Change is the one area of work where experts violently agree: It needs to happen. While employees exclaim, ‘Again?!’ So what’s the human story behind the hype for agile, café seating and induction manuals?

While the S&P 500 is considered by many to be the index best representing actual market performance, it appears to spend more time these days bringing out its dead. Look it up – I did this and recognised less than half of the companies listed. And of those companies I saw this morning, three out of four will topple off into the lands of receivership by or before 2030. What once was a 60-plusyear lifespan for the average outfit on the Exchange in the late 1950s, halved to below 30 years in 1980, to less than 15 years today.

How to keep up? Noticing this ever-dwindling corporate life expectancy, Professor Richard Foster of Yale University has claimed that change – the rate of transformation in the nexus of capital formation, innovation and corporate leadership – “is at a faster pace than ever”.

I suppose it’s to be expected of these hey-it’s-crazy-out-there VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) markets, but it certainly does look like change, itself, has changed. No longer a question of merely keeping up with the rhythm of market forces, change has transformed into the beat of business-as-usual, prompting leaders to compel disruption for their organisations before they seemingly become disrupted.

Sure, rapidly advancing capabilities, increasing transparency thanks to big data analytics, competing demands from multigenerational workforce demographics, the shockingly rapid rise of AI (artificial intelligence), and remote cloud computing have all contributed to a corporate zeitgeist of knee-jerk fretting, but for movers-and-shakers in the change management and corporate strategy space, the real question is: why do we even bother going to work anymore?

When I was asked this question by Melissa Marsden, chief creative at COMUNiTI – a strategic planning and design studio operating from Queensland – I wrongly assumed it was rhetorical. “I know it sounds a bit crazy, but I think it’s an important question to consider,” she continues. “After all, if we just look at the impact technology has made to our everyday, it has challenged not only how but why we go to work. If we can feasibly work anywhere at anytime, why do so many of us wake up every day at a specific time and go to an office? The answer to ‘why’, of course, is people.

“What we are seeing more and more is a genuine understanding that social interaction lies at the heart of workplace culture,” says Marsden. It’s all about unpacking both the rationale (the business principle) and the allure (the human imagination) of ‘going to work’. “In our work with clients, consulting on the design strategy of their workplace,” says Marsden, “I see our mission as demystifying the roles and actions that actually take place in a day, measuring this against qualities of employee and client experience, and then unpacking the spaces that facilitate or confuse these.”

Of course, today, we encounter these spaces at the historically unprecedented moment of ‘come on, everybody in!’, as yet another generation squeezes into what already feels like an overcrowded chaos of competing values, communication styles, work habits and expectations.

“In my personal experience, it’s not uncommon that I enter a client’s workplace and notice up to five different generations distributed across the organisation’s workforce,” says Nathan Sri, principal of strategy at Unispace. “But it is possible to overemphasise the perceived difficulties of the inter-generational workplace over other equally important aspects of work.

“Obviously, the changing workplace dynamics through the rise of the inter-generational workforce are central to the actual design of workplace change programs,” he continues. “But in our experience at Unispace throughout the region, it is very clear that successful change management really has a focus on the neurological dimensions of this change. It’s all about behaviours – and we need to ask a double-sided question of these in order to help change them: how do these behaviours operate and how do they form as habit?”

It’s a commonplace misunderstanding that habit formation can take the space of years to achieve, but evidence is beginning to prove otherwise. Significantly ingrained habits – what Phillippa Lally in the (July, 2009) has termed “the asymptote of automaticity” – can take as little as 18 days to establish. These findings present change programs with an opportunity-rich appreciation of the power of behaviour, rather than merely the challenge it can present.