Best laid plans

In a speech in 1957, US President Dwight Eisenhower declared: ‘Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.’ To which we might add that the American poet Sylvia Plath once claimed to find ‘beauty in the shadows’. Two quotes, beautifully counterintuitive in and of themselves, but positively meaningless, you say, when hitched to one another and made to share a bed. Not true, as the below more than demonstrates.

If you’ve been following Adam Scott’s recent high-speed visit to Uruguay and Argentina, then you will know that he was there to speak, along with others, at Worktech24 on the future of work, courtesy of Worktech and workplace design+build studio Contract Workplaces. Delivered first at the Zona Franca World Trade Center in Montevideo and then Salón Dorrego in Buenos Aires, the main thrust of the talk – Welcome to the Experience Revolution – spoke to the fundamental importance of a ‘universal foundation for creating experiences that have the capacity to change the way we think, feel, and act’. That foundation consists of three key inputs or ‘methods of engagment’: a shared employee-employer strategy for change, a front-and-back-of-house ‘whole ecosystem’ approach to worplace design, and a design-in-action process predicated on W Edwards Demings’s notion of continual improvement.

Supported by out-of-sector examples taken from the likes of the (now shuttered and much missed) Red Bull Music Academy, Nike Jordan’s The Last Shot Experience, and Melbourne Airport’s passenger experience, the talk ends with a dissection of Nike World Headquarters’s experience-led masterplanning for the agile workplace campus, highlighting the importance placed by the host on the narrative journey, a story so compelling as to not just have the capacity to attract people back to the workplace, but to involve them in its design, delivery, and managing. Less about extraordinary technologies or extraordinary spaces, it’s about everybody being given permission to play their part in a masterplanning that in being continually delivered, never actually stops.

All of which, to return to Eisenhower and Plath, sets the most excellent of stages for what happens next. Having successfully delivered his talk in Uruguay, Scott makes his way to Argentina, enjoys its capital’s famously active streets, before joining everyone at Salón Dorrego, where –  supported not just by an extraordinary team of hosts, organisers, and technicians, but also by an extraordinary set of technologies, providing state-of-the-art lighting, sound, and (even) translation services – he prepares to repeat the feat, and has more than hit his agile-workplace-campus stride when Buenos Aires suffers one of its periodic blackouts.

‘It had all,’ he says, ‘gone perfectly to plan. My fellow speakers – Leon Rost, Florenchia Pochinki, Carmen Gloria Carcamo Losada – had wowed a room packed to the rafters with possibly the most well-dressed crowd I think I’ve ever seen. The talk seemed to be landing well. I could see the finish line. And then the sound just stopped, and we were plunged into darkness and silence. A light came on from somewhere in the crowd and I could see the concerned faces of my hosts. As people began to remove their headsets, I asked whether we ought to continue, and with their blessing stepped forward and finished, lit by their camera phones, and for some wonderfully insane moment everything Leon and Florenchia and Carmen Gloria and I had to say, and everything the audience was doing, seemed to speak directly to the making of this time and space, to creating a place filled with humanity, a dynamic and infinitely adaptable place, a place of unforgettable experience. I left feeling like something enormously special had happened, a feeling we all shared, and which none of us – speaker, host, guest – could ever have planned for.’

Plans, you see, are worthless, and planning is everything; and there is, after all, much beauty to be found in the shadows.

Thanks to everyone at Worktech24. It was the most wonderful of experiences, and all the better for that moment in the shadows. If you’d like to learn more about the talk and the business of revolutionising workplaces, please get in touch with either Adam Scott, Su Lim, or Mark Irving.