inclusive design. Designing for neurodiversity is one critical component of it. I'm thankful that the industry is paying so much more attention to it. I also think it should. Begin a conversation that gets into other sensory needs, other physical needs, and uh, then there's this topic of neuroaesthetics, which is actually, while neuro is in both, they're actually a little bit different.
They're related, but they're different. So neuroaesthetics is, I still consider it to be a nascent emerging practice or science that looks at how the aesthetic things around us impact our bodies, how we feel and how we think. I know you are an active user of biometric sensing. One of the most interesting experiments in Neuroaesthetics was when one of our brands, Muto partnered with Google, the [00:24:00] International Arts and Minds Lab at Johns Hopkins, and a designer named Sochi Reddy at CEL in 2019.
And here's what they did. They created four spaces that feel very different, totally different vibe, but like when you walked into 'em and I wasn't there, I've only seen the pictures. They conveyed a very different feeling. Google was putting biometric bands on everyone's wrists that visualized their personal data in an abstract form back to your Monet on a screen, and the participants could look as they went from space to space at how their bodies changed.
They reacted to the aesthetic things around them differently, and it was one of many really amazing, I think, projects to move neuroaesthetics forward. But where that wants to go. And I think the International Arts and Minds Lab at Johns Hopkins is the group for me that's making it happen and we love working with them, is that we should be able to put data in the future around how certain aesthetic choices should impact the way people think, [00:25:00] feel, and the sort of decisions they might make.
A lot of designers know good design gets at this today, that you're gonna want to put more vibrant, energetic surfaces and very social places, and you're not gonna want. Like fluorescent yellow where somebody's trying to read a book. But I think this is gonna take design way further down the path. And then it links to designing for Neurodivergence.
It links to biophilia. There's a very strong connection there. Interesting. Yeah. But I think it's just one that is now is a pretty good time to go. Like Google it, see what is out there, begin to maybe actively participate in some of the conversation around it. 'cause this one could be defining the conversation for a few decades.
Wow. Yeah. So what's next? Ah. Good question, and I'll be completely transparent where, when I say last week I asked Michelle Osmond, our director of research, and Joseph White, our director of design strategy, Hey, for neuroaesthetics, what's next? And we're thinking about that too, as far as what's next. More broadly, we will continue to [00:26:00] actively explore how design decisions impact the health of organizational networks and relationships beyond what's been done in the past.
But specifically on Neuroaesthetics, we're charting our own. Course of work with some partners to look at what's the most practical way of getting better data to make furniture application decisions or textile. And we're really fortunate with Mahar and Edelman and Noel Textiles and spinning back to have a really sizable textile portfolio.
We wanna inform what they're doing and Muto, the brand I mentioned, continues to be actively involved as well. Great. So
Rex: where do people find out about your research? Find you, although you're gonna be hard to nail down, but where do they find more of the things that Herman Miller is researching in the work?
Ryan: Yeah. We have been very diligent about updating miller knoll.com under the insights tab on a very regular basis. You'll find information out there right now about relationship based work, about place attachment. This idea that we shouldn't just return to the office, we should reattach [00:27:00] to it. But beyond that, for the really deep cuts.
It's our monthly Insight webinar series, which is also on that page so you can see it. And our About Place podcast, I think I know about that one. You do. Exactly. And then of course, I'm always sharing stuff on LinkedIn, which is a little bit random, but if you want to get a sense of what's on my mind or our team's mind on a given week, it's probably whatever I just posted on LinkedIn.
Rex: That's great. Ryan, thank you for the time. Thank you for coming on the Resilience Lab.
Ryan: I want to thank you and this is how I want to close. I have been thinking for a long time about your contributions to our industry broadly. You've been a champion for so many of us, and just to make everything better, more human centered.
Yeah. That's what I think of when I think of Rex. I think champion for this whole industry broadly, and you've made a huge difference to me, but to so many others, so, oh, thank you buddy. Thank
Rex: you, man. Appreciate it.
Okay. That was more than a tour of Miller Knoll's workplace research.
It [00:28:00] feels like a wake up call. Ryan reminded us beneath all the data strategy and square footage is something we forget too easily
that we don't go to work to use space. We go to work to find each other.
So let me ask you this.
What are you taking with you today?
Maybe it was Ryan's insight that inclusive design isn't about checking the boxes. It's about participation involving those who we are designing for.
That when people help shape the space, they don't just use the space they belong in it.
Or maybe it was this, that technology isn't the enemy, but unchecked it becomes a thief.
Stealing our presence, stealing our connection. And sometimes stealing the joy out of the very work it promised to support.
And if that struck a nerve, maybe it's time to reclaim something. Reclaim conversation over coordination. Reclaim spaces that don't just look smart, but feel [00:29:00] human because we don't need more policies.
We need more hugs in the elevator, more eye contact in the hallway. More places to say You matter here.
So whatever you took from this conversation, I hope you carry it forward into your next project, your next meeting, your next decision about how people gather, work, and grow. A heartfelt thank you for listening and to my team at the Surround podcast Network, Rob Schulte, Rachel Senator, and the brilliant crew behind the scenes.
Thank you for making this show possible. If this episode moved, you share it, and if you haven't yet. Please subscribe, leave a comment or a review. It helps us tailor this content for you. Until next time, embrace resilience. Stay curious and lead with hope.
Rex: [00:30:00] Ryan, welcome to the Resilience Lab.
Ryan: Thank you for having me, my friend.
Rex: So let's get some context. We're in the Meno showroom during NeoCon. We just had an interview and you had all the best equipment in the world and the producers, and you and I are sitting here with two Road go mics and a phone that we're recording this.
Ryan: Yes, I believe this is called the Consumerization of Technology and it's pretty cool.
Rex: What I wanted to. Take some time because you're so immersed in all the different conversations going around and you've come up with some great insights about the divorce and the reattachment thing, and I still use that.
You guys are working towards Neuroaesthetics and I know Kay Sergeant with HLK Neurodiversity, so I'd like a little bit of where those two. Compliment each other or distinguish [00:31:00] them because Sure. We're getting full of new terms. But more importantly, and I described before we talked, I want our conversation to be a little bit like a Monet painting where we're taking these points of color from different people you've spoken to, different clients you've seen as outliers.
Mm-hmm. And begin just. Let's start out with these points and see if we can pull 'em together in a pattern at the end.
Ryan: Sure.
Rex: So where would you like to begin in terms of the conversation you had that got you excited, that gave you an aha?
Ryan: Oh boy. I've had a lot. I mean, this is part of the perk of my job, is I get to, I have an excuse.
To dial up the smartest people I know and ask them questions about the way they're thinking, which is such a blessing for us. So I, I'll start with a few things because actually a lot of [00:32:00] your lead up to me was closely related. Our team, 'cause I am fortunate to lead global research and planning. So that's research, but it's also the workplace strategists and designers that are working with the researchers to help real customers with their space.
We see a lot of patterns in terms of what's working, what's not. It was really evident to me, particularly like a year and a half, two years ago, but more recently this has even been more pronounced that what we used to think of as progressive office design or more traditional was not really correlating with what I saw in terms of vibrant, loved, active spaces sometimes.
There were progressive designs that were really awesome and people loved them and they were doing great, I think of Atlassian's Austin facility. Oh yeah, right. Other times there was more traditional spaces that were equally as vibrant and loved, and then there were examples of both that were just dead.
And so where I see some of the dots connecting in this Monet, is the [00:33:00]organizations that I've really enjoyed getting to know are the ones that figured out how to engage their employees. And pause on the word engage.
Rex: Okay, so what do you mean by that?
Ryan: Yeah. I would say take an interest in how the employees are doing.
Ask them about their work experiences, begin to understand the role of physical place and improving those work experiences, and then communicating. And by communicating, I don't just mean talking, listening, creating, shared understanding in particular, focusing on intent. This is what I hope our space does for you.
This is what we're trying to do with the space. 'cause no design is perfect and there's a lot in flux, but what seemed to be producing the most consistently positive results were situations where the facilities, real estate, or HR and other teams were learning about where the employees were struggling in their work experience and coming back and saying, we're gonna try to use these spaces to help you.
And I think part of that [00:34:00] is just conveying to the employee that the purpose of this space is for them, but also trying to unpack why some changes are being made at all. And I know I'm jumping a topic here, but this is where, for me, deeper cuts, deeper topics like inclusive design, designing for neurodiversity.
Neuroaesthetics and I can get into what I mean by all that are actually probably a subset of the bigger idea, which is the space for the leaders, or is the space for the employees nice? And if it's for the employees, let's make sure they know it
Rex: and know why. So what are some of the things that clients are hearing?
How space gets in their way? I remember a conversation with a client wanting to build a new headquarters in the Carolinas. Uh, sister headquarters to the main, and her comment was, we've got the best design in the world, but it's not us. And she felt like someone going [00:35:00] through a divorce in terms of communicating that was a bad experience.
Mm-hmm. And I don't wanna repeat that bad experience here. So what are some of the things that people are listening to that say, this doesn't work for me, and how do they adapt and. Create something that does,
Ryan: there's a lot more examples of what we hear than people might think. There's some common experiences with people showing up to offices that feel dead and having that be something that interrupts their motivation to come back.
It's a vicious cycle, right? I came in, there weren't that many people, so I didn't come in tomorrow. Somebody else comes in tomorrow, you're not there. Those sort of things are common, but the underlying issues are a little bit more diverse than I think maybe we've realized in the past, spending too much time on video calls is one of them.
Not understanding the nature of how distributed the teams have gotten is another, having spaces that feel like they convey the importance of individual task-based repetitive [00:36:00] work, just rote stuff. When in fact what people are trying to do is do all the stuff in the office that they can't easily do from home.
People find disconnects between what they read, the intent of that office as. But then there's other things. There's like very specific things to what a team might be trying to do, and it's just, it's not fit for purpose. The space is just designed with some sort of template or workplace standard in mind.
And you and I have talked about this in the past, but it's particularly dangerous at this moment of time for an organization to say. What are other organizations doing? Give us the blueprint for the quote unquote hybrid office, which there isn't such a thing. And then to try to follow somebody else's playbook.
'cause that's really out of context for the employees who are like, hang on, how does this relate to what we're facing at all? And so the remedy to all this is to try to, for lack of a better term, personalized or contextualize what's happening in a given building or in a given space with the people there.
And yes, they'll change over time, but at [00:37:00] least the sort of work. It happens in that sort of building so that it feels right. That's complicated. More complicated than using a template, but that's the path to success. That's the discipline we have to get in, involved in.
Rex: And it seems that people are afraid to make a mistake.
Ryan: Yeah,
Rex: they're risk averse. Amanda Schneider's research that 80% of clients are waiting for their competition to make the first move to feel safe. So let's go down this road. How do you engage a client because. The challenge with the template is cost.
Ryan: Yep.
Rex: So not enough fee for true design. True discovery. So how do you help a client go into the kind of discovery where you can help them see what their current reality is?
Mm-hmm. And what's holding them back? And then how to create something that's not a template.
Ryan: It's through the questions we might ask. And we're also trying to be advocates for. [00:38:00] Those in the architecture, interior design, and commercial real estate communities who have problem solvers who know how to do some of this.
And sometimes organizations just don't want to invest in it. But asking higher level questions around what value do you expect to get from this space? What experiences do you expect employees to have here that they're not gonna have at home? How are you going to communicate to the employees that the sort of things that are meant to be accomplished or achieved in this space are different than just doing it from their spare bedroom?
It is usually enough to cause a group of people to look at each other, and we're really fortunate. We've had more C-Suite level engagement in the last year than I've ever seen. Why? I think both because the concerns about real estate investments not paying a good return is part of it, but also it's our emphasis on relationships, right?
So we've been looking at social science frameworks like strong ties and weak ties, place attachment, psychological safety. And trying to [00:39:00] associate how the design of space produces real positive effects on relationships and teams. And I think for the average CEO or CHRO, they don't want to hear about activity based design or agile or anything that feels like a design strategy.
They want to know like, what positive effects do we expect to happen if we improve this space? And if they think that their people are gonna be relating to each other in a more positive way, they're eager to have this happen. I'll give you one very specific example. I was talking with a CEO of an organization in the Midwest large organization, and I said to her, what types of interactions do you hope to see more of in your space?
This is one of my favorite questions to ask. I love that she said, I've been seeing people hugging in the elevators and it makes me really happy. And I said, why? Tell me, and of course, in my mind, I'm thinking of the concept of weak ties, which is how extended networks, which are really critical to our sense of belonging and security, they tend to atrophy over time.
So when people are hugging in [00:40:00] elevators, that's the strengthening of weak ties. That's somebody just like an event like this who hasn't seen somebody else for a while and being like, let's bond. And so it wasn't a difficult conversation then to say, where else can we spark these kinds of connections, if not in the elevator?
Should we have a little space near the elevator?
Rex: Have mocked up elevator spaces around, something like that. So
Ryan: I think those sort of questions, which are not just like theoretical and visionary, they're pretty practical. What do you expect to happen here? What do you think that the organization's missing that this space needs to deliver on?
If the answer is we need to have more people show up, we can't stop there. We have to say why. What is it that people are meant to be doing? Why is this more meaningful than doing something from another environment? And yeah, so long story short, like the more that we have those interactions with higher level teams, the more we're really forcing them to even gain a little bit of alignment in terms of what the value of this real estate is.
And then it's like just a matter of taking it deeper to [00:41:00] say, okay, what does it look like to, as an example, en engage your employee resource groups? To me that's like low hanging fruit. A lot of organizations already have self-assembled groups of employees that might be working. Parents, people of color, veterans, go ask them, how's your work experience?
What part of the space do you feel the strongest sense of belonging in? What parts of the space do you feel like are unusable or just not enjoyable? Those are not super time consuming sort of difficult activities, but the key is. It's getting the organization to engage with their employees to talk about work, not necessarily the space.
Let the space experts figure out what the space needs to do and then go back and say, this is our intent to deliver on some of the things we talked about. But I think a lot of organizations are afraid to engage. Why? They're afraid that the employees will ask them for a bunch of stuff that they can't deliver on, which is why you don't open up that can of worms.
I also think that return to Office has become so sensitive that I personally have had conversations with many organizations. That they're not [00:42:00] saying anything. We'll say, what are you intended to communicate? How are you gonna proactively get in front of the concerns about this and this? And I've had very senior level executives say to me, we're avoiding it like the plague.
Like it's gonna be a plague unless you stop avoiding it. We have to use sound change readiness principles to be able to go communicate effectively. So all of this falls into that bucket of, it's as much about the engagement as it is about the design. Great.
Rex: So I understand Atlassian having a cool distributed remote first culture because their DNA is software and development.
Do you have any stories of a more traditional company?
Ryan: Yeah,
Rex: that really got it, had that engaging conversation and has crossed the bridge over to. We're moving into this healthier, newer, more fluid life [00:43:00]
Ryan: integration world. Yes, and actually because finance, insurance, legal have been among the highest categories of lease signers in the last few years, really I'm seeing innovation within those sectors.
In fact, I'd argue that I'm seeing more innovation in some of those than maybe in the tech world. I love Atlassian and they're a great company, but I do recognize they're a bit of an outlier. Take standard insurance. Okay. Or First National Bank of Omaha. These are examples of organizations that just chose to engage differently based on the changes in work where they took more time to go talk to their employees and say, Hey, we're thinking about redoing our space.
Tell us about what you're struggling with in terms of your teams and how this space might be able to provide you some experiences that you feel like you're missing. I would say while they're a life sciences company, Genentech, which is a Roche company, may be the best at this. Really. I mean, Sarah k Clus and the team there, the name of their team is now Corporate Real Estate and Workplace Effectiveness.
They are as focused on going and [00:44:00] having those conversations with groups, even to the point of signing team agreements. Hey, you said this is what you need more of. If we come back to you with a design, this is how we expect you to be able to use it. It's an example and one of the few of real estate, not just supporting work, but actively changing the work.
But I don't think anybody would walk through those spaces and say, this is wildly out there. Genentech still has wet labs with people doing like lab work there, and they need desks and other things near it. It's First National Bank of Omaha is still a regional bank with several thousand people. It's mostly workstations, but they've created that link between the employees.
Seeing the value of the space and knowing that while the space might not be perfect, it's designed with intent.
Rex: You spurred an aha for me. Okay. A lot of my work is on large capital projects with project teams.
Ryan: Yeah.
Rex: A couple of the things we do on these more trust-based early [00:45:00]collaborative projects is, first of all, we have the stakeholders share.
Why this job is important to them and what does success look like? Then we go through a process of what we call conditions of satisfaction. When this job is over with, what are the conditions that would make it a success for you?
Ryan: Nice.
Rex: And we start talking about that. Then we go into what are the behaviors that we need collectively to achieve this success?
And that gets put into what we call a charter. So we go from stakeholder's vision of why this job's important, from the owner to the architect to the contractor, and some of the key subs. Then what does success look like to each of the stakeholders? What are the conditions that support that success? What are the behaviors needed to get there?
And then they create a charter that goes through, here's our values for this [00:46:00] project. Here's why we're doing this. Here's what success looks like.
Ryan: Nice. Yeah, it is. It's participatory and inclusive design, to get back to that is participatory design. Those two things are essentially synonymous, so the more that you gain greater participation in the process, the more inclusive you are by nature.
I
Rex: like that.
Ryan: And by the way, that is for me, the key to creating an inclusive design. It's not getting some unique set of design principles that are out of a textbook. It's about engaging with people, understanding unmet patterns of need. But in the example you shared, you can call it a visioning workshop or an alignment workshop or whatever.
But I like the way you framed it 'cause it feels more pragmatic. And I think that can be done with focus groups, that can be done with people who really would never be asked typically for their input on a workplace project. It doesn't have to be everybody, but just even a representative sample of folks that say, this is what success looks like for us.
I think it's a really good idea.
Rex: Phrase that we came up [00:47:00] with back when we did the Change your space, change your culture. If you want a social and engaging workplace, you need a social and engaging process to get there. I
Ryan: love that.
Rex: Yeah. For you, where's your kind of focus and interest? I feel like we can almost see what that better future looks like and what really captivates your time interest.
Curiosity, yeah. About
Ryan: where we need to be. I'll start by saying, across the global research and planning team at Miller Knoll, there's quite a few facets of that answer. As an example, we've done a deep dive into hospitality and what it really means to be hospitable in terms of making people feel safe, fostering intellectual welcome.
This falls within that greater scheme of relationships. I think our inclusive design research, which is now going into its 13th year formally, is for me, it's such a passion project. We've worked [00:48:00] with lots of different groups, most recently, a couple years focused on supporting women in menopause and perimenopause in the workplace.
Huh. But if I had to put my finger on one just because of the timeliness of it, and this is gonna sound a little unusual. It's how to use our physical spaces to counterbalance the negative effects of technology. So I've spent a lot of my career bridging tech and space. I was VP of Digital Innovation at Herm Miller, right in my past life at Steelcase.
I launched a product for them called mediascape, which was a tech product. I'm not a Luddite, I'm not anti-tech, but we have so far gone off the rails as far as the balance of using tech in our lives, that social isolation, burnout. Mental fatigue, just straight up loneliness is such a chronic issue, and I had Amy Edmondson from Harvard who's popularized the concept of psychological safety in our podcast.
Incidentally, she did her PhD studies studying 52 teams at her Miller, so she knows her Miller very well. Talking [00:49:00] about how too much screen time is even decreasing our sense of psychological safety, which is causing organizations to not take smart risks if we don't address. The amount of screen time people have.
We risk designing spaces where people just sit on those screens all day, which is a total waste of time. We need to support the tech, but we need to give people these moments like you and I are having right now, which bring a degree of joy, safety relief. We're relational creatures and we're suffering, and so for me, it still falls within that greater banner of relationship based work and fostering belonging.
But I'm getting very specific now in terms of. If there's tech in the room, how do you make sure it doesn't dominate? If it's a video space, how do you make sure everybody's not staring at the wall? I, is there a few spaces or are there a few spaces where clearly you should put the tech away and just make eye contact with somebody who you don't know that Well, we need to be super intentional about this.
Rex: It reminds me, of course, I've got [00:50:00] lots of, it reminds me of the good old days type of things, but when Herman Miller introduced Ethos Space,
Ryan: yep.
Rex: I think 1986 or so. They gave a reprint of a chapter in John Nesbit's book called Mega Trends, and the reprint was high tech, high touch. And the same argument you're saying to the degree we go high tech, we've got a counterbalance with the human side of things.
Yes, the high touch.
Ryan: That's so interesting you bring that up because you probably knew Jack Kelly, who was the lead designer for Ethos Space and years ago I said something and Andy
Rex: McGregor too, who
Ryan: was the product manager? See, I didn't know Andy. Yeah. Jack also is probably more famous for designing the space for the first personal computer that Stanford showed the world in 1968 in an event known as the mother of all demos.
So when Stanford showed the world the first computer, her Miller designed the environment for it. Jack was the lead. Cool. But when I was talking to Jack specifically about Ethos Space, I was like, boy. That product to me was the first to deliver tons of network [00:51:00] cabling to different work points. It did that, but the primary goal was to bring natural light into the space because after designing action office and testing at University of Tennessee, they loved it, but said we accidentally blocked all the light from the windows.
And so the systems product that, at least for me growing up in the industry in the nineties, was known as the solution to get a bunch of cabling. Its primary goal was to give a natural light to people.
Rex: Wow. Yeah. That's neat. So let's wrap up with Neurodiversity. Neuroaesthetics and then what's next for you.
Ryan: Okay. I'll start by saying the big banner for me is inclusive design. And what I mean by that is literally including people, and this is everything we've been talking about in a more participatory way in the design process, employee resource groups and other ways of organizing input are a way of beginning to understand patterns of unmet need.
And what's so magical about it is when you begin to unpack the needs, you begin to realize that solving for a [00:52:00] group very likely solves for another. So if we're talking women in menopause, yes, we might have to deal with hot flashes. Have we ever addressed thermal comfort? Yeah, we created Aon in 1994 for, let's face it, larger guys wearing suits that didn't like sitting on upholstered foam.
But we might also talk with menopause about joint pain. Have we addressed joint pain? Yes. We have through sit stand stations, through recliners and wellbeing spaces. Likewise, you get into opportunities to support those on the neurodivergent spectrum with different levels of sensory input. Something as simple as a respite space with a curtain.
Can that curtain also then help somebody with an anxiety disorder? Or if it's a completely private environment, a nursing mom, yes, it's a funny thing, but the more you understand each unique group and what it takes to help them to get to a goal, the more you realize that you can land on solutions that solve everyone.
So that to me is inclusive design. Designing for neurodiversity is one critical component of it. I'm thankful that the industry is paying so much more attention [00:53:00] to it. I also think it should. Begin a conversation that gets into other sensory needs, other physical needs, and uh, then there's this topic of neuroaesthetics, which is actually, while neuro is in both, they're actually a little bit different.
They're related, but they're different. So neuroaesthetics is, I still consider it to be a nascent emerging practice or science that looks at how the aesthetic things around us impact our bodies, how we feel and how we think. I know you are an active user of biometric sensing. One of the most interesting experiments in Neuroaesthetics was when one of our brands, Muto partnered with Google, the International Arts and Minds Lab at Johns Hopkins, and a designer named Sochi Reddy at CEL in 2019.
And here's what they did. They created four spaces that feel very different, totally different vibe, but like when you walked into 'em and I wasn't there, I've only seen the pictures. They conveyed a very different feeling. Google was putting [00:54:00] biometric bands on everyone's wrists that visualized their personal data in an abstract form back to your Monet on a screen, and the participants could look as they went from space to space at how their bodies changed.
They reacted to the aesthetic things around them differently, and it was one of many really amazing, I think, projects to move neuroaesthetics forward. But where that wants to go. And I think the International Arts and Minds Lab at Johns Hopkins is the group for me that's making it happen and we love working with them, is that we should be able to put data in the future around how certain aesthetic choices should impact the way people think, feel, and the sort of decisions they might make.
A lot of designers know good design gets at this today, that you're gonna want to put more vibrant, energetic surfaces and very social places, and you're not gonna want. Like fluorescent yellow where somebody's trying to read a book. But I think this is gonna take design way further down the path. And then it [00:55:00] links to designing for Neurodivergence.
It links to biophilia. There's a very strong connection there. Interesting. Yeah. But I think it's just one that is now is a pretty good time to go. Like Google it, see what is out there, begin to maybe actively participate in some of the conversation around it. 'cause this one could be defining the conversation for a few decades.
Wow. Yeah. So what's next? Ah. Good question, and I'll be completely transparent where, when I say last week I asked Michelle Osmond, our director of research, and Joseph White, our director of design strategy, Hey, for neuroaesthetics, what's next? And we're thinking about that too, as far as what's next. More broadly, we will continue to actively explore how design decisions impact the health of organizational networks and relationships beyond what's been done in the past.
But specifically on Neuroaesthetics, we're charting our own. Course of work with some partners to look at what's the most practical way of getting better data to make furniture application decisions or [00:56:00] textile. And we're really fortunate with Mahar and Edelman and Noel Textiles and spinning back to have a really sizable textile portfolio.
We wanna inform what they're doing and Muto, the brand I mentioned, continues to be actively involved as well. Great. So
Rex: where do people find out about your research? Find you, although you're gonna be hard to nail down, but where do they find more of the things that Herman Miller is researching in the work?
Ryan: Yeah. We have been very diligent about updating miller knoll.com under the insights tab on a very regular basis. You'll find information out there right now about relationship based work, about place attachment. This idea that we shouldn't just return to the office, we should reattach to it. But beyond that, for the really deep cuts.
It's our monthly Insight webinar series, which is also on that page so you can see it. And our About Place podcast, I think I know about that one. You do. Exactly. And then of course, I'm always sharing stuff on LinkedIn, which is a little bit random, but if you want to get a sense of what's on my mind or our [00:57:00] team's mind on a given week, it's probably whatever I just posted on LinkedIn.
Rex: That's great. Ryan, thank you for the time. Thank you for coming on the Resilience Lab.
Ryan: I want to thank you and this is how I want to close. I have been thinking for a long time about your contributions to our industry broadly. You've been a champion for so many of us, and just to make everything better, more human centered.
Yeah. That's what I think of when I think of Rex. I think champion for this whole industry broadly, and you've made a huge difference to me, but to so many others, so, oh, thank you buddy. Thank
Rex: you, man. Appreciate it. That's a wrap. Alright my friend. Oops. Thank you.
Ryan: When are you ready to go live with that?
