Last week, I shared with all of you that I was leaving behind the traditional world of offices and cubicles to try something new. I am excited to share the story of how a simple question turned into an idea, and then quickly became a reality.

Necessity is the mother of invention

CHS is in the process of remodeling our corporate office building. That’s an exciting change in itself. To accommodate that, most our IT team is simply relocating to different floor in the building. In the planning, we realized that we needed a little more space than what was available.

Being out of space is problem, but it’s also an opportunity. We saw it as a chance to try something different. Ultimately, this could have been a boring problem to solve. We could have just looked for the closest office building that had available capacity to rent. That would have been straightforward. But why do something the easy way, when you can do it the hard way?

There’s a whole lot more going on in CHS IT than just an office move. CHS, like other companies, is on a journey. We are pursuing this thing called digital transformation, and it’s enormous. It causes us to question everything we do.

The questions that drive us:

What if we could use this office space move to experiment with a completely different way of working? CHS is a large enterprise. We are not a high-tech startup. However, the market demand for digital transformation is forcing us to think more like a high-tech startup. Ultimately, we need our IT teams to behave a little more like a high-tech startup. What if we treated our enterprise IT team more like a high-tech startup? Would then, in turn, would we get high-tech startup outcomes for the business?

How and where do high-tech startups work?

They don’t work in office buildings in the suburbs. They tend to congregate in urban areas. They work in refurbished brick and timber warehouses that have a hip atmosphere. They are located on rail lines. Startups don’t have the money for long-term leases and build-outs so they use shared co-working spaces.

The experiment: CHS Lowertown

Today is day one of an eight-month experiment. 40 brave CHS IT team members are joining me to establish a new office location in the Lowertown neighborhood of Saint Paul, a few blocks from CHS Field. We’ve partnered with Fueled Collective to provide the co-working space and community environment.

We’ve poured a lot of organizational change management effort into this experiment to prepare our teams for the best possible experience, but ultimately, we won’t know what will happen until we try it. That day is today. From here we experience one of two outcomes. We hope our hypothesis rings true, and not only do our teams enjoy the experience, but the whole company is impacted by the lift in productivity, creative thinking, and technical design from those in CHS Lowertown. Perhaps our future selves will look back at this move as significant catalyst to CHS’s digital transformation.

The other possible outcome is that this becomes a total disaster. That could happen. With measurement and feedback, we will know along the way how the experiment is going. I’m certain that we will learn and adjust as we go.

Even if the outcome is bad, I can picture my future self looking back, glad that we got out of our comfort zone and tried something hard and different. We will have learned a lot and lost little. That’s a chance worth taking every time.

To my fellow co-workers in CHS Lowertown, thank you for going with me on this journey. I’m with you all the way. To the rest of my CHS colleagues, thanks for being flexible with us. It’s not easy for you when those you work with are no longer just down the hallway. Once we’ve settled in, please come by for a visit.