Whither strategy?

Yet as the year begins, workplace strategy finds it can no longer say how much workspace an organisation will need, nor promise how well and in what ways it will be used. It can’t be sure of the types and balance of worksettings required. It still looks at the performance of the workplace itself via utilisation and satisfaction rather than the contribution it’s making to the organisation over and above not having it at all. Above it all, it’s not sure of the problems it’s trying to solve.

Increasingly convinced that a dramatic shift in workplace thinking and outcome will draw people back to the office to do things they didn’t used to do much of before, organisations are starting to take risks on the basis of little calculation. They’re bypassing strategy and moving straight to design. If the strategists can’t provide the assurance of success they once might have, then what are they for? Our paradox becomes: we need to know what the future workplace will look like, so we’ve created it.

It’s a potentially dangerous and expensive place to be. Like all hit-and-miss affairs, occasionally it may work, and we’ll hear about it; when it doesn’t, we won’t. Workplace strategy has a massive year ahead in which it needs to thoroughly reinvent itself for the postpandemic era. Design needs strategy to flourish in order for design to flourish; for strategy to be able to identify the problems it needs to solve and to develop the tools to solve them. ‘Warts and all’ will need to be part of the brief. It may not always be comfortable, but it’s never been more necessary.

n e IL u sher is Chief Workplace & Change Strategist at gospace aI and author of The Elemental Workplace and Elemental Change