IELTS CAM Inspired 14 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 14 - Reading Test 2 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 8
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1
Henderson passed much of his early life at the family's rural estate.
2
Henderson was eager to make his living in the world of commerce.
3
Henderson learned his photographic skills through formal instruction.
4
The results of the 1865 magnesium-flare tests matched what the two men had expected.
5
Rennie earned recognition for the true-to-life quality of the landscapes he produced.
6
The studio Henderson established in 1866 lay close to where he lived.
7
The stretch of line linking Dunedin and Christchurch was in full working order when Henderson took on the commission to photograph its structures.
8
The final photographic work of Henderson's career was carried out for a railway company.
Question 9 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Alexander Henderson
Early life
• born in Wales in 1831; his father worked as a
9.
• trained in accountancy before leaving for New Zealand in 1855
Beginnings as a photographer
• set up his own photographic studio in 1866
• recorded scenes of urban life but was more drawn to landscapes
• his prints found buyers partly because the process was slow and the
10.
were bulky to carry
• customers acquired his prints to keep as souvenirs or to give as
11.
Life as a travelling photographer
• journeyed extensively across Otago and Canterbury during the 1870s and 1880s
• travelled along a number of the area's rivers by
12.
• undertook work for New Zealand's railways from 1875 to 1897
• accompanied the Midland Pacific line in 1885, photographing the
13.
and the ongoing construction near Hartley Pass
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-I.
14
the sort of people who once refused to enter hospitals at all
15
the view that high-rise towers are prized chiefly as a symbol of standing
16
a finding that an old building could renew its air as fast as a present-day facility
17
the means by which Voss checked whether an old ventilation scheme worked
18
a hint that clever marketing, rather than real merit, explains how quickly artificial cooling was taken up
Question 19 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Ventilation in 19th-century hospital wards
Professor Reinhardt Voss examined the work of Ellis Hargrove, whose plans determined the overall of hospital buildings, allowing air to move through them freely. Using digital models, Voss demonstrated that the carried in the breath of patients ill with would not have reached others on the ward. He also established that the air in the of these hospitals was replaced as often as it is in a modern surgical theatre, and that housing more patients together in areas could reduce energy use sharply.
A key force behind better ventilation in that era was pressure from ordinary seeking protection from harmful air, which was known at the time as . Such air had been blamed for spreading disease over many centuries, including the outbreaks that struck Marseille and around the middle of the 1800s.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 34
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
I
An approach first proposed long ago
II
Signs that a method may cost more than it returns
III
Tasks that are now widely demanded of individuals
IV
Why no single method ensures ongoing gains
V
Core assumptions that turn out to be mistaken
VI
Firms that have adopted a different way of working
VII
Dissatisfaction arising from a particular method
VIII
Businesses harmed by altering their methods
IX
A route to results that structure prevents
27
Paragraph A
28
Paragraph B
29
Paragraph C
30
Paragraph D
31
Paragraph E
32
Paragraph F
33
Paragraph G
34
Paragraph H
Question 35 - 37
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
35
The workshops being sold are pitched at anyone worried they are insufficiently
.
36
Enthusiasm for organisation has taken hold among company bosses and
alike.
37
A large share of employees describe themselves as
with how their jobs are set up.
Question 38 - 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
38
The more thoroughly a company organises itself, the more its output will keep rising.
39
Too much disorder can be as damaging to a company as too much order.
40
Larksphere's shift to a less rigid way of working came about because of what happened at Halvorsen Corporation.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Alexander Henderson (1831-1913)
Born in Wales, Henderson emigrated to New Zealand in 1855 and became a well-known landscape photographer
The son of a prosperous brewer, Alexander Henderson came into the world in Wales in 1831. His grandfather, another Alexander, had established the family firm and become the first chairman of the Bank of Cardiff. Land was something the family held in abundance across Wales: apart from the house they kept in Cardiff, there was Llanfair Estate, some 500 acres of farmland lying roughly 40 miles to the north. Much of Henderson's boyhood was spent at Llanfair Hall, the great house at the estate's northern edge, where the family often stayed and where he would play on the shore near Barmouth or fish the nearby streams.
His schooling, at Caerleon Academy just outside Cardiff, did nothing to loosen his ties to Llanfair, to which he returned most weekends. A three-year apprenticeship in accountancy followed in 1849. The idea of a life in commerce had never appealed to him, yet he saw it through rather than disappoint his relatives. Then, in October 1855, he left for New Zealand together with his wife, Margaret Ross Aitken, the couple making their home in Dunedin.
It was in Dunedin, around 1857, that Henderson taught himself photography, throwing himself into it as a dedicated amateur. Before long he had struck up a friendship, and a working partnership, with Thomas Rennie, an English photographer who had also settled in New Zealand. Together the pair travelled to Sutherland Falls to photograph it in 1860, and five years later they were jointly testing magnesium flares as a means of artificial illumination. Membership of the same societies brought them together as founder members of the Otago Society of Artists, and when that body first convened, in Rennie's studio on 14 March 1860, it was Henderson who took the chair.
Close as the two were, they photographed in markedly different ways. Rennie built his reputation on landscapes of unflinching realism, whereas Henderson, throughout the opening two decades of his working life, turned out romantic pictures that owed a clear debt to the British landscape tradition. He advanced quickly as both artist and technician, and a first substantial set of his landscape photographs appeared in print in 1865. Titled Otago Views and Studies, it never circulated widely, just six copies are known to survive, and because no two copies hold quite the same contents, the work has become a valuable means of assessing his earliest output.
The year 1866 saw him abandon the family firm and set up a photographic studio, where he offered his services in both portraiture and landscape work. Portraits were set aside from around 1870, once he chose to concentrate on landscapes and similar views. Though scenery remained his first love, his many studies of urban life, the streets, the dwellings, the market stalls, teem with people, and even his landscapes were generally arranged around some human occupation: a field being worked, ice being cut from a river, a boat drifting down a wooded creek. Pictures of this sort, along with those he made of the timber trade, steamboats and waterfalls, sold well enough to keep him solvent. Right up to the late 1880s, the elaborate, slow methods and the sheer bulk of the cameras left him with few amateur rivals. Since customers were after images to keep as mementoes of a journey, or to hand on as presents, Henderson kept a stock of prints ready at the studio to be mounted, framed, or slipped into albums.
Exhibitions of his work were frequent, both at home in Dunedin and further afield, in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne, Sydney and Cape Town. His greatest recognition came in 1877 and 1878 at Melbourne, where landscapes made with the carbon process took first prizes at a show mounted by the firm of Ferrier and Blyth. A second-place award followed in 1879 at the international exhibition in Sydney.
Across the 1870s and 1880s, Henderson's travels took him across Otago and Canterbury, where he recorded the chief towns of both regions and many of Otago's villages. The backcountry held a particular appeal, and he would often take to the Taieri, the Clutha and other well-known southern rivers by skiff. The West Coast drew him back more than once, and in 1872 he made his way by yacht along the southern coastline. During that same coastal journey he first photographed work under way on the Southern Trunk Railway, images that, in 1875, earned him a commission to document the main structures along its nearly finished route between Dunedin and Christchurch. Further railway commissions came his way. Bridges on the Otago and Southland Railway, on the stretch from Dunedin to Invercargill, were the subject of his 1876 work, and in 1885 he followed the Midland Pacific Railway inland as far as Hartley Pass, there recording both the glaciers and how far construction had advanced.
A full-time appointment with the Midland Pacific Railway came in 1892: Henderson was to build and then run a photographic department of its own. Under the terms of the post, four months of every year were to be spent in the field. He set off that summer on a second inland journey, taking photographs all along the line as far as Nelson, and he held the position until 1897, the year he gave up photography for good.
At his death in 1913, the vast store of glass negatives he had amassed lay in the cellar of his home. His photographs are today divided between the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington and the Hocken Collections in Dunedin.
The soaring electricity demands of tall towers and large public buildings could be eased by reviving clever schemes for moving air that architects devised - and then forgot - in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A
A. Professor Reinhardt Voss's new book, The Cool Interior: Recovering a Lost Architecture, brings together more than thirty years of prize-winning research into low-energy design, carried out by Voss and colleagues in architecture, engineering, environmental science and applied mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. 'People like to believe that clever devices will get us out of the trouble our buildings cause, but they won't,' he says. 'The warmer the planet becomes, the more power we will burn on cooling those buildings by machine - until, one day, there is simply no more to draw on.'
B
For Voss, the glass-and-steel towers crowding our skylines are treasured far more as badges of status than as sensible responses to the way we actually live and work. Keeping such airtight structures fit to occupy is enormously expensive: in the richer nations, buildings already consume something approaching half of all the electricity generated, throwing off carbon emissions on a similar scale, while the rest of the world is closing the gap alarmingly fast.
C
His alternative is to stop sealing buildings and keeping them alive on banks of air-conditioning plant. Even the largest structures, he shows, can be cooled by fresh air alone, exactly as they were before mechanical cooling came along - a technology that, in his account, its makers forced upon the market through relentless and aggressive promotion. The way ahead, he suggests, runs backwards, through the design thinking that flourished before our high-energy age began.
D
A central strand of the book traces the steadily more refined craft of drawing air through nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings, and hospitals above all. Voss is especially taken with the wards conceived by the American army physician and engineer Ellis Hargrove, whose thinking shaped the architectural layout of the first Ashworth Infirmary, put up in the US city of Cleveland between 1871 and 1888.
E
To find out how well Hargrove's wards really performed, Voss's team rebuilt his final drawings as digital models and studied them over three years. 'We released microbes into the moving air and imitated a patient sick with typhus, coughing on an open ward,' Voss explains. 'The models showed that the current of air would have swept the danger away and left the other patients unharmed.'
F
The measured results took the team by surprise. Some of these old hospital rooms could exchange their entire volume of air roughly twenty-four times an hour - the very standard demanded of a modern, computer-regulated operating theatre. Wards, Voss is convinced, could still be built to this formula. Not every patient needs a room to themselves: for the frail elderly, or those living with dementia, generously proportioned shared spaces would answer perfectly well, at a tiny fraction of the energy now spent. The air within such rooms, he notes, could be turned over as often as in the most tightly controlled theatre.
G
The ingenuity of these hospital schemes grew, in large part, out of public fear. For generations, illness and epidemics were blamed on foul air - the poisonous exhalations that doctors of the day named effluvia - rather than on germs, and it was this tainted air that was thought to breed the deadly hospital fever. The notion was ancient and stubborn: it was still being invoked to account for the cholera that tore through Marseille and Naples in the 1850s. Little wonder that uneasy residents pressed builders for premises that might guard them against such air, or that the well-off, sure that hospitals were sinks of poison, stayed away from them entirely and were nursed at home.
H
Voss can already point to buildings that make his case. The Calder Building at the University of Dundee, which houses some 1,800 staff and students, is ventilated and cooled by wholly natural means and lit for the most part by daylight - its two largest lecture halls, each seating more than 180 people, included. It draws only a fraction of the electricity that comparable British buildings get through. Over three decades Voss has designed and built a whole series of such structures, and then measured what they actually do. Left as they are, he warns, the glass towers of London and elsewhere may become costly liabilities within twenty or thirty years, once the forecast rises in temperature and energy prices arrive.
I
He is just as certain that towers drawing on the natural environment can be kept cool almost anywhere. With his team he has developed hybrid designs for the brutal climates of Harbin and Phoenix - naturally ventilated, with mechanical cooling held in reserve - and discovered, perhaps against expectation, that the back-up can be switched off for more than half the year, right through the gentler weeks of spring and autumn. How, Voss wonders, might the cities, workplaces and homes of tomorrow look if we planned them along these lines? Perhaps it is time we changed the way we see them.
A. Bringing order to things has itself become a thriving business. From our personal lives – the calendars, reminders and overflowing inboxes – to the way firms are built, a market worth many billions has grown up to serve this appetite. We now have more such methods than ever. We are told to impose structure on our firms, our home routines, our weeks, our days, even our hours of sleep, on the promise that all of it will make us more efficient. Almost every week, somewhere in the world, a paying audience files into a seminar to be told that tighter organisation is what will get them there. That thinking has filtered into the outlook of company directors and the entrepreneurs beside them, and it especially suits the self-styled perfectionists who cannot rest until every detail is correct. Over the past fifty years the number of business schools, and of their graduates, has climbed sharply, and what such places chiefly teach is the craft of organising well.
B
Yet, against expectation, the tally of firms that collapse has climbed just as steadily. Stress at work has mounted too. Right across the workforce, a sizeable share report that they feel frustrated by the manner in which their jobs are arranged and their managers behave. All of which prompts an obvious question: where has it gone wrong? Why should a drive for organisation, which on paper looks a certain route to greater output, fall so far short the moment it meets reality?
C
None of this is new. Among the earliest figures to place the ordering of work on a systematic footing was the engineer Emil Draxler. Working through the opening decades of the twentieth century, he set down a body of rules meant to sharpen the efficiency of the working process, and these have long since spread throughout the modern firm. The thinking has been with us for generations.
D
Fresh research now points to this fixation on efficiency being aimed in the wrong direction. What lets us down is not the theories or tactics we reach for when we organise; it is the unexamined belief we begin from, that order is something productivity cannot do without. From that same belief grows a second: that disorder is bound to eat away at whatever an organisation achieves. And so firms, and the people inside them, pour time and money into ordering themselves for its own sake, rather than pausing to ask what the whole exercise is finally meant to achieve.
E
More than that, recent studies indicate that order delivers steadily shrinking rewards. Up to a certain threshold it does lift output; beyond it, the gains from each further round of organising tail away, until a stage arrives at which any additional order drags productivity back down. If the cost to a business of formally arranging something exceeds the good it does, the argument runs, then it ought not to be arranged formally at all, and the effort saved is better spent elsewhere.
F
The evidence, indeed, is that where innovation is concerned the wisest course is to build a setting stripped of structure and rank, one that lets everyone taking part come together as a single organic body. Settings of that kind can throw up fresh answers which a conventionally ordered environment, clogged with bottlenecks in the flow of information, chains of command, rules and routines, would never reach.
G
Of late, firms have begun, cautiously, to make room for such disorganisation. Many take it on board both in how they see matters, treating disorder as something to welcome rather than dread, and in how they operate, by building in mechanisms that strip structure out. Kessler Optics, a Swiss maker of laboratory microscopes, offers one instance: it brought in what its managers nicknamed a 'lattice' arrangement to loosen the company's stiff hierarchies. Formal job titles were scrapped, and staff were handed a great deal of control over their own time and projects. At first the experiment worked strikingly well, productivity rising plainly across the business. In much the same spirit, the man who once headed the American engineering group Halvorsen Corporation advanced the notion of the 'borderless' firm, which meant pulling apart the walls between a company's divisions and pressing for remote collaboration and flexible hours. Several technology businesses, the search company Larksphere among them, have taken on these looser structures, at least in part, held together by the technology itself and by strong shared values.
H
A word of caution, all the same, for anyone tempted to climb aboard: the evidence so far hints that disorder, no less than order, appears to yield diminishing returns, and that it too can harm performance if carried too far. Disorder, like order, is worth embracing only to the degree that it proves useful. It should be neither feared nor prized above the alternative. What the research drives home is that we should keep questioning the assumptions we already hold.
The son of a prosperous brewer, Alexander Henderson came into the world in Wales in 1831. His grandfather, another Alexander, had established the family firm and become the first chairman of the Bank of Cardiff. Land was something the family held in abundance across Wales: apart from the house they kept in Cardiff, there was Llanfair Estate, some 500 acres of farmland lying roughly 40 miles to the north. Much of Henderson's boyhood was spent at Llanfair Hall, the great house at the estate's northern edge, where the family often stayed and where he would play on the shore near Barmouth or fish the nearby streams.
His schooling, at Caerleon Academy just outside Cardiff, did nothing to loosen his ties to Llanfair, to which he returned most weekends. A three-year apprenticeship in accountancy followed in 1849. The idea of a life in commerce had never appealed to him, yet he saw it through rather than disappoint his relatives. Then, in October 1855, he left for New Zealand together with his wife, Margaret Ross Aitken, the couple making their home in Dunedin.
It was in Dunedin, around 1857, that Henderson taught himself photography, throwing himself into it as a dedicated amateur. Before long he had struck up a friendship, and a working partnership, with Thomas Rennie, an English photographer who had also settled in New Zealand. Together the pair travelled to Sutherland Falls to photograph it in 1860, and five years later they were jointly testing magnesium flares as a means of artificial illumination. Membership of the same societies brought them together as founder members of the Otago Society of Artists, and when that body first convened, in Rennie's studio on 14 March 1860, it was Henderson who took the chair.
Close as the two were, they photographed in markedly different ways. Rennie built his reputation on landscapes of unflinching realism, whereas Henderson, throughout the opening two decades of his working life, turned out romantic pictures that owed a clear debt to the British landscape tradition. He advanced quickly as both artist and technician, and a first substantial set of his landscape photographs appeared in print in 1865. Titled Otago Views and Studies, it never circulated widely, just six copies are known to survive, and because no two copies hold quite the same contents, the work has become a valuable means of assessing his earliest output.
The year 1866 saw him abandon the family firm and set up a photographic studio, where he offered his services in both portraiture and landscape work. Portraits were set aside from around 1870, once he chose to concentrate on landscapes and similar views. Though scenery remained his first love, his many studies of urban life, the streets, the dwellings, the market stalls, teem with people, and even his landscapes were generally arranged around some human occupation: a field being worked, ice being cut from a river, a boat drifting down a wooded creek. Pictures of this sort, along with those he made of the timber trade, steamboats and waterfalls, sold well enough to keep him solvent. Right up to the late 1880s, the elaborate, slow methods and the sheer bulk of the cameras left him with few amateur rivals. Since customers were after images to keep as mementoes of a journey, or to hand on as presents, Henderson kept a stock of prints ready at the studio to be mounted, framed, or slipped into albums.
Exhibitions of his work were frequent, both at home in Dunedin and further afield, in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne, Sydney and Cape Town. His greatest recognition came in 1877 and 1878 at Melbourne, where landscapes made with the carbon process took first prizes at a show mounted by the firm of Ferrier and Blyth. A second-place award followed in 1879 at the international exhibition in Sydney.
Across the 1870s and 1880s, Henderson's travels took him across Otago and Canterbury, where he recorded the chief towns of both regions and many of Otago's villages. The backcountry held a particular appeal, and he would often take to the Taieri, the Clutha and other well-known southern rivers by skiff. The West Coast drew him back more than once, and in 1872 he made his way by yacht along the southern coastline. During that same coastal journey he first photographed work under way on the Southern Trunk Railway, images that, in 1875, earned him a commission to document the main structures along its nearly finished route between Dunedin and Christchurch. Further railway commissions came his way. Bridges on the Otago and Southland Railway, on the stretch from Dunedin to Invercargill, were the subject of his 1876 work, and in 1885 he followed the Midland Pacific Railway inland as far as Hartley Pass, there recording both the glaciers and how far construction had advanced.
A full-time appointment with the Midland Pacific Railway came in 1892: Henderson was to build and then run a photographic department of its own. Under the terms of the post, four months of every year were to be spent in the field. He set off that summer on a second inland journey, taking photographs all along the line as far as Nelson, and he held the position until 1897, the year he gave up photography for good.
At his death in 1913, the vast store of glass negatives he had amassed lay in the cellar of his home. His photographs are today divided between the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington and the Hocken Collections in Dunedin.
B. For Voss, the glass-and-steel towers crowding our skylines are treasured far more as badges of status than as sensible responses to the way we actually live and work. Keeping such airtight structures fit to occupy is enormously expensive: in the richer nations, buildings already consume something approaching half of all the electricity generated, throwing off carbon emissions on a similar scale, while the rest of the world is closing the gap alarmingly fast.
C. His alternative is to stop sealing buildings and keeping them alive on banks of air-conditioning plant. Even the largest structures, he shows, can be cooled by fresh air alone, exactly as they were before mechanical cooling came along - a technology that, in his account, its makers forced upon the market through relentless and aggressive promotion. The way ahead, he suggests, runs backwards, through the design thinking that flourished before our high-energy age began.
D. A central strand of the book traces the steadily more refined craft of drawing air through nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings, and hospitals above all. Voss is especially taken with the wards conceived by the American army physician and engineer Ellis Hargrove, whose thinking shaped the architectural layout of the first Ashworth Infirmary, put up in the US city of Cleveland between 1871 and 1888.
E. To find out how well Hargrove's wards really performed, Voss's team rebuilt his final drawings as digital models and studied them over three years. 'We released microbes into the moving air and imitated a patient sick with typhus, coughing on an open ward,' Voss explains. 'The models showed that the current of air would have swept the danger away and left the other patients unharmed.'
F. The measured results took the team by surprise. Some of these old hospital rooms could exchange their entire volume of air roughly twenty-four times an hour - the very standard demanded of a modern, computer-regulated operating theatre. Wards, Voss is convinced, could still be built to this formula. Not every patient needs a room to themselves: for the frail elderly, or those living with dementia, generously proportioned shared spaces would answer perfectly well, at a tiny fraction of the energy now spent. The air within such rooms, he notes, could be turned over as often as in the most tightly controlled theatre.
G. The ingenuity of these hospital schemes grew, in large part, out of public fear. For generations, illness and epidemics were blamed on foul air - the poisonous exhalations that doctors of the day named effluvia - rather than on germs, and it was this tainted air that was thought to breed the deadly hospital fever. The notion was ancient and stubborn: it was still being invoked to account for the cholera that tore through Marseille and Naples in the 1850s. Little wonder that uneasy residents pressed builders for premises that might guard them against such air, or that the well-off, sure that hospitals were sinks of poison, stayed away from them entirely and were nursed at home.
H. Voss can already point to buildings that make his case. The Calder Building at the University of Dundee, which houses some 1,800 staff and students, is ventilated and cooled by wholly natural means and lit for the most part by daylight - its two largest lecture halls, each seating more than 180 people, included. It draws only a fraction of the electricity that comparable British buildings get through. Over three decades Voss has designed and built a whole series of such structures, and then measured what they actually do. Left as they are, he warns, the glass towers of London and elsewhere may become costly liabilities within twenty or thirty years, once the forecast rises in temperature and energy prices arrive.
I. He is just as certain that towers drawing on the natural environment can be kept cool almost anywhere. With his team he has developed hybrid designs for the brutal climates of Harbin and Phoenix - naturally ventilated, with mechanical cooling held in reserve - and discovered, perhaps against expectation, that the back-up can be switched off for more than half the year, right through the gentler weeks of spring and autumn. How, Voss wonders, might the cities, workplaces and homes of tomorrow look if we planned them along these lines? Perhaps it is time we changed the way we see them.
J. * microbes: microorganisms that can cause disease
B. Yet, against expectation, the tally of firms that collapse has climbed just as steadily. Stress at work has mounted too. Right across the workforce, a sizeable share report that they feel frustrated by the manner in which their jobs are arranged and their managers behave. All of which prompts an obvious question: where has it gone wrong? Why should a drive for organisation, which on paper looks a certain route to greater output, fall so far short the moment it meets reality?
C. None of this is new. Among the earliest figures to place the ordering of work on a systematic footing was the engineer Emil Draxler. Working through the opening decades of the twentieth century, he set down a body of rules meant to sharpen the efficiency of the working process, and these have long since spread throughout the modern firm. The thinking has been with us for generations.
D. Fresh research now points to this fixation on efficiency being aimed in the wrong direction. What lets us down is not the theories or tactics we reach for when we organise; it is the unexamined belief we begin from, that order is something productivity cannot do without. From that same belief grows a second: that disorder is bound to eat away at whatever an organisation achieves. And so firms, and the people inside them, pour time and money into ordering themselves for its own sake, rather than pausing to ask what the whole exercise is finally meant to achieve.
E. More than that, recent studies indicate that order delivers steadily shrinking rewards. Up to a certain threshold it does lift output; beyond it, the gains from each further round of organising tail away, until a stage arrives at which any additional order drags productivity back down. If the cost to a business of formally arranging something exceeds the good it does, the argument runs, then it ought not to be arranged formally at all, and the effort saved is better spent elsewhere.
F. The evidence, indeed, is that where innovation is concerned the wisest course is to build a setting stripped of structure and rank, one that lets everyone taking part come together as a single organic body. Settings of that kind can throw up fresh answers which a conventionally ordered environment, clogged with bottlenecks in the flow of information, chains of command, rules and routines, would never reach.
G. Of late, firms have begun, cautiously, to make room for such disorganisation. Many take it on board both in how they see matters, treating disorder as something to welcome rather than dread, and in how they operate, by building in mechanisms that strip structure out. Kessler Optics, a Swiss maker of laboratory microscopes, offers one instance: it brought in what its managers nicknamed a 'lattice' arrangement to loosen the company's stiff hierarchies. Formal job titles were scrapped, and staff were handed a great deal of control over their own time and projects. At first the experiment worked strikingly well, productivity rising plainly across the business. In much the same spirit, the man who once headed the American engineering group Halvorsen Corporation advanced the notion of the 'borderless' firm, which meant pulling apart the walls between a company's divisions and pressing for remote collaboration and flexible hours. Several technology businesses, the search company Larksphere among them, have taken on these looser structures, at least in part, held together by the technology itself and by strong shared values.
H. A word of caution, all the same, for anyone tempted to climb aboard: the evidence so far hints that disorder, no less than order, appears to yield diminishing returns, and that it too can harm performance if carried too far. Disorder, like order, is worth embracing only to the degree that it proves useful. It should be neither feared nor prized above the alternative. What the research drives home is that we should keep questioning the assumptions we already hold.
