He then laid out the timeline businesses actually need. Up to twenty staff, start three to six months before expiry. Fifty to a hundred and fifty staff, start nine to twelve months out. And that’s before you factor in fit-out time, he said, or legal documentation, or the fact that transactions are simply taking longer at every stage right now than they used to.

I commented on his post, because I couldn’t help myself. I said I’d bet that when most of those businesses do finally come to him, they still don’t have a clear idea of what they actually need from a new tenancy to support the business for the next three to seven years. I’ve seen it too many times, a business relocates the same dysfunction and the same outdated way of operating, straight into brand new premises, and then wonders why the new space doesn’t feel any different.

That exchange has stayed with me, because it’s the same conversation I have with clients, just from the other end of the process.

A potential client got in touch with me once, right at the end of November. She said “If you could just do some basic plans for us before Christmas, we can get the renovation done during the three weeks the team’s on annual leave over the New Year. I told her I didn’t think that was going to happen.

What struck me about that conversation, and what struck me again reading the leasing agent’s post, is that everyone’s mental model of the timeline has the emphasis in the wrong place. People assume the risky, unpredictable part is the fit-out itself. Trades, tools, mess, the classic renovation horror story. So they budget generously for that and assume everything before it is basically administrative.

It’s actually the opposite that’s true. If you sequence a fit-out properly, demolition, electrical prewire, plumbing, framing, gib, stopping, paint, final fix, flooring, joinery, it’s genuinely one of the more predictable parts of the whole process… Typically six to twelve weeks on site, depending on size and scope, and a good contractor will tell you that up front with real confidence.

What isn’t as predictable, and what most businesses don’t allow enough time for, is everything that has to happen before a builder can even start pricing the job. A proper space planning process, then architectural drawings, detailing, specifications and finishes selections, are typically four to six weeks on their own, and that’s only if the client can make decisions quickly. Then there’s compliance. Any new plumbing or structure, and depending on the extent of the fit-out, anything that triggers updated fire or mechanical (HVAC) design needs a building consent through council, and that’s a minimum of 20 working days processing time, sometimes longer if they need additional information.

Add it up, with nothing going wrong, and you’re looking at four to seven months between deciding to move and walking your team through the door. That’s the optimistic version. It doesn’t include the structural surprise nobody flagged, or the services upgrade the landlord glossed over, or the fact that in real life, decisions simply take longer than anyone plans for.

But here’s the part that actually matters, and it’s the part that often doesn’t show up in anyone’s timeline. None of what I’ve just described, the design, documentation, compliance or fit-out, includes any strategic thinking at all. It’s the timeline for executing a plan. It doesn’t allow for exploring and clarifying that the plan is the right one.

That’s usually where the compression happens. The lease is signed, the clock is already running, and the temptation is to skip the thinking part entirely, hand a designer a list of rooms, and hope what comes back happens to be right. It usually isn’t, not because anyone did anything wrong, but because nobody asked what the business actually needed the space to do. And the cost of that shortcut doesn’t show up in the build programme. It shows up six or twelve months after move-in, when the team has settled back into the same inefficient, dysfunctional patterns they had in the old office, just with better paint.

So when I think about the timeline question now, the one I’d actually want a business owner to sit with isn’t how long will the fit-out take. It’s closer to the question that agent was really asking underneath his post. When does your lease expire, and separate from that, how clear are you, right now, on what your business actually needs from its next space to support it for the next three to seven years?

If the answer to the second question is “not very,” that’s the timeline that should worry you. Not the six weeks on site. The thinking that hasn’t happened yet.

Most office leases run a 3–5 years initial term, with one or more rights of renewal (often 3+3 or 3+3+3). That’s a long time. Long enough for a business to change significantly. Long enough for the team to grow, the model to evolve, the brand to mature, the way people work to shift. And yet, when the lease renewal date comes up, most businesses approach it as though the question is binary. Stay or go. Renew or move.

What that misses is that the renewal isn’t really the question. The renewal is the deadline by which the actual question needs to have been answered. And the actual question is whether the workspace you’ve got, in the location you’ve got it, in the shape you’ve got it, is still doing what the business needs it to do for the next chapter.

That question takes time to answer well. Not because it’s complicated, but because it depends on conversations that haven’t happened yet. Conversations with the team about what’s working and what isn’t. Conversations among leadership about where the business is heading. Conversations with the market about what’s available, at what cost, with what timeline implications. And then, once you’ve actually got clarity on what the workspace needs to do, you’ve got the design and consent and build process to run on top of that.

If you back the whole thing out, you start to see why I keep saying the same thing to clients. If your lease is up in three years, you should be starting to think about it in the next 12 months. If your lease is up in eighteen months, you’re already running tight, and the briefing process is the bit that can’t be skipped.

Three projects have made this argument better than I ever could.

The first is a 690sqm project I’m currently mid-fit-out on. The client came to me in January through a fit-out contractor, wanting plans for a quick design and build. They had the space, they wanted to be in it, and the assumption was that they just needed drawings for the builder. I suggested that they take a step back and let me run a proper briefing process first, staff survey, workshops, focus groups on key areas and workflows. Which they agreed to, mostly because they could see that engaging with the wider team would ease the change management process. But at that point they didn’t yet know what they didn’t know.

What the briefing surfaced was a much bigger scope than anyone had anticipated. We went through several rounds of layout iterations based on team feedback, and it quickly became evident that what they really wanted needed structural work, fire engineering input, and HVAC redesign.

We’re now into July. The fit-out contractors are onsite, and should be done by early August. Eight months, start to finish. And here’s the thing, that’s actually quick for the scope that ended up on the table. They already had the adjacent tenancy sitting empty next door, so there was no need to go out to the market, no lease negotiation, no relocation logistics to work through. Even with that head start, the brief grew to include structural work, fire engineering input, and HVAC redesign, and it still only took eight months.

If the client had pushed ahead with a quick fit-out in January, without the briefing, they might have moved faster. But faster into what. A layout that solved the wrong problem. That’s the trade. Speed without strategy isn’t really speed. It’s just quicker delivery of something that doesn’t fully work.

The second project is a Real Estate Agency, and this one is probably the clearest example of how far briefing can shift the answer.

The owner came to me through the same fit-out contractor, wanting to move a meeting room wall back to make space for an auction lounge. They had two existing tenancies in the Tauranga region, and they were planning to relocate the auction lounge from one to the other to create more space and ease the crowding at the first.

That was the brief. Move a wall, free up some space, get on with it.

When we ran the briefing, a different picture emerged. The first tenancy was older and less polished, but it had something genuinely rare for a commercial site, more than thirty carparks, in a busy location, where parking was the operational lifeline for the property management arm of the business. The second tenancy was a nicer fit-out but had a fraction of the parking, almost no street parking nearby, and was carrying way more space than the team was using.

That observation reframed the entire question. Instead of “where do we put the auction lounge,” the question became “which of these tenancies is the long-term home for the business, and which is the temporary one.” Once that question was on the table, decisions started cascading.

The auction lounge moved to the second tenancy, but everything we built there was deliberately demountable. The new wall partitions, the joinery, the furniture, all of it designed and procured on the basis that it would easily relocate when the time came. No money spent on permanent fixtures in a tenancy the business was likely to leave in the next few years.

At the first branch, we did a much more substantial upgrade, because that was clearly the building the business wanted to commit to. So much so that the owner has since approached the landlord about purchasing that building outright. Sit with that for a moment. A “let’s move a wall” conversation turned into a decision to buy a commercial property.

But the more interesting outcome was cultural. The briefing process surfaced that part of the issue with utilisation wasn’t the space, it was the rhythm of the team. The agents weren’t coming in to the second tenancy because they weren’t sure who else would be there, so they weren’t bothering. We worked with the owner on the actual problem, which had nothing to do with the layout. It was about giving people a reason to show up again, deliberate anchor days when the team knew who else would be in, a recalibration of what the office was actually for. None of that shows up on a floor plan, and none of it gets fixed by a fit-out on its own. It’s the kind of thing a briefing process surfaces that people don’t expect, which is usually where the “isn’t this just an expensive way to rearrange furniture” assumption comes from. It isn’t. A good chunk of the value is in what gets uncovered about how the business actually runs, long before anyone draws a wall.

In the six months since that fit-out was completed, he’s brought on a new sales agent nearly every fortnight. The team has grown significantly enough that they’ve taken on a third tenancy in another part of the region, which we’ve also fitted out, again with a mix of new and existing furniture so the business can test the model before committing more capital.

A conversation about some minor alterations became a potential property purchase, a cultural shift, huge business growth, and three tenancies serving different functions. None of which was on the table at the start.

A third example is from a few years ago now, but it’s still a relevant case study. A consulting practice came to me wanting to rejig their existing premises. Their lease was about six months from expiry and they were planning to renew. The brief on the surface was straightforward, open up the reception, refresh the layout, make better use of what they already had.

The briefing process revealed something the team hadn’t quite articulated, which was that their current tenancy wasn’t going to answer the issues they were experiencing. Even with significant changes, the layout couldn’t deliver the kind of working environment they were describing. The bones of the building weren’t right. The location was working but the footprint itself was constraining things in ways that no amount of internal rework could resolve.

That changed the conversation entirely. From “let’s reconfigure” to “should we be renewing this lease at all.” We looked at the market, considered a couple of viable options at the time, and ultimately the team made a strategic decision about what kind of disruption they were willing to take on, against what kind of upside. They held off, then a better-fit option came to market, and the move happened, a bit later than originally planned, but in a much more considered way.

The point isn’t whether they stayed or moved. The point is that the question they walked in with, how do we make this work, was the wrong question. And the only reason they figured that out was that we slowed down enough to actually ask better questions.

The thread that runs through all three of these stories is the same one. The brief the client walks in with is almost never the brief that emerges. And the value of the briefing process isn’t that it produces a better design, although it does. The real value is that it produces a different decision.

A different question gets answered. A different problem gets solved.

Strategic briefing doesn’t tell you what to design. It tells you what decisions to actually make.

Which is why I keep saying this needs to start much further out than most businesses think. If you’re approaching this in the last six months of your lease, the briefing process is absolutely still worth doing, but your options have narrowed, you might need to have a conversation about a lease extension or moving to month by month temporarily. If you’re approaching it eighteen months out, or two or three years out, you’ve got room to actually let the answer be different from the one you walked in with. And that room is where the most valuable decisions get made.

It’s also where the most expensive mistakes get avoided. The lease you didn’t renew because you finally understood what you actually needed. The fit-out you didn’t sink money into because the briefing revealed the tenancy wasn’t right. The expansion you sequenced properly because you’d given yourself time to test the model. Those aren’t dramatic wins. They’re quiet ones. But they’re the ones that compound over the life of a business.

If the answer to “what does our workspace need to do for us in the next chapter” feels obvious, that’s usually a sign the question hasn’t been asked properly. And if your lease renewal is coming up in the next few years, that’s the question to be sitting with now, not later.

I write about why workspace strategy matters, and what it costs when it’s skipped. If you’re facing a major workspace decision, or you know someone who is, subscribe and I’ll land straight in your inbox.

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Not budget. Not location. Not the wrong designer, or a difficult builder.

Someone skipped the conversation that needed to happen first.

I want to tell you a story about a hip hop competition. Stay with me - it gets relevant faster than you’d expect.

My sister has run this event for 17 years. For the last six of those, my job has been sitting with the judges, tabulating scores, and making sure what goes into the system actually makes sense before the results get announced.

We have software now. The judges score each crew across six criteria, the system averages and ranks automatically. Clean, efficient, fast.

Except early on day one, something looked wrong.

Three out of four judges had placed a particular crew first. The fourth had them sixth. That’s not impossible, judges come from different backgrounds, genuine disagreement happens. But it felt off. I flagged it to the head judge. She went back to him.

He’d entered a 1 instead of an 11.

One digit. The whole ranking skewed.

The software did exactly what it was supposed to do. It processed the inputs and produced an output. It had no way of knowing the input was wrong. It didn’t have the context to recognise that something was out of place. It just calculated.

That’s not a flaw in the software. That’s simply what software does.

What caught it was a person, someone sitting alongside the process, watching for the thing that didn’t quite fit, asking the question the system couldn’t ask.

On day two, we got into the higher-level categories. Experienced crews. Serious choreography. Prize money. Real stakes.

And in some of those categories, the judging split genuinely. Not a typo this time, actual, considered disagreement between four experienced people watching the same performance.

One judge valued technical precision above everything. Another was moved by performance. The third was looking for creativity. The fourth lit up for energy and crowd connection in a way the others didn’t weight as heavily.

Same performance. Four different lenses. Four different rankings.

None of them were wrong. They were all drawing on years of experience in different corners of the same industry, seeing different things, valuing genuinely different qualities. The disagreement wasn’t a problem to resolve. It was expertise in tension, which, averaged across enough performances, produces a more accurate result than any single perspective could.

You can’t automate that. You can’t train a scoring algorithm to replicate twenty years of embodied knowledge about what makes a performance land. The knowledge isn’t in a rulebook. It’s in the person.

In one of the breaks, I got curious.

Pop quiz, I said. How do we feel about lip syncing? Is it okay for dancers to mouth the words while they’re performing? And what about different costumes versus matching ones?

I was partly joking. I’ve sat with judges in the past with very strong opinions on both, that every dancer should be in identical costume so nothing draws the eye away from the whole, that mouthing lyrics is unprofessional and distracting.

One of the judges looked at me immediately: “It depends on context.”

If a dancer steps forward and mouths the lyrics as part of the choreography, a deliberate creative choice, that’s completely different from someone in the back row singing along because they’re not fully in the performance. Same action. Completely different meaning.

Same with costumes. Maybe the mixed looks are intentional, telling a story, creating a visual contrast that serves the piece. Maybe they’re just a mess. You can’t know without understanding what the crew was trying to do.

It depends on the context.

I’ve said this word to my daughters approximately ten thousand times. They’ll start telling me something and I’m completely lost, no idea who or what they’re referring to, and I just say: context? And they fill it in and suddenly the whole thing makes sense.

It’s such a simple word. But it contains everything.

And here’s the part of the weekend I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

After 17 years, the MC is retiring.

Over those years, my sister has tried to bring other people in. Understudies. Replacements in training. People who are good at the job in the technical sense, they can hold a microphone, work a crowd, keep things moving.

Every time, it’s been a disappointment.

Not because those people weren’t talented. But because this particular MC has been in the industry for over twenty years. He knows the dance schools. He knows the dancers. He knows who started where, who’s been competing since they were seven years old, which school has been quietly building something extraordinary for the last decade.

When he steps up to introduce a crew, he doesn’t just say their name and ask how long it took them to put the routine together.

He gives context.

This school has been part of this community for fifteen years. These kids might be new to the stage, but look at what they’ve built. This choreographer came up through this competition as a junior. Watch what she’s done with this.

He tells you what you’re about to see in a way that makes you see it differently.

You can’t brief someone on that. You can’t train it in. You can’t hand over a file and say: here’s the context, go. Because the context isn’t a document. It’s twenty years of showing up, paying attention, being genuinely interested, caring about the thing, and building the pattern recognition that comes from all of that combined.

My sister made a video montage for his farewell. At the end of it, she said:

“You are the best in the business because what you do, who you are, and how you hold space for all these dancers just isn’t teachable.”

I’m still sitting with that sentence.

Every week I read another take on AI replacing professional services. Some are thoughtful. Some are designed to terrify you into clicking.

What they consistently miss: the roles that matter most in any professional service are the ones built on context. On the twenty years of being in the room. On knowing that a score of 1 when everyone else has 10 probably isn’t a genuine assessment. On understanding that the answer to “should they be wearing matching costumes?” is always, always: it depends, what are they trying to do?

AI is extraordinarily good at processing information. Faster than any human, with less mechanical error, at a fraction of the cost. I use it. I’ll keep using it. It makes me more effective at the parts of my work that are genuinely about processing.

But when I sit down with a business owner who is about to make one of the biggest financial decisions of their professional life, a lease, a fit-out, a workspace their whole team will live inside for the next five to ten years, what I’m doing is not processing information.

I’m sitting in the room.

I’m listening to what’s being said and what isn’t. I’m noticing when someone gives me the official version of how the business works, and asking the questions that get to the real one. I’m catching the moment when someone junior says something that changes the whole direction of the brief, and recognising it for what it is. I’m holding twenty-three years of having been in rooms like this one, having seen what happens when businesses skip this conversation, having watched the same assumptions play out in the same costly ways.

I’m asking: what’s the context?

And then doing something with the answer that a system cannot do, because the answer isn’t a data point. It’s the beginning of a bigger conversation.

If you’re a business owner thinking about your next workspace, the question worth sitting with isn’t whether AI changes how your team works. It probably does, or it will.

The question is what that means for the space they need.

If more of the transactional work gets handled by systems, what remains in your office is increasingly the work that requires human presence. Connection. Mentoring. The informal conversation that solves a problem nobody had formally identified. The culture that makes someone choose to stay.

That work needs a space designed around it.

Not around rows of desks for processing information. Around the actual human things your people need to do together.

And here’s what I want you to hear, clearly, before you look at a single floor plan or take a call from an agent: most businesses skip the conversation that would tell them what that space actually needs to be.

They go straight from we need a new office to let’s go look at spaces. They get excited about natural light and the right suburb. They sign something that looks right on the day and realise six months later it was designed around assumptions nobody tested.

The briefing conversation, the one that happens before the designers and the builders and the agents get involved, isn’t complicated. The questions aren’t secret.

But knowing which one to ask next. Knowing when the answer you’ve been given isn’t the real one. Knowing when to push and when to sit with the silence.

That comes from somewhere a manual can’t reach.

It isn’t teachable.

It’s just what happens when you show up, pay attention, and care about getting it right, for long enough.

I write about why workspace strategy matters, and what it costs when it’s skipped. If you’re facing a major workspace decision, or you know someone who is, subscribe and I’ll land straight in your inbox.

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I don’t walk into a project with preconceived ideas.

Not as a rule I follow or a process I perform. It’s more fundamental than that. I genuinely don’t know what your workspace should look like, how it should function, or what it needs to do, until I’ve asked you enough questions to find out.

And I mean enough questions. Not the obvious ones. Not the ones that confirm what everyone assumes the answer will be. The ones that go underneath.

The ones that make you pause.

There’s a coaching technique, you might have come across it, called the Five Whys. The premise is straightforward: don’t accept the first answer as the real answer. Ask why. Then ask why again. Keep going until you hit something that actually matters.

It sounds simple. But it’s not easy.

Because the first answer is almost always the official version. The version that’s been articulated before, that sounds reasonable, that doesn’t require anyone in the room to be uncomfortable. It’s the answer people give when they’re performing competence rather than revealing reality.

We need a bigger office because the team has grown.

Okay. Why has the team grown in the way it has?

Because we’ve taken on more clients.

What kind of clients? What kind of work? Is that growth going to continue, or was it a particular season?

Well… we’re not entirely sure.

And there it is. The real conversation. The one that needs to happen before anyone looks at a single floor plan.

Most businesses skip straight from we need a bigger office to let’s go look at spaces. The patient, curious, genuinely interested unpacking of what’s actually underneath the first answer is the thing that gets skipped. And it’s the most important thing that happens in the entire process.

I want to be specific about what this actually looks like, because curiosity as a value is one of those things that sounds good and means nothing until you see it in action.

When someone tells me their team hates the open plan, I don’t nod and start sketching enclosed offices. I ask: what specifically bothers them about it? Is it noise? Visual distraction? The feeling of being watched? The lack of somewhere to have a private conversation? The sense that there’s no difference between a focused work day and a casual one?

Those are not the same problem. And they do not have the same solution.

When someone tells me they want more collaboration spaces, I ask: what does collaboration actually look like in your business? Is it two people working through a problem together? Is it a whole team on a whiteboard? Is it the kind of thing that’s scheduled, or the kind that happens when someone swings past someone else’s desk? Because a collaboration space designed for the first kind will frustrate everyone who needs the second.

When someone tells me their current space doesn’t reflect who they are anymore, that one I sit with for a while. Because that sentence is almost never about the furniture.

Who are you now? is the question underneath it. And sometimes that question, asked with genuine curiosity and no agenda for the answer, opens up a conversation about where the business is actually going that the owner hasn’t had with anyone yet.

That’s not interior design. That’s not even briefing, in the technical sense. That’s just what happens when you stay curious long enough to get to the real thing.

I’ve been doing versions of this work for 23 years. People sometimes ask me if it gets repetitive. Same problems, different offices, over and over again.

It doesn’t. And I’ve thought about why…

The honest answer is that no two businesses are the same. Not in the ways that matter. They might look similar on paper, same industry, similar headcount, comparable lease terms. But the way the people inside them work together, interact, communicate, make decisions, manage energy, and define success - that varies in ways that are genuinely endlessly interesting to me.

One business’s open plan workspace is another business’s nightmare. One team thrives on ambient noise and visible activity. Another needs quiet and separation to do their best thinking. One founder wants the office to signal arrival, to clients, to future hires, to themselves. Another wants it to disappear into the background so the work can come forward.

There is no template. There is no trend that applies universally. There is no this is what modern workplaces look like that is true for every business at every stage.

And every time I read an article that implies otherwise, that declares the open plan dead, or the activity-based workplace the answer, or the return to private offices the inevitable correction, I feel the same mild frustration. Because the premise is wrong. Not the observation, necessarily. But the generalisation.

It depends on the context is not a cop-out. It is the only honest answer. And getting to what the context actually is, for this business, this team, this moment in the company’s life, requires curiosity. Patient, genuine, non-agenda-driven curiosity.

Here’s something else I’ve noticed over a long time of doing this. The question someone asks at the start of a briefing process is almost never the question that matters.

How many desks do we need? is usually a question about how the business is going to grow, and whether the owner is ready to commit to a number.

What should we do about meeting rooms? is usually a question about how decisions actually get made in the organisation, and whether the current culture supports the way people need to work together.

How do we make the space feel more like us? is almost always a question about identity, brand, culture. About what the business has become and whether the physical environment has kept pace with that, and will continue to support it.

I’m not looking for hidden meanings or reading too much into things. I’m just following the thread. Staying curious. Asking the next question instead of answering the first one too quickly.

Because if I answer the first one, if I say you probably need X desks based on your headcount, I’ve closed something down. I’ve moved us into solution mode before we’ve finished understanding the problem. And solution mode feels productive. It feels like progress. It is, often, the thing that leads businesses into spaces that looked right on the day they signed and felt wrong within six months.

The briefing conversation is slow on purpose. Not because I’m being difficult. Because the questions need room to breathe. Because the person across from me needs time to move from the official version to the real one. And because the real one, the one about growth uncertainty and team culture and what they actually want the business to feel like from the inside, is the only one worth designing around.

If you’re reading this as a business owner somewhere in the process of thinking about a workspace decision, viewing spaces, coming up to a lease expiry, watching the team outgrow the current setup, here’s what I want to offer.

Before you look at floor plans. Before you talk to a designer or a builder or a leasing agent. Before you get excited about a space that has good natural light and is in the right suburb.

Ask yourself the question underneath the question.

Why now? Not the logistical answer. The real one.

What does this business actually need from its next space? Not what would look impressive. Not what the last office you admired had. What does your team need to do together that they currently can’t? What does the space need to make possible?

What are you assuming that you haven’t tested? About how your people work. About how your clients experience you. About what growth is actually going to look like over the next three years.

You don’t have to have the answers. The point of curiosity isn’t to arrive somewhere quickly. It’s to make sure that when you do arrive, when you sign, when you commit, when you hand over the deposit, you’re making a decision that was built on the real brief, not the first answer.

The businesses I’ve worked with that ended up with spaces they genuinely love, not just liked for a season but actually still love years later, almost always share one thing. Not budget. Not location. Not the calibre of the designer.

They were willing to sit with the questions long enough to find out what they actually needed.

The first answer is easy. The first answer gets you moving. The first answer lets you feel like you’re making progress. But it’s the fifth answer, the one you get to after you’ve peeled back the official version, the reasonable-sounding version, the version that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable, that’s the one worth building around.

What I’d studied was interior design. I expected to spend my career space planning, choosing finishes and furniture, detailing cabinetry. And for the first few years, I did some of that. But what kept happening was that I’d be put into rooms where the real work wasn’t about finishes at all. It was about helping an organisation figure out how it wanted to work, what it needed to support that, and then translating that into a brief a design team could actually use.

That phrase, the brief, turned out to be my thing.

Early in my career I ended up at Jasmax, who at the time were doing some of the most interesting workplace projects in the country. It wasn’t accidental. I’d been developing my thinking around workspace strategy while working at Creative Spaces, had been putting myself into conversations where that thinking was relevant, and was eventually introduced to the right person because of it. One conversation led to another, and I found myself in an environment where the work I was most interested in was genuinely valued.

What kept drawing me in was the part of the project nobody else seemed particularly interested in, the work that happened before design. Observing teams. Asking the questions nobody else was asking. Trying to understand the why underneath what people were saying they needed.

One of the first major projects I facilitated the briefing for was a relocation for a multinational with its New Zealand operations split between Wellington and Auckland. When I got involved, the executive team knew they needed to consolidate in Auckland, but they didn’t yet know what they wanted to move into. My job was to help them work that out before we went anywhere near a leasing agent.

We put together a comprehensive set of executive documents detailing what the business actually needed from a future workspace, and used that as a reference point when we went to market. We started with seventy-two tenancy options. I facilitated the process of reducing those to three shortlisted properties, ran full comparison space planning for each, and looked carefully at how well each would support the way the business needed to operate. Alongside that, we ran workplace performance surveys with the broader team and facilitated workshops to explore what the future of the workplace looked like for that particular organisation. We deliberately ran the workshops in Tauranga, neutral ground, away from the building they’d worked in for a decade, because there’s something about getting people out of their familiar environment that allows them to talk honestly about it.

By the end of that project, Jasmax had appointed me their specialist briefing facilitator. It wasn’t a role I’d applied for, or even known was possible. But it had become clear that the briefing process was its own discipline, and someone needed to be leading it properly.

The next major project was a consolidation for a national organisation with eight Auckland branches moving into a single purpose-built campus at Britomart. We ran a workplace performance survey across the whole organisation, then facilitated five workshops with a cross-section of staff from every team and every site. But the conversations we were having weren’t really about desks and meeting rooms. We were asking what culture actually meant to people, what the future of their industry looked like from where they sat.

One of the more interesting things we did was bring in a researcher who was working with schools, looking at how open-plan learning environments were starting to reshape how the next generation thought about work and collaboration. The premise was simple: those students were going to become employees. What would that mean for the workplace they’d be walking into? Some of the most useful conversations I’ve been part of came out of those sessions, not because we had answers, but because the questions pushed people somewhere they wouldn’t have gone on their own.

I spent two years at Jasmax, but they were two full years. The briefing work crossed industries and different sized businesses. Each one was different. But each one confirmed the same thing: the process worked, and it was needed.

Nobody was calling it “workspace strategy” yet. The phrase hadn’t really filtered into the New Zealand industry vocabulary yet. But the work was being done.

That’s what actually prompted me to write this article…

There’s a version of workplace strategy that gets talked about as though it only exists inside large commercial practices, the kind with offices in multiple cities and a portfolio of multinational clients. I even heard it suggested recently that the discipline didn’t exist at all in New Zealand before the mid-2010s. But I was doing it at Jasmax in 2006. The work did exist - wherever someone was asking the right questions before the design started, regardless of the firm’s size, their marketing budget, or where their principals trained.

What I didn’t fully appreciate until later was that the same patterns showed up everywhere.

It didn’t matter whether the organisation had fifty people or five thousand. The same things kept being true. People had assumptions about how their team worked that didn’t hold up under questioning. There were workarounds everyone had stopped noticing. Behaviours leadership assumed were happening weren’t, and behaviours actually happening weren’t on leadership’s radar. The brief that arrived at the start of a project was almost never the real brief. The real one had to be drawn out, carefully, through conversation.

The patterns weren’t unique to large organisations. They were just more visible at scale. The assumptions, the missing brief, the decisions made on instinct under time pressure, those showed up just as reliably in a business of twenty people as in one of two thousand. The strategic thinking wasn’t sophisticated because the organisations were big. It was necessary because the decisions were significant. And a lease commitment is just as significant when it’s your money on the line as when it’s a corporate budget.

And that became one of the more frustrating things about how the industry was set up.

Because the briefing process I’d been developing was only really available to organisations that could afford that level of consulting. The multinationals. The major banks. The insurance giants. Organisations with big budgets, internal HR functions, and change management specialists. Meanwhile, every small and mid-sized business I came across was navigating the same fundamental challenges, the same assumptions, the same friction, the same missing brief, with no realistic way of accessing the strategic thinking that would actually help them.

When I started my own practice, I took the same approach and rebuilt it for a different context. Less complex. More focused. Designed around what a business of fifteen, thirty, or fifty people actually needs to do to get to a real brief before they start signing leases or commissioning designs. Not a watered-down version of the corporate process. A different version, built for a different situation.

That’s what The Workspace Strategist is.

A way of taking the part of the work I genuinely care about, the strategic briefing process, and making it accessible to business owners who would never have been able to engage it at consultancy rates. Not because the thinking matters less for them. Because it probably matters more. The decisions are smaller in dollar terms but far more personal in stakes. The owner is usually signing the lease themselves. The owner is carrying the consequences if it goes wrong.

So that’s how I got here. Not by deciding twenty-three years ago that I wanted to be writing publicly about workspace strategy. By being put, again and again, into rooms where the work that actually mattered was the work nobody else was being paid to do, and eventually deciding it was worth telling people about.

But nobody had really complained. Chairs had been positioned with a bit of extra care. People walked through the space carefully avoiding the trip hazards. Everyone had learned the small adjustments. When I asked one of the directors about it, he gave me a half-smile and said, “We’ve just made it work.”

That phrase. I hear it constantly.

It sounds responsible. Sensible. Even a bit virtuous in the right context, in the sense of we’re not just throwing money at problems, we’re getting on with it. And honestly, sometimes that’s exactly the right call. I’m the last person to suggest a business should refurbish every time something feels a bit dated, and I get genuinely uncomfortable when I hear other consultants tell growing businesses they have to “spend money to make money”. Spending without clarity isn’t a business strategy, it’s just reaction.

But there’s a version of “we’ll just make it work” that is strategic. And there’s a version that’s something else entirely.

The strategy version goes something like this. We know what we’re heading toward, we know what this space needs to do for us over the next two years, and we’re deliberately choosing to live with this friction for now because we’ve decided it isn’t the priority, yet. That’s a decision. The friction is real, but the choice to carry it is deliberate, bounded, and connected to a bigger picture. There’s a destination in mind, and what you’re tolerating is part of getting there.

The other version, which is the one I hear far more often, sounds identical on the surface but is actually a very different thing underneath. It’s a phrase that quietly stands in for the fact that no one has ever sat down, thought about it and asked the right questions. The team has been adapting around the sloping floor, or the cramped meeting room, or the kitchen that’s become a dumping ground… not because anyone weighed it up and decided to, but because nobody ever stopped to think about it properly. There’s no destination, no staging, no plan. Just a kind of momentum in some areas, while burying your head in the sand in others.

And that version, in my opinion, is the version that costs.

Because it isn’t the friction itself that’s expensive. Plenty of businesses carry friction for years without it doing much damage at all. The cost lives in the absence of a decision around it. It’s never having lifted your head up long enough to ask, if we keep growing in this direction, what impact is that going to have on this space? What does this space actually need to do for us? And given that, what should we be doing now, or at least planning for?

I think of it like Google Maps. If you’re sitting at an intersection with three possible directions and you haven’t put a destination in, the map can’t help you. It doesn’t matter how clever the app is, how good the traffic data, how many shortcuts it knows. With no destination, it’s just a screen full of roads. Most of the businesses I see are doing exactly that with their workspace. Lots of small decisions, none of them connected to a destination, all of them happening on instinct or in response to whatever feels most urgent that month.

And when you’re operating that way, the small decisions start to fight each other. The meeting room you reconfigured last year doesn’t quite work for all the zoom calls the team are on now. The acoustic screens someone added don’t relate to anything else. The kitchen upgrade looked great in isolation but didn’t anticipate the staff numbers you’re now at. Each fix was reasonable in the moment, but because none of them were building toward anything, the whole space starts to feel patchwork. A bit incoherent. Slightly off.

The other analogy I come back to is building a garden shed. You can put a shed up in a weekend, sure. But before you start, you need to decide what size will be best, you need to consider the flooring, or what it’s being fixed to. You want to read the assembly instructions. You need to know what the finished thing is meant to look like. Without that, you’re just screwing pieces of aluminium together and hoping it eventually becomes a shed, and that it doesn’t blow away.

A workspace is the same. The teams I see age well in their environments aren’t always the ones who spent the most money or did the biggest re-fit. They’re the ones who, at some point, stopped and asked the right questions. Where are we heading as a business, and what does the space need to do to support us getting there? Once they had an answer, they could stage the work intentionally. Better lighting this year. Acoustic improvements next year. A proper meeting room reconfiguration the year after, when the lease comes up for review. None of it expensive in isolation. All of it adding up to a coherent space, because all of it was responding to a clear plan.

And the teams that don’t age well? Mostly, they just kept making it work. Year after year. Until eventually the making-it-work itself became so embedded in how the business functioned that nobody could see how much energy it was costing.

So the question I find myself coming back to, when I’m in front of a business that’s been carrying friction for a while, isn’t is it bad enough to fix yet? The answer to that one is almost always not quite, and you can keep saying that to yourself for a remarkable number of years. The more useful question is something closer to: “have we consciously decided to tolerate this, for now, or have we just been tolerating it?

Because those are very different things. One is strategy. The other is just what happens when nobody slows down to look at things from a different perspective.

It’s never one decision. Someone shifts a desk. Someone else stops using a meeting room because of the noise. The printer ends up in an awkward corner because that’s where there happened to be space. After a year of that, it’s just how the office works. Nobody pushes back because nobody really remembers it being different. The walk to the printer, the meeting that ends up in the kitchen, the background noise people have trained themselves to ignore - it all becomes the wallpaper of the working day.

And once it’s wallpaper, you can’t see it. That’s the actual problem. Most businesses have no clear idea what their space is costing them, because the cost isn’t on the lease. It’s in the energy you burn every day working around something that should have been sorted years ago. It’s in how you feel walking in on a Monday. It’s in what a new client thinks in the first ten seconds when they come to meet you.

Two pictures come to mind when I think about this.

The first is a pair of standing desks I walked into at a property valuation firm in Tauranga. Two of them. Built out of 2x4 framing timber. In the middle of an open plan office. I do love a bit of Kiwi ingenuity – but if your team is building their own furniture out of construction lumber, something has gone wrong further upstream. That team had been working around it for years and stopped seeing it.

Here’s what the directors said after they moved into their new premises:

“We didn’t fully appreciate how bad the old space was, you tend to just get used to and put up with what you have.”

The second picture is a sign I clocked above a sink during a site measure at a pharmacy. Laminated. Stuck to the wall. “This basin is for handwashing only.” There were dishes in the sink.

I’m not telling these stories to embarrass anyone. Both businesses were run by good people who knew what they were doing. The DIY desks and the dishes weren’t a sign anything was wrong with them as operators. They were a sign of a team that had been in the same space too long to see it anymore.

That happens to everyone. You don’t get clever enough to dodge it. It’s just what being in the same building five days a week does to your eyes.

The pharmacy is a good example because the owner worked it out herself. She opened a second branch on the other side of the city. New fit-out. Everything fresh, everything working the way it should. Then she went back to the original shop.

That was all it took. One day of contrast. Suddenly she could see the old space the way a customer would see it – the dark finishes, the dated joinery, the clutter, all the workarounds stacked on top of each other. She rang me not long after to update her original premises. She didn’t need talking into anything. She just needed help working out where to start.

That’s usually how it goes. You don’t see the problem until you stand somewhere else and look back at it.

Which brings me to the thing I think a lot of businesses underestimate about their office. The space is talking to people whether you want it to or not.

Some of it is obvious. A tired reception. A boardroom you’d rather not put clients in. A kitchen that’s become a dumping ground. But a lot of it is subtler than that. The feel of a space. The story it tells in the first few seconds. People make their mind up about you fast when they walk in, and mostly they don’t even know they’re doing it.

Here’s how I think about it. If you’re selling your house and the real estate agent pulls up in a beat-up old hatchback, something shifts. You can’t quite name what. But your confidence drops a notch. You wanted the agent in the Audi – not because the car needs to be flashy, but because it tells you something about how they work before they’ve opened their mouth. Your office does the same job. It doesn’t need to be expensive. It needs to be honest about who you actually are as a business. Is it telling the right story? Is it saying what you want it to say about where you’re at?

Most people, if they stop and look properly, will admit it isn’t.

So my suggestion is always the same one. Walk through your own office like you’ve never been in it. Stand at the front door. Look up. Look around. Walk the path a client walks. Notice the things they’d notice. Notice the things you’ve stopped noticing.

It’s an uncomfortable exercise. It works.

The DIY desks. The handwashing sink full of dishes. Things like that don’t come up in surveys. They don’t get raised in team meetings. They come up when someone walks through with fresh eyes and finally sees what they’ve stopped noticing, and ask “hang on, how long has it been like that?”

For this client, the fresh eyes came through a proper briefing process. Online surveys. Workshops. Me walking the floor asking the questions the team had stopped asking themselves. What we found wasn’t a layout problem. It was years of quiet adaptation that nobody could see anymore. Once it was visible, the brief was the easy part.

Most of us just need something to break the trance. Something to make us look at the space the way someone walking in for the first time would.

That’s where the useful questions start.

I was sitting with two executives this week, going through the detailed design on a project we’re well into, making sure nothing had been missed before the drawings go out for pricing. And at the end of the meeting, one of them said something I keep thinking about:

That comment made my week, genuinely. Because she’d just put into her own words the thing I always struggle to communicate at the front end of a project without sounding like I’m pitching for more work.

I hate the word “sell” – but at the beginning of a project, that’s a bit how it can feel. You’re trying to talk someone into a proper briefing process when they’ve never been through one before, when they don’t yet know what they don’t know. I know it pays off ten times over once the job is running, I’ve watched it play out on basically every project, but none of that is visible at the start. So when a client gets all the way through to detailed design and then puts it into her own words, unprompted – it’s really rewarding.

Because most of the time, when someone comes to me about refurbishing their office, they turn up with what feels like a perfectly reasonable brief. A couple more meeting rooms. More space for the team. Kitchen needs sorting. If you took that at face value and walked it across to a builder, you’d get exactly that – a tidier version of what was already there, with a few layout tweaks.

The thing that actually shifts the project is what comes up when you start asking the questions sitting underneath the brief.

This client went on to say that what had meant the most to her, more than the design itself, was being able to see how much of what was in front of her traced directly back to feedback from the staff briefing we’d done early on. Comments people had made in passing, frustrations that had only been half-articulated, suggestions that had been folded into the layout – and the team could point at the drawings and recognise where their own thinking had ended up.

She said the team were excited. They felt heard, because the space they were about to work in had their fingerprints on it. Nobody had to tell them that.

This wasn’t the version of the project she thought she was buying when we started. Her original brief, give or take, was a few meeting rooms and a general refresh. She’d pictured calling in a builder and doing a reshuffle. She ended up with a workspace planned around how her team actually operates, with their input running through it.

Here’s the pattern I see on almost every workspace project. The brief a client walks in with is hardly ever the brief that comes out the other end of a proper survey and workshop process. What makes the difference isn’t a clever design move. It’s asking the right questions of the right people, early. That’s it. And what those questions surface is always richer than what any one person – even the person at the top – could have written down on their own.

Because you don’t know what you don’t know.

That’s the whole point. You can’t write a brief around things you haven’t yet recognised as problems. And the team, who are inside the daily experience of the space, know things leadership doesn’t – not because leadership isn’t paying attention, but because once you’ve got used to something, you stop seeing it. The briefing process is what makes all of that visible again.

I’ve always believed the design outcome improves dramatically when you start with strategy rather than layout. That bit I can argue on the numbers – the mistakes that happen without a proper brief are the expensive ones, and they tend to show up six or twelve months after move-in, when the space has started working against the business again.

But the bit I don’t talk about as often, and the bit this week reminded me of, is what the process does for the people inside the business while it’s actually underway.

Being asked, properly. Being listened to. Watching a small comment you made in a workshop turn into something you get to use every day. A finished office can’t really manufacture any of that on its own – it has to be designed in, earlier, as part of the process.

And if you want your team to want to come to work, to feel engaged, to do their best work while they’re there, that part might matter more than any finish or piece of furniture or layout decision.

It’s the kind of thing you only really see in the feedback. And honestly, that’s what makes what I do feel worthwhile.

You can see where you want to go. You know how long the journey should take. And the person in front of you is just... cruising. Oblivious. Way below the speed limit. And because the road is winding, you can’t overtake, it’s not safe.

So you just sit there, and you watch the gap between you and your ETA get wider, and there’s this growing sense of frustration that something completely outside of you is holding you back from getting where you need to go.

I think about that feeling a lot when I think about workplace friction. Because that’s what a poorly designed environment does to a team. Not one big dramatic failure. Just a slow driver, day after day, quietly getting in the way of people who know exactly what they’re doing and just want to get on with it.

I had a good reminder of this recently with my own computer. My mouse has been lagging, not badly, just enough to be annoying. Enough that when I’m moving quickly between screens it doesn’t quite keep up, and I have to pause, wait, shake it a bit, lose my train of thought, and try to get back into what I was doing.

Over the course of a day, it becomes really frustrating. Not because I suddenly don’t know how to do my job, but because something outside of me keeps interrupting my ability to do it smoothly. I actually walked away from my desk a couple of times and restarted my computer. I lost the better part of an hour. But more than the time - I lost the flow. And that’s the part that really costs.

Because when you’re in the zone, when you know what you need to do, you have the energy for it, you’re engaged, and that state is actually quite fragile. It takes a while to get there, and it doesn’t take much to knock you out of it.

There’s also a lot in business right now that feels genuinely outside our control

The economy. Interest rates. Market confidence. Political instability. The general uncertainty around AI and how quickly everything is shifting.

You can feel it in the background of almost every business conversation at the moment… even when things are going well, there’s often a sense that the ground is moving slightly beneath our feet. The cost of getting things wrong feels higher. People are stretched. And there’s a lot that no amount of planning can fully account for.

Which is exactly why I keep coming back to the workplace. Not because a better office solves everything. It doesn’t.

But in a climate where so much feels unpredictable, the environment your team works in every single day is one of the clearest, most tangible things you can actually influence. And I think a lot of businesses are significantly underestimating how much that matters.

Most workplace friction doesn’t look dramatic. That’s the problem.

It looks like the kind of thing people adapt to, work around, stop mentioning, or quietly accept because it has become normal.

• A hot desk near the main walkway where someone is constantly interrupted.

• Meeting rooms that are always booked, so ad hoc conversations pile up at people’s desks or get deferred into emails.

• Acoustics poor enough that people wear headphones all day just to cope - cutting off the very spontaneous interaction the workplace is meant to support.

• Nowhere quiet to concentrate properly, take a call, or think something through without being pulled back into the noise.

• Technology that doesn’t allow people to move easily around the space, plug in quickly, or shift between focus and collaboration without breaking momentum.

None of these things are catastrophic on their own. That’s the point. They don’t need to be dramatic to be costly.

Because the real cost of workplace friction isn’t inconvenience. It’s broken concentration. It’s the loss of flow. It’s the mental effort required to keep adapting to an environment that isn’t helping. It’s the drag on quality that happens when people are constantly interrupted. It’s the frustration of knowing you could do better work, more easily, if the environment just stopped getting in the way.

And over time, that starts to shape how people feel about work itself.

The workplace is a business tool. Most businesses aren’t treating it like one.

Most people understand immediately that technology is a business tool. If your software is clunky, your systems don’t talk to each other, or your hardware isn’t fit for purpose, nobody is confused about why the work becomes harder. The connection is obvious.

But the workplace is a business tool too.

It is not neutral. It is not just a backdrop. It is not simply somewhere people happen to sit while work gets done. It is actively shaping how work gets done… influencing concentration, communication, collaboration, behaviour, mood, energy, and ease. It affects whether people can think clearly, connect quickly, solve problems efficiently, and feel supported in the process.

And yet many businesses still treat the environment as though it’s separate from performance, rather than one of the conditions performance depends on.

So when things start to feel off, the blame tends to land on people. The team isn’t focused enough. People aren’t as resilient as they used to be. No one wants to come into the office anymore. Staff are too demanding.

But I think that misses something important. Because what leadership often see is the outcome: the missed deadline, the slower turnaround, the lack of energy, the team member who seems less productive than others. What they don’t always see is the equivalent of the lagging mouse. Or the slow driver. The thing quietly getting in the way.

We’re not in an industrial-age model of work anymore, where everyone is expected to sit in the same way and produce in the same way for eight straight hours.

We know more now about how people actually work… about concentration, personality, energy, the different conditions people need to do their best thinking. Some people need quiet. Some need movement. Some need connection. Most need a mix, depending on the task.

So the idea that one generic environment should automatically support everyone equally, without thought, feedback, or any real strategy, simply doesn’t hold up.

If something feels off right now in your workspace… if your team feels like they’re working hard but still lagging, if the office doesn’t seem to be helping in the way it should, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture before the blame lands on the people.

Because what leadership often sees is the outcome. The missed deadline, the slower turnaround, the lack of energy. What they don’t always see is the equivalent of the lagging mouse. The slow driver. The thing quietly getting in the way.

In a climate where so much is genuinely outside our control, the workplace is one of the things we can actually look at honestly. And I think that’s worth doing… not as a grand solution to everything that’s hard right now, but as a starting point. A way of asking: is this environment helping, or is it one more thing our team is quietly working around?

Sometimes the most useful question isn’t what’s wrong with the team. It’s what environment has the team been trying to work in?

They’re looking to solve a visible problem.

They think they need more desks, more storage, a bigger meeting room, better flow, a nicer reception area, or, quite often, just a space that feels a bit more polished and more reflective of where the business is now. And sometimes they’re right. Sometimes that is the thing that needs to change.

But more often than not, what they’re bringing is a symptom, not the cause.

And I think this is where many workspace design projects go wrong before they’ve even really started.

Because when you start with the wrong question, you tend to head off in the wrong direction. You start solving the thing that’s easiest to see, rather than the thing that’s actually creating the friction in the first place. So you end up moving walls, buying new furniture, reworking layouts, or spending money trying to improve a space without ever properly stopping to ask what the workspace really needs to do.

Because that question - What does our workspace really need to do? - is where clarity matters most.

The most strategic part of office design happens before design starts

Over the past 23 years of designing commercial interiors, what I’ve found is that the most strategic part of a project is not the finishes, or the furniture selection, or even the design concept itself.

It’s the front end. The thinking. The questions. The brief.

The part where you slow down enough to understand how the business actually works, how the team functions, what the current environment is reinforcing, and where the disconnect really sits.

Because a workspace is never just a container for desks and people.

It affects how a team communicates, how people focus, how clients experience the business, how the culture feels on a day-to-day basis, and even how easily decisions get made. It can support growth, or quietly make everything harder. It can create pride and energy, or it can keep reinforcing old ways of working that no longer fit the business you’ve become.

Why businesses often solve the wrong workspace problem

What’s interesting is that businesses often don’t realise they’re solving the wrong problem because we don’t know what we don’t know!

If you’ve never been through an office refurbishment or relocation before, or if you’ve only done it once or twice, it makes complete sense that you’d focus on the obvious issue.

The office feels cramped, so you assume you need more space. People are always gathering around someone’s desk, so you assume the desk needs to be bigger. The office looks tired, so you assume the answer is cosmetic.

But sometimes the cramped feeling has less to do with square metres and more to do with poor zoning. Sometimes the bigger-desk issue is actually a sign that there’s nowhere else for collaboration to happen. Sometimes what looks like an office design problem is really a workflow problem, a storage problem, a behavioural problem, or even a clarity problem at leadership level.

And that’s why I think the wrong question is often the one that starts with, “What do we need to add?”

A better question is usually something closer to, “What’s really not working here, and why?”

That shift sounds subtle, but it changes everything.

Better office design starts with a better brief

Because once you start asking better questions, you get a very different kind of brief.

Instead of, “We need a bigger office,” it becomes, “We need a space that supports a hybrid team, allows for focused work, and gives us better places for informal collaboration.”

Instead of, “We need a nicer reception,” it becomes, “We need the space to feel more aligned with the level of brand we’ve built, so clients and potential hires experience that as soon as they walk in.”

Instead of, “We need more desks,” it becomes, “We need to understand how often people are actually in the office, what type of work they’re doing when they are, and whether individual desks are even the most useful investment.”

That’s a very different conversation.

And, usually, a far more valuable one.

Because good workspace design (in my humble opinion) has never really been about making an office look better for the sake of it. It’s about creating an environment that supports the business properly. One that reflects the brand, helps the team work well, makes people feel considered, and gives the business room to function and grow in a way that’s intentional rather than reactive.

Workspace Strategy versus surface-level fixes

I think this is also why I’ve always been more interested in the strategic side of projects than just the visible outcome.

The design matters, of course it does. But the design is the output. The real value sits upstream of that, in understanding the patterns, challenging assumptions, and making sure the solution is actually solving the right thing. That’s often the difference between a workspace that looks good on paper and one that people genuinely use, enjoy, and benefit from every day.

And to be honest, this is where I think many businesses short-change themselves.

They jump too quickly into Pinterest boards, new furniture solutions, or conversations with a builder, before they’ve got real clarity on what success looks like. They treat the briefing stage as a formality, when really it should be the most thoughtful part of the whole process.

Because when the brief is vague, every decision after that gets harder.

There are more opinions.
More second-guessing.
More wasted time.
More risk of spending money in the wrong places.
And, quite often, more disappointment at the end, because even if the space looks better, it still doesn’t feel like it’s fully working.

Why clarity matters before an office refurbishment or relocation

When the brief is clearly defined first, the whole project tends to run more smoothly.

You know what you’re prioritising.
You know what the space needs to support.
You’ve got a framework for decision-making.
And it becomes much easier to tell the difference between something that’s just appealing in theory and something that’s actually right for your business.

That kind of clarity is not the most glamorous part of a design project, but it is probably the most commercially important.

Because a workspace is an investment, whether you treat it that way or not.

It takes money, time, energy, attention, and usually a fair bit of disruption to change. So it makes sense to approach it strategically, rather than jumping straight to surface-level fixes and hoping they’ll solve deeper issues.

I think that’s really the point I come back to again and again.

Most businesses don’t need to start with design.

They need to start with clarity.

Clarity about who the space is for.
Clarity about how their team works.
Clarity about what their business is becoming.
Clarity about the experience they want to create, both internally and externally.
And clarity about what problems they’re actually trying to solve before they start investing in solutions.

Because once that part is clear, better design tends to follow.

And not just better design in the visual sense, but better decisions, better use of budget, better alignment, and a workspace that has a much better chance of actually working in real life.

And to me, that should always be the goal.