Kadence journal

News and ideas

Ideas, news and practical perspectives on the workplace.

· Future Of Work

Cutting Headcount Is Not Redesigning Work

I spent an hour last week with twenty workplace and real estate leaders from Europe and North America, along with Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward and executive-in-residence at Charter. He’s also an advisor and investor in Kadence. A few things are worth carrying back to your teams. Most of what’s being called AI transformation […]

· Future Of Work

Local Council Office Consolidation Needs Better Evidence

Most councils decide to consolidate office space before they can prove it is the right call. The saving appears in the medium term financial plan, a target is attached to it, and the estates team is then asked to produce evidence for a decision that has effectively already been announced. That sequence is normal across […]

· Future Of Work

Why University Utilization Figures Mislead

Ask a university what its space utilization is and you will usually get a single figure. Ask what that figure is made of and the answer becomes much less stable, because in a university more than in almost any other kind of organization, a utilization number is an average taken across spaces that behave in […]

· Future Of Work

23% Is Not an Adoption Story

CBRE says AI is already influencing space-planning decisions for 23% of occupiers. The workplace leaders I talk to are watching the rest of the company get lost, with tools that do not help them keep up. CBRE’s 2026 Americas Office Occupier Sentiment Survey put a number on a feeling a lot of workplace leaders already had. In […]

· Space Optimization

Kadence MCP Now in Your Favorite AI Assistant

Book desks, run the office, and get answers about your space in plain language, without leaving the assistant you already have open. Most AI in workplace software so far has been additive: a text box in the corner of a product, answering questions about the product it sits inside. That is useful, and it is […]

· Future Of Work

The Chief Places Officer Is Coming

The most influential forecast in commercial real estate just floated a new job title, and I think it is the most important idea in the entire report. In this year’s PwC and ULI outlook, in a passage about how occupiers are reorganizing their floors, is the suggestion that coordinating where teams sit may soon become […]

· Future Of Work

The Workplace Leader’s Playbook for When a Reorg Hits

Our team at Kadence was recently in a conversation with a large enterprise, and one thing a workplace leader on their side said has stuck with me. This particular company has publicly, very publicly, re-auged multiple times already this year and the Workplace team are feeling it. When a reorg hits and you have to […]

· Future Of Work

Offices Were Repriced. Your Space Decisions Should Be Too.

The market has already repriced your real estate. It did not ask whether you wanted to participate. Values have corrected, leases are getting shorter and smaller, and new supply has effectively stopped. What has not changed, in most enterprises, is how the lease decision itself gets made. That is the gap I want to close […]

· Space Optimization

Office Space Planning: A Workplace Leader’s Guide to Strategic Workplace Design

Office space planning was once a one-time exercise: lay out the floor, assign the desks, and revisit it in a few years. That model no longer fits how organizations operate. Office space planning has become an ongoing strategic discipline that touches real estate, headcount, hybrid policy, and employee experience at the same time. This guide […]

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