Well, what can you say about this? This is aged care going out on a weird date with Johnny Depp.
This place really works. It's driven by outrageous, narcissistic leadership; a culture that says yes and accepts anything people want to do; brilliant design that looks dog-eared like your favourite book; interior design that is so over the top it continuously assaults your senses AND maintains your interest; in our terms, a huge scale that permits experimentation and risk-taking and the opportunity to make expensive mistakes.
It really does work. We arrived early and plonked ourselves in the space to see what really happens and to avoid any spin. The main area is an internal atrium, a "sheltered village square" as they call it. The affordable housing flats open onto it. It works on the same principle as our new office - you have to walk through the village square to go anywhere so you have to meet people whether you want to or not. Anyway, the village square had a thriving restaurant, a craft and jewellery market, a bar, a pool hall, a convenience store, an internet kiosk space and it was very lively. Most of the people were old, many with walkers and buggies, but there were younger people too.
Not surprisingly, the staff wandering around seemed engaged and happy. They seemed to enjoy working there and no doubt this rubbed off on the residents.
We visited one of the affordable apartments. It was quite large for Europe and had universal design and smart wiring. Incidentally, the building is relatively new (built in 1992?) but it looks bloody awful like the Perth Hyatt. We've seen some stunning, modern design on our travels in Holland. But while most of those seemed sterile and cold, this place looked comfortable - the sort of place you can knock your drink over and it won't matter.
When we left the village square and visited the therapy rooms and the medical suites, it was like putting on your 3D glasses to view the weird and wonderful. It was a sort of menagerie of artefacts and peculiar murals so your mind would be on the stimulation and not on your ailments or your treatments while you sat around to wait or received your therapy.
Finally, we went down to the basement, which is like the size of a city block. This is where the drugs were really kicking in. This is like the greatest social history museum you have ever seen. You walk from room to room where a different aspect of life in Holland over the last 100 years in depicted in minute detail. There are thousands if not tens of thousands of everyday objects laid out there. It is mind-blowing.
Being a small group of very nosey people, we seem to be able to dig under the surface and find out what life is really like. Obviously, having a charismatic, outrageous, reckless leader like Hans Becker would be hard going for the other staff. People like that need the support of very stable and reliable people to focus on the detail and get the job done. They also need ambassadors and interpreters who smooth over relationships with those who are struggling to keep up in the wake of innovation and change.
Let's not kid ourselves - there's no way in the world that any of our organisations could replicate what is going on here. And in the Australian setting, we probably wouldn't want to. But what we can do is - stand up to the boring regulators, dare to be diferent, commit absolutely to a yes culture and the biggest impact of the whole thing for me - create environments for people that are really stimulating and interesting.
Humanitas is very good at marketing itself. They tell everyone how good they are - and they are!
Ray
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