One of the things I’ve noticed come up again and again, across all sorts of businesses, is that people rarely come to an office design project with the real problem.
They come with the 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 the symptom, not the cause.
And I think this is where a lot of workplace design projects go wrong before they’ve even really begun.
Because when you start from the wrong question, you tend to head off in the wrong direction. You start solving for 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, quite simply, they don’t know what they 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 actually 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.