How This Office Space Brings Your Ideas to Life: Working From_Southwark

To say Working From_Southwark’s wow-factor is its boutique-hotel feel is to do it an injustice. It’s a space that has been designed to inspire surges of productivity with curated weekly events, free advisory clinics and daily wellness classes.

Holly Fraser, WeTransfer’s editor in chief explored the report’s main themes alongside a panel that included Nick Eagleton from The Playful Saboteur, Mev Bertrand from Neuro-Insight and illustrator Alice Bowsher.

The report set out to answer ‘What makes a bad idea?’ and ‘What role do bad ideas play in our creative processes?’. WeTransfer interviewed 20,000 creatives and discovered:

• You need more ideas than you think. In fact, “most people (72%) end up using half of their ideas or fewer”.
• Trust your gut, you know your ideas best. Despite the belief that creativity is synonymous with collaboration, “only 18% of creatives will consult their ideas with friends, family or colleagues”.
• Making money only matters if the planet is still around. When thinking about bringing an idea to life, 27% of people ask themselves: “Will it make the world better?”
• Fewer meetings, more thinking. Outperforming social media’s distraction power, “my job” was cited as the biggest thing distracting people from their ideas, which is “a worrying number, given almost 90% of our respondents work in creative fields which rise and fall on the power of good ideas”.

When discussing what holds us back from “activating” our ideas, Nick suggested it was our inner-critic that says ‘No’. One way in which he advised people to change that narrative is to come up with a scenario, like ‘We should revamp our entire website’ and follow the train of thought through a silly ‘Yes and’ structure, like ‘Yes and we should do it dressed as clowns.’ Once you’re in a mindset that’s surreal and outside-the-box, your inner-critic takes a back seat.

For businesses, there’s a method to the madness here, even though it might not seem so. If fear stifles creativity, taking brainstorming sessions to bizarre places helps everyone in the room recognise that no suggestion should be left unsaid. But we don’t think this notion is exclusive to mental space – your physical office space can be just as powerful; moving to a breakout area or a zen room can refresh and recharge our brainstorming batteries.

The number of a-ha moments I had throughout the day was enough to make me believe that if I worked there, I could conquer the world, never run out of ideas and even have time to prioritise my wellbeing.

Francesca Cooper-Isow

Senior Surveyor

Having good ideas is a numbers game. The more ideas you come up with, the higher your chance of finding the great ones. During the Ideas Report panel, Mez echoed this, but suggested creativity comes from collision. She thinks you need people in the room that are going to have a different opinion to you, which is why she’ll often throw in a next-level curve-ball like astronauts meeting Vikings.

Working From_Southwark's desk-hop space and pantry. Each desk includes a wireless charging dock.

Later on in my hot-desking day, the award-winning learning network, YCN, hosted a workshop titled ‘How to Have Ideas’. It began with an ice-breaker challenge of drawing a 5-second portrait of the person sitting next to you. While our creations were far from works of art, they certainly got people talking.

We explored a technique called Question Brainstorming, where you’re asked questions about a business goal you have, without being allowed to answer any. It made room for a new type of objective thinking, one without the distraction of having to defend your ideas – which none of us are strangers to.

Next up was an introduction to The Six Thinking Hats, a business-tool used in brainstorming to think about a particular challenge in a number of different ways: wearing the metaphorical white hat means you focus on facts, yellow for benefits, black for devil’s advocate, red for intuition, green for new concepts and blue for control mechanisms.

As the blue sky turned to black, I joined an army of after-hours side-hustlers to finish up some work, made my final cup of tea and enjoyed the goodies in the ‘help-yourself pantry’.

Francesca Cooper-Isow

Senior Surveyor

My day took an interesting turn in a sound meditation session run by Refinery E9 in the office’s on-site studio. Though this might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it certainly did a good job of getting me out of my comfort zone – a place every successful person tells you is ‘where the magic happens’.

As the blue sky turned to black, I joined an army of after-hours side-hustlers to finish up some work, made my final cup of tea and enjoyed the goodies in the ‘help-yourself pantry’.

Working From_Southwark sets out to create an environment that feels like working from home, but without the distractions. Because it’s created by The Hoxton Hotel, which it sits above, members also get to enjoy extra perks like laundry service, duvet days and hotel discounts globally.

The number of a-ha moments I had throughout the day was enough to make me believe that if I worked there, I could conquer the world, never run out of ideas and even have time to prioritise my wellbeing.

I left with plenty to think about and very little on my to-do list.