Workplace strategy produces trade-offs, and trade-offs produce conflict. Evidence about desk sharing, presence or portfolio reduction will be contested by whoever loses from it. If decision rights are designed after the conflict appears, the loudest stakeholder wins. This method establishes who decides, who advises, who is consulted and who escalates — while the questions are still abstract and agreement is cheap. Governance designed early is the difference between a strategy and a stalemate.
- Immediately after Project Definition Initiation, before any research method is deployed
- When restarting a stalled project whose governance collapsed
- When multiple functions (CRE, HR, IT, Finance) claim ownership of the workplace question
- At the transition into Develop and Deliver, when governance intensity increases
- Project sponsor
- Nominated steering group members (senior, cross-functional)
- Workplace project team lead
- External advisors: strategist, architect/design lead, change lead where appointed
- Finance owner of the budget
- Project definition document and constraint register
- Organisational chart and existing governance bodies
- Budget structure and financial approval thresholds
- Lease/portfolio milestone dates driving the timeline
- Map the decision inventory: every major decision the project will produce (workstyle model, sharing ratio, scenario selection, concept approval, budget release).
- Assign each decision a decision-maker, an advisory group and a consultation group — explicitly, in a RACI-style register.
- Establish the steering group: composition, mandate, meeting cadence, quorum, and what it may and may not decide.
- Define the workplace project team: workstream owners for research, spatial, change, technology and finance.
- Confirm the roles of external parties — strategist, architect, change team, technology and data team — and where their advice ends and client decisions begin.
- Set escalation routes: what happens when the steering group deadlocks, and who breaks the tie.
- Build the master timeline backwards from fixed events (lease break, board dates), allocating realistic durations to research and co-creation.
- Confirm resourcing: internal time commitments, data-owner availability, and budget ownership per workstream.
- Steering groups composed only of one function — the trade-offs will be invisible to them
- Decision-makers who delegate attendance: a deputy cannot own a trade-off
- Timelines that compress Diagnose to protect Develop — evidence debt always surfaces later
- Unfunded workstreams, especially change management and data governance
- Ambiguity about whether the community group advises or decides — resolve it now
- Governance charter: bodies, mandates, cadence, escalation routes
- Decision-rights register (RACI per major decision)
- Master timeline with fixed milestones and method sequencing
- Resource plan and budget ownership map
Every workshop in Develop runs against the decision-rights register: Workshop IV can only confirm a concept because this method defined who confirms it. The Leadership Team and Community Group methods implement the bodies chartered here. Calibration and Scenario Development escalate through the routes defined here. The governance model carries into the final Workplace Strategy and into Recalibrate.
Formal decision rights and actual power rarely match. Judging where informal influence sits — and designing governance that survives it — requires organisational reading no register can encode.
- Copying a generic RACI template instead of building the register from the project's actual decisions
- Treating governance as administration rather than conflict design
- Setting steering cadence by calendar habit (monthly) instead of by decision moments
- Omitting escalation routes because 'we all get along' — until the sharing ratio lands
- Underestimating internal time cost: data owners and community members are not free
A financial services firm launched a headquarters strategy with an eight-person steering group and no decision-rights register. When evidence supported a 0.7 sharing ratio, three business heads rejected it and the project froze for four months. The re-mobilised project assigned the sharing-ratio decision explicitly to the COO, advised by the steering group, with CEO escalation. The same evidence then produced a decision in one meeting.