Can we reinvent the modern office?

After a short break, Workplace Geeks returned in April with a heavyweight conversation to launch series 4: a rich and wide-ranging discussion with Jeremy Myerson and Philip Ross, co-authors of ‍. Unworking: The Reinvention of the Modern Office.

Longtime collaborators and respected voices in the workplace sector, Jeremy Myerson and Philip Ross have written together for decades. Their first book, The Creative Office (1999) challenged large companies to model the workplace behaviour of small ones to unlock more creativity and performance. They followed this with The 21st Century Office (2003), which explored how shifting working patterns, workspace design and technology were reshaping workplace. Then in Space to Work (2006) invited organisations to specifically consider their knowledge worker needs in terms of four distinct realms.

Each of their previous books – chunky coffee-table editions packed with case study photos – captured a moment in the evolving story workplace enabling work. But Unworking feels different. Part workplace retrospective, part manifesto for the future, it is more urgent and more provocative: a call not just to adapt, but to reinvent. As Ross explains on the show: “When I look at the workplace, most of what I see is iteration … small improvements, a bit of marginal gain here and there … COVID was an inflection. We have to do something very different to reimagine the future of work … [unworking is about] unbundling and unravelling our assumptions.”

At the heart of their argument is a simple but powerful idea: that our current approach to workplace design is still haunted by the ghost of Frederick Taylor. The legacy of Taylorism – with its obsession with efficiency, standardisation and control – continues to shape everything from office layouts to management culture, subconsciously or otherwise. Yet for ‘knowledge workers’ it just isn’t fit for purpose. Myerson explains: “Peter Drucker wanted a revolution in productivity for knowledge work … The productivity of the manual labourer in the modern factory setting went up 50-fold, and there wasn't the corresponding leap in the modern office setting because we don't know enough about how cognitive work plays out and what is really a catalyst for better performance.”

One of the most thought-provoking moments in the conversation is their reference to Tom Wolfe's essay ‘The Great Relearning’, published in 1987 in American Spectator. Wolfe observed how the countercultural movement of 1960s San Francisco returned to basic principles in the face of cultural excess. What followed, Wolfe argued, was a necessary relearning and reframing of fundamentals.

For Myerson and Ross, this idea resonates with where we are now. Myerson frames it practically, encouraging us to ask: “What have we done? How can we learn from it? How can we repackage all of this so that we don't fall into the same traps again?” Meanwhile, Ross notes the irony for many post-pandemic workers: “…Taylor studied time and motion, the idea of clocking in. And here we are, over a hundred years later, people are studying return to office, by studying clocking in.”

It’s a refreshing framing. Where so many debates about hybrid working and return-to-office policies are framed as binary or tribal, Unworking invites us to take a wider, deeper view. Not to choose sides, but to ask better questions by reflecting on how their ten directions can lead to ‘unworking’.

Ultimately, Unworking outlines ten directions for the future: social, healthy, sentient, purposeful, elastic, personalised, contextualised, digital, consumerised, and shared workplaces. This approach offers a recipe for workplace professionals and organisational leaders alike reflect on their own unique context. But the bigger shift they’re calling for is philosophical. Instead of endlessly tweaking old models, we need to be bold enough to press the reset button and start afresh.

But can we really shift the status quo? That’s less clear. On the one hand, the pandemic was a profound disruption, an ‘event horizon’ that allowed many people to reimagine what work could look like. On the other, as co-host Ian Ellison argues during the episode reflection section with Worktech Academy’s Kasia Maynard, social and structural systems are incredibly good at snapping back into place. And the corporate real estate system that the authors describe as “the people who own, plan, build, design, manage, supply, invest, and occupy our offices” in the book is a pervasive one indeed.

It’s also worth remembering that to publish a book is to forever timestamp one’s arguments in black and white. First published in 2022, before the rapid growth of LLM-based generative AIs like ChatGPT, some of the technology predictions in Unworking are already changing shape. Myerson laments: “when we wrote the book, everyone was into virtual reality, augmented reality … a regret as authors is that we didn't play up AI enough in the book. We mentioned it, we discussed it, it's underlying a lot of processes, but we didn't foreground it.”

Nonetheless, to change anything takes vision, ambition, and the skilful use of rhetoric and evidence through compelling storytelling – all of which this book provides in abundance. Unworking is full of examples and provocations, not just about how offices might look, but how they might function socially, digitally, and sustainably.

Whether you’re a seasoned workplace professional or simply someone trying to make sense of work's messy present and fast-moving future, this episode is worth your undivided attention.

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