You've painted this lovely picture. That's the dream. We've got this new kind of corporate language, new values. It's democratic. It's open. It's playful. How did the dream play out? So we've established the dream, but did it work? We all have horrific open plan office stories, I think. Tell me some good things and some bad things. Yes, I

mean, you're absolutely right. I think the legacy here is pretty clear that it was not the Hellsian utopia that it was imagined to be.

Yeah, because the dream that we're all equal, actually the reality is you kind of want hierarchy and you want private spaces and you want to be closed off so you can actually do some bloody work. Anyway, sorry, I'm

jumping in. But tell us, from your point of view, the reaction to this new landscape. Yeah, from the very beginning, there were some that were very excited about it. There were people who were very eager to adopt this and I think for some it really represented the possibility of a more egalitarian environment. So that was very exciting. But very quickly it became clear that that isn't what was really on offer. When I write about this, I talk a lot about the sort of tension between the fantasies as they were represented and the realities as they were experienced. So one piece of this is that, of course, very quickly executives in the management that was supposed to be out in the open were very resistant to the notion of being open. And actually some of the earliest resistance was among that group. Remember that lower class workers, you know, secretarial staff and other kinds of technical workers had long been in spaces with almost very little privacy often. So this idea of being out in the open wasn't really new for them. It was more new for these other people who had long become accustomed to the promise of privacy. So one of the groups that immediately is very resistant is that group. I think that's part of the early kind of grousing. But I think very quickly there also is this kind of failure of the open plan in terms of things like noise. It was an incredibly noisy environment. And that piece, I think, is one of the most often dismissed, was dismissed actually by the architects and designers who kept telling workers and organizations that everything would get better if people would just accept the noise as part of the way in which you have privacy. They actually tried to sort of suggest to workers that the noise itself was how you had privacy. And they would often compare this to the kind of privacy you might have at a noisy restaurant where there's all this hustle and bustle and the wait staff is going about and you're surrounded by people and yet at your table you could have a private conversation. And so they sort of had this idea, oh yeah, you have privacy. You just don't realize that privacy. This is a psychological re-framing of what privacy is. You don't need walls to have privacy, right? We can have this cone of privacy by way of noise. And of course that was bullshit. Well, this is it because my question, did this new office landscape, did it sort of motivate behavioral change?