Are We Building Tomorrow’s Workplace Through Yesterday’s Process?

Almost 20 years ago, when I was deeply invested in the sustainability proposition and the emerging world of green building, I read a book with a title that is difficult to ignore for anyone in the AV integration space: Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets.

Written by Barry LePatner, the book examined why construction projects so often produced familiar poor outcomes: cost overruns, delays, disputes, compromised results, and frustrated owners. Sound familiar?

The book was published in 2007, long before the current AI moment, and certainly was not about hybrid work, intelligent buildings, adaptive collaboration environments, or the future of the modern workplace.

Yet what it triggered in me at the time has stayed with me since, and feels even more relevant today. The way we go about building something is as important as the thing we intend to build.

When a process is fragmented, information is incomplete, incentives are misaligned, and accountability is divided, disappointing outcomes should not always be treated as isolated failures. They may actually be the predictable product of the system used to create them.

That principle has particular relevance for the AV and collaboration industry because we have long occupied an unusual position between two worlds. Our value is increasingly shaped by the digital environment: software, platforms, data, user experience, and now intelligence. Yet our systems and delivery model remain highly embedded within the physical environment, dependent upon walls, ceilings, furniture, cabling, acoustics, lighting, power, and construction schedules.

Despite years of discussion about AV and IT convergence, the physical side of that equation has continued to dominate how our environments are delivered. AV is still largely funded, designed, procured, installed, commissioned, and handed over through workflows inherited from a project-centric construction model.

That model was/is not designed around the continuous adaptability, shared outcomes, and ongoing learning realities of today. It was designed to define what largely static physical structures would be built, divide that answer into scopes, allocate risk, control change, and eventually reach completion. Because AV was so closely integrated into that process, we inherited much of the same inertia, fragmentation, and accountability challenges.

Interconnected Environments

As collaboration outcomes become more dependent on the speed and agility of digital capability, what was once an awkward tension risks becoming a foundational constraint.

The workplace is becoming one interconnected environment, whether our organizational structures are ready for it or not. Physical space, workplace applications, collaboration platforms, occupancy data, identity, employee experience, organizational policy, and eventually AI-enabled contextual intelligence are all becoming increasingly interdependent.

That means more stakeholders in the build process, greater consequence to the decisions each makes, more complexity across the lifecycle, and much less certainty about what future users and workflows will require.

In other words, we are taking a delivery model that was already struggling with fragmentation, information asymmetry, and divided accountability, then asking it to absorb more participants, faster change, greater integration, and far less visibility into the future.

The book does not provide a contemporary blueprint for solving that challenge. But it offers a valuable diagnosis of the familiar model we still work within, and an invitation to recognize why simply forcing more technology and complexity into it will not produce a fundamentally different outcome.

That is why the traditional reliance on defining project-centric scope upfront deserves much greater scrutiny.

Rethinking Scope

Our procurement models typically begin by trying to define the answer. Requirements are established, translated into specifications, divided between disciplines, priced, contracted, and then managed against the original definition. Commercial accountability depends upon the assumption that the intended result can be understood with enough confidence at the beginning.

For physical construction, much of that discipline will always be necessary. Buildings require plans, budgets, sequencing, code compliance, and contractual clarity.

But the modern workplace presents a different challenge. Organizations are still being asked to define long-term requirements when their visibility into future need is shrinking. AI is changing interfaces, workflows, support models, collaboration patterns, and the role of the workplace itself. Capabilities that might seem experimental if not futuristic when a project begins may become commonplace before the initial deployment reaches completion.

The more intelligent and adaptive the workplace becomes, the less credible it is to believe that all meaningful value can be specified at the outset.

That does not mean scope disappears. It means scope cannot continue to be treated as a complete and static answer.

A tightly defined scope may provide immediate commercial certainty while simultaneously constraining future opportunity. It can reward delivery of what was understood yesterday while leaving no one responsible for what becomes possible tomorrow. The conventional process seeks to eliminate uncertainty, yet the future workplace must embrace the opportunity of uncertainty and a capacity to learn and adapt to whatever the future holds.

There are no quick or easy answers to this new reality. But I believe there are two practical directions end-user leaders can begin pursuing today: reconsider how the workplace itself is designed, and challenge whether the procurement and accountability models around it are capable of supporting that design.

A Layered Approach to Design

The first direction begins with recognizing that the workplace is not a single system operating to a single lifecycle. It is an interconnected environment spanning infrastructure, hardware, digital capability, and contextual intelligence. Each layer changes at a different speed and should be considered accordingly.

The infrastructure layer includes the structure, power, pathways, network cabling, acoustics, mounting provisions, furniture, environmental systems, and other relatively permanent characteristics of the space. It moves slowly, lasts a long time, and is disruptive and expensive to change. Its role should be to provide a resilient foundation without unnecessarily predetermining what must sit above it.

The hardware layer includes cameras, microphones, displays, loudspeakers, sensors, control devices, local compute, networking equipment, and other physical technology endpoints. Hardware may be digitally upgradeable, but it remains constrained by its processing power, memory, optics, connectivity, inputs, outputs, sensors, and physical architecture.

The digital layer is the software and data environment that activates and connects that hardware. It includes operating software, collaboration platforms, applications, control logic, identity, APIs, integrations, analytics, cloud services, and management platforms. This is where capability becomes far more agile, but only to the extent that the infrastructure and hardware beneath it allow.

Finally, the emerging contextual intelligence layer interprets who is gathering, why they are gathering, what they are trying to achieve, what has happened previously, which constraints or preferences matter, and how the environment might respond. It connects real-time signals, organizational knowledge, history, individual needs, and human purpose to create a more relevant and adaptive experience.

The practical principle is that each slower-moving layer should create permission for the faster-moving layer above it to evolve, rather than predetermining its limits.

That offers end-user leaders a different way to think about scope today. Does the largely static infrastructure simply support the current equipment list, or does it preserve future flexibility? Does the hardware only meet today’s specification, or can it support new software capabilities as they emerge? Is the digital architecture open and integrated enough to enable future intelligence? Are we imagining contextual experiences while making foundational decisions that may prevent them?

These are not abstract future questions. They belong in current design and governance conversations.

Moving Toward Shared Accountability

But layered design alone is not enough. A workplace may be architected for evolution and still be pulled back toward a static answer by the procurement model through which it is delivered.

That is the second practical direction for change.

A process built around tightly defined upfront scope, fragmented contracts, lowest initial cost, and responsibility that largely ends at handover will naturally reinforce the very outcomes we are trying to move beyond. It encourages each participant to optimize their own deliverable, even when the employee ultimately experiences the result as one integrated workplace.

Specification accountability remains necessary, but it is no longer sufficient. The future workplace requires greater shared accountability for how the combined environment performs, adapts, and creates value across its lifecycle.

That does not mean every partner can guarantee every workplace outcome. Collaboration quality, employee behaviour, organizational culture, and business performance will never sit entirely within the control of an architect, consultant, integrator, or technology provider.

But partners can be held accountable for their contribution to those outcomes. They can help establish the original assumptions, identify how their decisions enable or constrain the intended experience, remain involved in measuring performance, and participate in refining the environment as needs and capabilities change.

That is very different from completing a project, signing off the scope, and transferring responsibility to an operational team. It treats the workplace not as a static collection of assets, but as an organizational capability that should improve over time.

Many AV and workplace technology leaders may reasonably feel they have limited authority over these wider processes. Construction may sit with real estate. Procurement may be centralized. Workplace policy may belong to HR. AI governance may reside elsewhere in the enterprise.

But leadership has rarely been defined by remaining comfortably within an established lane. It often begins with recognizing that the existing lanes no longer serve an outcome for which you carry some responsibility.

Catalyzing Integrated Processes

This is not about AV leaders claiming ownership of the entire workplace. It is about becoming catalysts for a more integrated process: connecting physical decisions to future digital consequences, bringing the right stakeholders together before major constraints are locked in, and asking how success will be judged across the lifecycle rather than only at commissioning.

It means pursuing two connected propositions.

Design the workplace for evolution.

Procure the partnerships and accountability that allow it to evolve.

Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets was a catalyst for this reflection because it challenged the idea that flawed outcomes are always caused by the failure of individual participants. Sometimes capable people working within a flawed structure will continue to produce flawed outcomes.

For the collaboration industry, that is not only a lesson from the past. It is a warning about the future.

We cannot seek to procure tomorrow’s intelligent workplace through yesterday’s construction workflow.

We may not yet know the specific technologies, capabilities, or experiences that will define that future. But we do not need to wait for those answers before beginning the work. The practical path available today is to rethink the foundations we design and the models through which we procure, operate, and remain accountable for them, so that future change becomes something the workplace is prepared to embrace rather than something it is structured to resist.