At the heart of Barcelona's 22@ innovation district – the regenerated Poblenou industrial neighbourhood – stands a unique building that serves as "the nucleus connecting the space between Media and TIC clusters". Media-TIC, a 14,000-square-meters space over eight floors, is anything but a normal office building.

What's most interesting about Media-TIC is the philosophy behind its spatial and gravitational organization. Indeed, the greenish, glow-in-the-dark, eco-efficient building is constructed following concepts largely borrowed from biological analogies. It is enveloped by a skin that breathes. In much the same way insects wake at specific temperatures, it lives largely thanks to the contribution of photovoltaic cells and rainwater collection that create a reciprocal relationship with its environment.

Just as biophilic design inspired the renewal process of Espace pour la Vie in Montreal, Media-TIC is constructed on the idea of an exterior shell. An exosqueleton. Insects are also built that way: they exist thanks to a hard exterior shell and a mushy, organic inside. Instead of being built from the ground up, stone over stone, Media-TIC floors are suspended on this exosqueleton, from the ceiling down.

Organizations behave much in the same way. What they present to the outside is a structure, organized around concepts that seem to be prepared in advance: a strong brand, product categories and org charts. What most intimate actors know for a fact is that both managerial and corporate communication strategies are most often formulated ex post, drawing from actual competencies rather than projecting them. They are the exosqueleton that expresses – and protects! – the internal mushiness, the loosely-coupled communities that make for most of the actual productive dynamics.

As much as we love to see more of these organic buildings, promoting a sustainable future in architecture through a sound relationship with the environment, we believe that Media-TIC can also be used as an example in the field of strategy and management. If we took more care in the building of environments – the spaces necessary for creativity that could literally "hang from the top-down" and rely on vast volumes at the bottom – we would undoubtedly make for more human, more innovative and more creative organizations. It's all up to a few visionary "architects". Architects of elevation. Architects of knowledge.