Occupancy data shows a setting is avoided; only observation shows the coat left to claim a desk, the team that annexed the project room, the quiet zone renegotiated into a call zone by daily practice. Behavioural drift is how concepts erode — not through decisions but through a thousand small adaptations nobody chose. This review reads that layer directly: which norms operate, which assumed behaviours materialised, what the workarounds reveal about unserved demand.
- Periodically — typically twice yearly — as standing practice
- When quantitative anomalies need behavioural explanation
- Before any Kit or policy revision: the workaround map is unserved demand made visible
- After changes likely to shift norms: new leadership, reorganisation, policy revision
- Strategist or trained internal observer
- Community group as behavioural informants
- FM contributing the operational record: complaints, furniture migration, signage requests
- Change lead assessing which assumed behaviours landed
- Behavioural assumption register from Workshop IV and the Kit
- Anomalies flagged by occupancy, booking and experience streams
- The Kit's per-setting norms as designed
- Prior review records, for drift comparison
- Conduct structured observation across settings, times and days with a consistent frame: territorial markers, setting misuse and reuse, movement, norm compliance and renegotiation.
- Map the workarounds — every adaptation is information: furniture dragged between zones is a setting-mix message, calls in stairwells an enclosure message, coats on chairs a sharing-trust message.
- Audit the behavioural assumption register: which assumed behaviours operate, decayed, or never landed.
- Classify drift: adaptation that improves the design (adopt), erosion of a valid norm (re-norm), or a signal the norm was wrong (redesign).
- Interview the informal layer via the community group: the unwritten rules that actually govern desk choice, room use and presence.
- Consolidate into the behaviour map with drift classified by required response.
- Territorial recolonisation of shared settings — the earliest, most predictive drift signal
- Workarounds concentrated in one population: a demand cluster the kit missed
- Norm decay following leadership example
- Improvised signage and furniture migration — the workforce redesigning what the project didn't
- Observer effects; triangulate with the informal layer
- Behaviour map: operating norms, failed norms, workarounds with demand interpretation
- Behavioural assumption audit
- Drift classification: adopt, re-norm, redesign
- Inputs to Kit revision, change interventions and the pulse
Adopt classifications update the Kit's norms; re-norm classifications route to change interventions; redesign classifications feed the Spatial Performance Review. Workaround demand signals enter the assumption register where they contradict the demand model.
This method is judgement almost entirely: reading a workaround's meaning, classifying drift as improvement or erosion, detecting the informal constitution beneath the official one. It is deliberately not platform-enabled — this evidence is precisely what instrumentation cannot see.
- Replacing observation with another survey — reported norms and operating norms are different data
- Reading all drift as failure when some drift improves the design
- Reviewing only the settings with complaints, missing silent colonisations
- Policing norms the review shows were wrong
- Treating it as FM inspection rather than strategic evidence
A media company's review found project rooms permanently annexed by two teams — officially a booking-discipline failure. Observation reframed it: both teams ran continuous multi-week productions the kit had modelled as bookable-session work. Classified redesign, not re-norm: four rooms converted to allocatable production spaces with a governance rule, and booking discipline elsewhere recovered within a quarter.