In 2025, Dr. Agustin Chevez is putting velocity at the forefront of office innovation. The formula for the new office environment is capable of reaching cosmic heights.
Many challenges had to be overcome for humankind to reach the moon, one of which is particularly relevant to those of us in workplace design: escape velocity. Escape velocity is the speed needed for a spacecraft to break free from the Earth’s gravitational pull. Failure to reach escape velocity sees everything come crashing back down.
The escape velocity for workplace design, workplace velocity, is the speed required for work to break free from the gravitational pull of the office.
Failure to achieve this velocity, sees our efforts to explore new work environments crashing back down to the office.
The escape velocity from Earth is a staggering 11.2 km/s (≈9 miles per second). To establish our workplace velocity, we need to understand the gravitational pull that the office has on work.
But first, we need to clarify the difference between office and workplace.
Office vs Workplace
Revisiting a study on how many people fit into an office, highlights the distinction between the office itself and the workplace in a way that is particularly useful to the workplace velocity.
At the time of the study, there were concerns that workplace strategies, like Activity Based Working, were putting organisations at risk of exceeding the occupancy limit of one person per 10 m2 (≈33 ft2), as outlined in the National Construction Code of Australia.
Putting the density limit aside, it is important to note the description of the office as used in the Code: “Office, including one for typewriting or document photocopying.” A view of the workplace which is increasingly difficult to reconcile with today’s context of work and one which underscores the outdated assumptions that continue to inform key design parameters of offices to this day.
Why, for example, is office design still classified as a capital expenditure (CapEx), when it would better serve organisations as an operational expense (OpEx), allowing design to be adjusted continuously to support the organisation as it evolves?
Thus, for the purpose of the workplace velocity, an office can be defined as:
Office: an outdated set of assumptions about the workplace.
The Gravitational Pull of The Office
The Where of Work research aims to shed light into the mechanisms that shape our current places of work and it offers insights into the sources of the gravitational pull of the office.
The study maps the network of interactions between stakeholders involved in delivering our places of work. This network includes property valuers, developers, project managers, builders, tenants, flexible work operators and various design disciplines involved in creating spaces to accommodate work, as well as those indirectly impacted by where we work, such as those in transport, retailers, and city councils.
Over time, this network has evolved into an efficient system to align work with its place, giving us the “workplace.”
This structure that was (arguably is) perceived to deliver workplaces so effectively has now become a limiting factor in adapting to the changes of work and its context. The network is so established, that it continues to produce its finely tuned product, the office, at the expense of work now being misaligned with its place.
The inertia of the relationships across stakeholders operating under outdated assumptions that once created highly successful commercial work environments are now pulling work back into the office.
A Key Consideration
One key consideration of workplace velocity is inspired by Business Professor Oren Harari, who remarked: “The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.” With some editing, this quote becomes quite relevant to workplace design:
Reaching New Frontiers of the Workplace
With the above consideration in mind, two distinct zones emerge:
- The Candle Zone: this zone deals with the betterment of offices. It focuses on metrics like cost per square metre, space utilisation, and is motivated in bringing employees “back to the office.”
- The Electric Light Zone: is the new frontier of the workplace and contains a variety of work environments. One of these is The Full Spectrum Workplace, a framework to help organisations find their optimal work environment upstream from current property solutions. However, an advantage of the workplace velocity is that it helps others reach their own interpretation of a better workplace.
As per Harari’s edited quote, efforts to improve the office will not lead to the workplace of the future. The model below indicates two distinct trajectories: one that improves the office (red) and one that leads to the workplace of the future (blue).
The horizontal line (orange) represents the Kármán line: the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. It marks the altitude where the air is so thin that traditional aircraft would no longer fly, and a different type of propulsion is needed. “In other words, the Kármán line is where the physical laws governing a craft’s ability to fly shift.”
Key for us is that workplace velocity can’t be reached in the same way we gain speed in the office/candle zone – we need a different type of propulsion. The Blue Ocean Strategy provides the type of thrust necessary to reach better places of work.
The Blue Ocean Strategy divides markets into two categories: red and blue oceans. Red oceans represent established markets where competition is fierce and likened to bloody waters due to the intense rivalry. Parallels can be easily drawn with the current office markets.
In contrast, blue oceans refer to the unknown market space, untainted by competition. Here, demand is created rather than fought over.
Therefore, the Full Spectrum Workplace cannot be reached (e.g. commercialised) in the same way we commercialise the office. The former requires a commercialisation based on the extent to which the environment allows organisations to achieve their objectives (value proposition / blue ocean). The latter is commercialised by the square metre and perceived as a cost to be minimised in an increasingly competitive red ocean.
Four strategies that could help you reach workplace velocity:
- Choose a trajectory based on your destination: Ensure that your conversations, and importantly, your actions align with the destination you seek. The trajectory that leads to better offices is not the same as the one that leads to better workplaces.
- Build your spacecraft: Remember the Kármán line, an aircraft will not take you where a spacecraft would. The Blue Ocean Strategy is a good start to help propel your better version of the workplace. You can learn more about it from the researchers who developed it.
- Fuel your spacecraft: The Where of Work research identified trust in the network as a crucial factor in enabling exploration beyond what the established relationships allow. Find, or create a network of stakeholders with the trust needed to gain workplace velocity and explore new work environments.
- Recruit astronauts: Ultimately, we need organisations willing to take the leap and explore these new environments. Find those willing to venture into the unknown and experiment with what the workplace could be.
We Chose to go to the Moon
In 1962, US President John F. Kennedy delivered his seminal moon speech, a call to organise the best of our talents to explore new frontiers.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”
Now is the time to recruit our adventurous spirit and explore the possibilities of new work environments better suited to the work of our times and the ones ahead. Together we can find ways to break free from the gravitational pull of the office. We must reach workplace velocity, not because it is easy, but because it is important.
Want more insights from Agustin? Check out:
The Full Spectrum Workplace
