Upon my graduation from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning in 1975, the U.S. was in the middle of a recession. As we all know, when the economy goes down, people stop discretionary spending and construction is a discretionary cost. When construction slows, so does the world of architecture. That’s where I found myself in 1975. No jobs in architecture. To this day, I still have a folder of rejection letters from some of the best architectural firms in southeast Wisconsin.
Back then, there was no Internet. So to find a job—a good career-type job—you either had to have connections (your Uncle Ernie who knew someone who knew someone else) or more commonly, you looked in the classified section of your local daily newspaper. The Sunday paper held the bonanza of classified ads—pages and pages of job advertisements for every conceivable job organized by type. Some were little ads and some were huge eye-catching ads. One Sunday, my eye was drawn to one of those large job advertisements. The line that caught my attention was, ‘Architectural experience desired.’
Where it all began
Up to that point, my architectural experience amounted to working for two small architectural firms part time right after I graduated. I was making US$3.25 an hour. The two firms were across the street from each other. Every day at noon I started up my ’66 GTO, backed it out of my parking spot at firm #1 and drove across the street to firm #2 where I reparked and ate my lunch in the car. After lunch, I proceeded through the back door of firm #2 for an afternoon that was a duplicate of my morning—drawing stair sections, wall details and the occasional elevation. I did this all with a mechanical pencil, a sleeve of ‘H’ lead and my most used tool, the erasing shield. When firm #1 wouldn’t give me a 25 cent-an-hour raise after six months, I saw the handwriting on the wall. Maybe architecture was not my game. But what would it be?
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Upon seeing the ad, I sent them a letter and my credentials. To my surprise, they called and asked me to come down for an interview. It was in a town about 50 miles south of where I lived in Milwaukee. So I put on my best pair of dress pants, a sky blue double knit shirt, a matching tie and a blue and white checkered sport coat that I borrowed from my father. With a ’70s college hairdo down to my shoulders, I jumped into my GTO and made the trip down for the interview.
Several weeks later, to my surprise, I was notified that I got the job. I was going to make US$12,238 per year. To me, it was a staggering amount. My career was established and my life was set. In a week I was going to start being a facility planning engineer. There was only one small hurdle left to overcome—I had no idea what a facility planning engineer was nor did I know what a facility planning department was. Sure, they told me all about it in my interview but that didn’t mean I understood what they were talking about.
When I arrived for my first day of work, my new boss gave me a tour of the place. It was the corporate headquarters of a large manufacturing company. There were about 350 people working in the office. Some of them were in offices, but the rest of the people sat in something I had never seen before—something they called a cubicle.
My boss took me to my new home-away-from home. It wasn’t just a cubicle. It was a cubicle within a cubicle or as I found out, a bullpen. My space was comprised of a desk with a surface you could safely land a hovercraft on, a rotary phone, a drafting table, an adding machine and a pad of pink pre-printed paper upon which one could write down a phone message. That was it.
A trip through time
So what will facility management be like in the future? Here are a couple of thoughts from a guy who has personally experienced more than 33 years of change in the industry.
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First of all, don’t blink or you’ll miss something. Things change fast but I don’t think we’ve really seen fast yet. Technology has changed the world. As Thomas Friedman said in his book, The World Is Flat, any company can compete with any other company in their industry anywhere in the world. Technology enables small companies to look like global giants and big companies to look small and customer friendly.
There is more technology today than existed when I started out in facility management. But the changes we’ve seen in technology are only upgrades to what has existed for some time.
The computer is still a machine run by a micro processor. The next thing will be our ability to communicate instantaneously through advanced mental telepathy. There will be no machine to log on to or download another application into. Although the computer can store more memory and is immensely faster than our brains, it doesn’t do one important thing—think for itself. Through advanced medical research, our brains will be trained and programmed to communicate with each other cued by electrical waves and thought. At some point we’ll even discover a new area of the human brain that will allow us to instantly store and recall not just gigs of data but much more. We will have the capacity to train our brains to automatically transform that data into useful real-time information based on what our needs of the moment are. We will also be able to program them to interface with machine technology so that we can communicate with and manipulate building systems remotely.
Not your average office
Buildings will change radically as well. From a sustainability standpoint, zero footprint buildings will be the norm. It will be mandatory that what flows into a building will never wind up in a landfill. In fact, landfills will be obsolete. Everything will be recycled and buildings won’t be the office buildings we know today. Instead, they will be places where we live and work.
Working from home will no longer be considered an alternative workplace strategy but will be the norm and commuting to work may not be an option because many companies won’t even have a common physical place for people to come to. Technology will be so greatly advanced that our work life will be avatar-like and the need to go somewhere to work will be limited.
In the future, everything in a building that we control today will be automatically controlled by the building itself. Whether we are working from home or in a common place, the physical workplace inside those spaces will be nothing like we’ve ever seen. The workplace has improved drastically over time but like technology, it has only been upgraded. We still work in the same basic open work environment and cubicles that we’ve have been working in for the last 50 years.
The future workplace will be completely different. Never in our wildest imagination could we conjure up the idea of what our physical workplace will look like in the next 25 years. The new workplace may have no furniture. There will be no need for moves and changes. In the fashion of a hologram, technology will advance us to the point that we will be able to instantly create whatever space we need at the moment and then make it disappear when we’re finished with it. Our buildings will be mere shell space and a fraction of the size of what we need to work in today.
New energy resources
The energy we use to run our buildings will be mostly renewable. Utility companies will become energy resource companies and there will be vast energy farms in the deserts and in the oceans that will produce huge amounts of wind, geothermal and yet-to-be-discovered renewable energy sources. The storage capacity of these energy farms will provide enough renewable energy for the entire world to run nonstop. But these energy sources will pale in comparison to what our advanced research in outer space will bring.
We will find ways to harness the energy from the stars and even far off galaxies. The transmission of these new energy sources will be virtual and transparent. All we’ll have to do is invite these new sources into our buildings. The energy itself will be smart energy—knowing when it has given enough of itself to operate a building. Energy conservation will become an obsolete concept because we will have energy delivery systems in place that provide exactly the right amount of energy at any given moment based on activity level. We won’t wonder how it happens. We’ll just wonder why it didn’t happen long ago.
Looking forward
Architecture school did not prepare me to be a facility planning engineer. But over the first nine years of my career, I learned more than ever imagined about facility planning. Answering that ad turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. But little of what I learned over the last 33 years will be relevant in the next 25 years—or for that matter in the next 10 years.
As facility managers, there won’t be a need for us in the traditional sense we are accustomed to. Buildings will run themselves and people won’t need a place to go to work. The day-to-day activities that facility managers are familiar with today won’t be required in the future. Our whole focus must change from physical building managers to experience providers. We’ll have to provide not just a place for people to work but a place for people to experience and live their lives.
We will no longer be facility managers, but will be enablers. We will provide the environment in which people will maximize their human powers. With advanced virtual education available to us and a constant vision of the future, we as enablers will be looked upon as one of the most important professions on earth because we will provide the environment that will enable all of us to live ingenuously simpler lives and help the world be sustainable. It will be a brave new world and we will be among its leaders.
About the author
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Mark Sekula, CFM, LEED AP, is president of Facility Futures—a facility management consulting firm specializing in strategic facility planning, real estate planning, programming, workplace design and occupancy management. With more than 33 years of facility management experience, Sekula has served as a facility management professional in the manufacturing, health care and technology industries.
A Certified Facility Manager since 1993, Sekula has served in leadership roles with IFMA at the chapter, council and national levels for more than 15 years. He is founder and past president of the Facility Management Consultants Council of IFMA and has served on the IFMA board of directors.
