Mission Impossible: Hybrid Space and AI
"Good morning, Ethan. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to determine exactly how much office space Corporation X will need for the next five years. You'll need to account for hybrid working patterns, activity-based working requirements, AI-driven workforce changes, and staff projections that shift faster than a rogue AI algorithm. Warning: traditional space planning formulas have been compromised. As always, should you or any of your team be caught making inaccurate space predictions, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence. This message will self-destruct in five seconds."
BOOM.
And there goes another workplace strategist's confidence, because frankly, Ethan Hunt would have a better chance of defeating another rogue AI than accurately predicting office space requirements in 2025.
The Good Old Days (Remember Those?)
Twenty years ago, this mission would have been child's play for any first-year graduate. The formula was beautifully simple: count your people, multiply by your efficiency ratio (usually 12-15 square metres per person), add some meeting rooms, and Bob's your uncle. Everyone had either an office or a workstation. Everyone came to work five days a week. Everyone knew their place—literally.
Those were the days when workplace planning was as predictable as a Mission Impossible plot twist (which is to say, completely predictable if you'd seen more than one film).
Enter the Complications
Then activity-based working arrived like a plot twist nobody saw coming, even though the signs were there all along. Suddenly, it wasn't just about offices and workstations. We needed quiet rooms for deep focus, café areas for collaboration, telephone booths for private calls, shared offices for project teams, lounge areas for informal meetings, and more work settings than a Christopher Nolan film has timeline shifts.
Now you had to consider occupancy patterns across different spaces. The quiet rooms might peak at 80% utilisation while the café areas barely hit 40%. Some spaces were ghost towns at 9 AM but packed by 2 PM. Planning became less mathematics and more meteorology—lots of sophisticated models that might be completely wrong by Thursday.
COVID: The Ultimate Plot Twist
Just when we thought we'd mastered the activity-based working puzzle, along came 2020 with a curveball that made previous complications look like warm-up exercises.
Hybrid working didn't just change the game—it threw the entire rulebook into a shredder and set fire to the pieces.
Now we're dealing with organisations where people might only be in the office two or three days a week. But here's the kicker: if everyone decided to come in on the same day (let's say Wednesday becomes the universally agreed "collaboration day"), you'd still need the same amount of space as the pre-COVID era.
Meanwhile, other businesses might find their peak days are Tuesday through Thursday, but the peak only reaches 60% of pre-pandemic capacity. And Fridays? Fridays have become so empty you could hear a pin drop in most offices—if anyone was there to drop it.
The Crystal Ball is Broken
The final nail in the coffin of predictable space planning? Business uncertainty that makes the stock market look stable.
We used to confidently ask businesses: "What will your staffing numbers be in three years?" They'd give us projections, we'd plan accordingly, and they'd sign seven-year leases with fit-out incentives that made everyone happy.
Now when you ask that same question, you're more likely to get responses like:
"Well, it depends on the economy..."
"We're not sure how AI will impact our workforce..."
"Will we need fewer people or different people thanks to automation?"
"Our people might demand more flexibility..."
"Remote work might become permanent, or maybe not..."
"Will AI make our office spaces obsolete or more important for collaboration?"
"Ask me again next quarter, assuming I haven't been replaced by ChatGPT..."
It's like trying to plan a picnic when the weather forecast ranges from "sunny with light showers" to "possible tornado, controlled by an unpredictable AI weather system."
Mission: Flexibility
So what's an organisation to do when predicting space needs has become genuinely impossible?
The answer isn't better crystal balls or more sophisticated algorithms—though ironically, we're all now asking AI to help us predict the unpredictable (the irony is not lost on us). The answer is building flexibility into everything—lease terms, fit-out designs, and most importantly, organisational thinking.
Instead of trying to solve the unsolvable equation of future space needs, smart organisations are focusing on adaptability. Modular furniture, flexible lease arrangements, spaces that can be reconfigured quickly, and change management strategies that help people adapt to evolving workplace realities.
Because here's the thing: while we can't predict exactly how much space you'll need, we can help you create spaces and cultures that adapt to whatever the future throws at you.
Mission Accomplished?
Unlike Ethan Hunt's adventures, this mission doesn't end with everything neatly resolved in two hours. The mission of creating flexible, adaptive workplaces is ongoing, requiring constant attention to how people actually work, not how we think they should work.
The impossible has become possible—not by predicting the unpredictable, but by building the capability to adapt to whatever comes next.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to embrace the uncertainty.
At Next Workplace, we specialise in helping organisations navigate these impossible predictions through change management strategies that work with uncertainty, not against it. Because sometimes the best solution isn't having all the answers—it's building the capability to adapt to the questions we haven't thought of yet.