2. Not embarrassingly empty

WEBVTT
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Good afternoon, Mr.
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Ellison.
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How's it going?
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Going okay.
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We've pressed record, haven't we?
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I have pressed record.
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So do you know what today is?
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I do know what today is.
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Go on then, what's today?
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Five weeks.
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Five weeks to the day from the doors opening.
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When I last spoke to Paul Glaister about registrations a week ago, he told me what he'd need by today to stay on target for the 500 sign-ups he's after to hopefully get the attendance he needs.
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So, come on then.
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How are we doing?
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We we're doing okay, but not where we'd like to be.
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I know I I did say in our last conversation that um I give myself the target of by the end of this week.
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Oh, I see.
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You're getting out of the technicality.
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I need another 50 registrations to get to get above the hundred or another hundred registrations to get it to 150.
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Okay, so you've got 50.
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Okay.
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51 or 500 target.
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We've gone over 10%.
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So I think it'd be fair to say that right now things are heading in the right direction, but not nearly fast enough.
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So where's the needle on the Optimisticometer this week?
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I think we're stuck on 60%.
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Just like last week.
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Just like last week.
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This is Work in Motion from Work Pattern.
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Series 1.
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The inside story of Work Beyond Walls, exploring why one man thinks the Northeast needs an event like this and whether anyone else agrees.
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Written and presented by me, Ian Ellison.
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Episode 2.
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Not embarrassingly empty.
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In the first episode, which you should listen to first if you haven't yet, we learnt how an idea for a pop-up furniture showroom in a railway arch turned into a two-day extravaganza at the Boiler Shop, a grade two-star listed building and former locomotive works, once Paul Glaister, co-founder and brand principal of Work pattern, got his hands on it.
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What we didn't do is establish what the event actually is, which is a bit awkward because in five weeks, as I record this, several hundred people are supposed to walk through the doors in Newcastle to experience something special.
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And Paul has promised them quite a lot.
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Not an expo, not a trade show, not a conference.
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Something that blends elements from each to make something different.
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Something better.
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He's promised them the Northeast's first living workplace.
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And the event has a name.
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Work Beyond Walls.
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It didn't have this until recently, and we'll get to that too, because an event without a name can be quite a challenge.
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Coming up in this episode, what is Work Beyond Walls?
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Has anyone ever actually pulled something like it off?
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How important is a name?
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And to Paul and his team have a hope of getting at least 500 people to even care by the 9th of September.
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In episode one, you heard the same challenge from three different people.
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Beth, Philippa, and Paul.
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If you want to see the good stuff, you have to get on a train.
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And in the early days of Work Pattern, Paul even went one better.
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I managed to get myself a little van and I'd quite regularly drive down to London and come back with I'd steal things from the showroom.
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He was heading directly for Clerkenwell.
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Clerkenwell had a sign up and do it one stage, I think, trying to keep me out of it.
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Because you kept nipping down there and kept nipping down there, and I always came back with something.
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Clerkenwell, alongside Farringdon, is a neighbourhood in London, about a square mile in area just north of the Barbican.
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If you don't work in design, there's no reason you'd know it's the centre of gravity for the entire British design industry, but it is, and there's a reason.
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The reason it's there is because there is a multitude of architects, and the history of the area means that architects set up in lofts and warehouses, and from there brands came to the area.
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So furniture brands, accessory brands, brands related to architecture and design.
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That's Katie Richardson.
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I am a PR and brand consultant by trade.
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As part of my remit for Clerkenw ell Design Week, I actually curate the official talks program.
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I grew up in Essex and I moved to London and I lived in Clerkenwell for many years.
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That was my stomping ground.
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If you talk to pretty much anyone from the workplace design sector in the UK, there's one event that everyone has heard of: Clerkenwell Design Week.
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Launched in 2010, and after 15 editions, it's become the award-winning de facto benchmark for everything else.
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And Katie has handled the official talks program, Conversations at Clerkenwell, for the last seven years.
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Clerkenwell Design Week runs for three days in May.
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Owned by Media 10, it now attracts well over 30,000 visitors annually to explore more than 600 showroom events and visit 16 curated exhibitions.
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I asked her to describe it to somebody who's never been.
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What the festival has done is open up a lot of public spaces with the support of the council, and brands or entities or designers can come along and take those and create something wonderful.
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So when you're on the public route travelling around, you've also got installations, pop-ups.
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So for example, we created a pavilion just off of Clerkenwell Green, and it just became this wonderful hub for people to see colour, be inspired by how the product can look in context.
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And that is a big part of the festival to happen across these unexpected creative and curated moments.
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So it's a business with elements of a festival, and the entire district is the stage.
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The showrooms are already there because the architects were already there, because the warehouses were already there.
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Hundreds of years of history creating a gravitational pull towards a unique location.
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Which brings me to what I actually wanted to ask, because there are so-called Clerkenwells popping up elsewhere now.
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There's ClerkenWales in Cardiff.
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There was a ClerkenLeeds this year.
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And this thing happening in Newcastle in five weeks could have been called Clerken Up North or something like that.
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Can we do this when we don't have a Clerkenwell?
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We do have a design community, but we don't have that gravitational pull.
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And obviously with Clerkenwell, you have this wonderful landscape of architecture and design already there, and bringing it to life is what the show does.
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If you airlifted it to a blank canvas, you would have problems because it's to do with buildings, architecture, and all of those things, right?
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Right.
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So the model everyone starts trying to copy is a model that, according to someone involved in running it, can't be copied because the bit that makes it unique isn't the event.
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It's the sense of place the event rests upon.
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The Northeast hasn't got that.
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It's got a passionate, if small, design community with some great university courses feeding it.
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What it hasn't got though is a defined district you can point at on a map.
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But then Katie said something else that I thought was really interesting.
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I told her what Paul's actually doing: the boiler shop, the Stephenson industrial history, 20 odd brands, the ambition, and I asked her the industry-facing question.
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Not will people come, but what would make a furniture brand say yes to a brand new first-year event when they could just do Clerkenwell?
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It's a bit of a closed loop, isn't it?
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You have to show the brands that you're going to get your visitors.
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That's the ongoing challenge.
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You have to show them that if they're going to invest, they're going to reach the right specifiers in the audience.
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So that is something that builds over time.
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A closed reinforcing loop.
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The brands come if you've got the visitors.
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The visitors come if you've got the brands, chicken and egg.
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And you can't have either without the other.
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Except Paul has 23 partners signed up already.
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He got every one of them before a single attendee registration.
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And then in the last week of July, when the event site finally went live, this happened.
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Being inundated by other people, can we get involved in this?
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Is there a space for us?
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Which is interesting.
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 So the side of the loop Katie says is the hard side, the half that's supposed to take years, Paul's already cracked, pardon the pun, for a workplace event that has never happened, in a region with no track record of them, or nothing but his word and his reputation.
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And now more are interested.
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But the other side, the easy-sounding side, getting people to walk through a free door in their own region, that's the half, sitting at 51 registrations.
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Hold that thought.
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Option two is what a small studio in Cardiff did four years ago.
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My name's Dave James.
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I am an interior designer and director at Blocker, an interior design and architectural studio with offices in Cardiff and Sheffield.
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Dave's event is ClerkenWales.
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It happens in a converted chapel called Cornerstone at the bottom of Church Street in Cardiff.
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2026 will be its fourth year.
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What we try and do is bring a little bit of a feel of what Clerkenwell Design Week brings to designers and sort of bring it home and bring it into a local setting where people can come and experience it for a couple of days.
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Going to Clerkenwell Design Week was the big highlight for any designer's calendar.
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But that highlight can actually come at a cost.
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I've had experiences where it was only certain members of the team could go, and then even those members of the team, they'd have to almost report on what they stole when they came back to the prove they were paying attention and not just having ice creams and drinking beer and that sort of thing.
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This is it, again.
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So Dave and his colleagues set about to emulate the experience for their own local design community.
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We needed to find a venue that kind of ticked all the boxes for us in what we were looking for.
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We knew we definitely didn't want a kind of an empty, cold exhibition space.
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When we sort of found Cornerstone, it's a great backdrop for what we create.
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So Cornerstone, I'm guessing, if it's converted chapel, it has got lots of history and lots of character, but it is still ultimately a blank canvas.
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Not like the NEC is a blank canvas, just an empty hall, but it's it's still a blank canvas.
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That's exactly it in a nutshell.
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Sound familiar?
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And what happens inside isn't too far, I think, from what Paul's actually trying to do.
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Here it is from someone who's done it three times already.
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The biggest word that kind of commonly gets used when we're talking about this event is collaboration.
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They work together to create a setting within that hall that people can use throughout the day.
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So that could be used to, you know, work with your team.
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A lot of independent designers come down and kind of co-work for the day from there.
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Lisa, who I work with, calls it a sticky event.
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So you come down and you stay there for the day or how much time you can spare and spend as much time in that space to help kind of create that buzz and that atmosphere within there.
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Sticky.
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Remember that word too, because we'll come back to it later.
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Four years in, ClerkenWales has gone from six or seven manufacturers to 23.
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There's a reserve list, and crucially, because this is what Paul has to be able to tell his own partners, it works commercially.
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And the manufacturers themselves, they'll say, you know, just on the back of those two days, we've had three orders come in, we've had four project inquiries, and they've had actual tangible business awarded to them through attending ClerkenWales, which is why we've kind of got a long list of people who want to attend.
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Now, before this starts sounding like a slam dunk, there is also a lot of learning from mistakes.
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Like, for example, the need to oversell tickets.
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The guy called James Munch, who works for 01 furniture, he kind of pointed out to me, he said, Well, you do know if you want 20 people to show up, you need to sell about 40 to 60 tickets.
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I was like, Oh.
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And that brought me to sort of crashing back around to earth a little bit.
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Ah yes, the curse of Eventbrite and Free Tickets, a painful lesson in the difference between a registration and an actual human showing up.
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Which Paul is clearly aware of given his own maths.
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500 registrations to get around 300 bodies and 200 unique organisations to visit over two days.
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So ClerkenWales proves it's possible.
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You don't need Clerkenwell to do something valuable and memorable.
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You need a place with some character and a reason to stay in it.
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But there is a catch, and it's the one that challenges Paul specifically.
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ClerkenWales is an event by designers for designers.
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Dave's completely open about this.
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Coming at it as designers, that's what we do first and foremost.
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This is who we're putting it on for.
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It's kind of as designers, what would we want?
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And that's only half of what Paul's promised.
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He wants the design community, yes, but he's also said he wants people who have probably never bought a chair or any other office furniture for that matter in their lives.
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Local and regional businesses, employers, employees, the public as well as the private sector, people whose bosses might think work beyond walls sounds like a bit of a tangent, maybe even a bit of a jolly.
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So, taking a specialist conversation and getting a whole region to turn up for it, up here in the Northeast from nothing.
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There's one person who has done exactly that, and I needed to understand more about it.
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My name's Herb Kim, and I am the founder of the Thinking Digital Conference, TEDx Manchester, TEDx Newcastle, TEDx Durham, and TEDx Liverpool.
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I spend my year trying to find interesting emerging talents, people who have been there and done it, and helped them tell their story in a 15-minute nugget.
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Thinking Digital runs at the Glasshouse in Gateshead, the building many of us still call the Sage, and this May was its 17th year.
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When I asked Terry McStea, who you met last time and knows about pretty much every event in this region, which ones are genuinely unmissable?
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Thinking Digital was the first one out of his mouth.
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I think the unmissable ones are Thinking Digital, run by Herb Kim.
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That usually sells out pretty quickly after the tickets go on sale.
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So that has become genuinely an unmissable part of the annual calendar.
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I think the Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival is certainly up there as well as being something that people put in their diaries months in advance.
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If for whatever reason the Innovation Festival was cancelled or thinking digital was cancelled, it would leave a huge hole, and people would be really, really disappointed that it wasn't happening.
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Unmissable sellout.
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So the first one was in May 2008, and um it was it was very challenging, if I'm completely honest with you.
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The first year uh was probably on the knife edge between disaster and success.
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Year one was it was badly undersold.
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I mean, we thought the people were who were coming were amazing and all that sort of stuff, but you know, it wasn't like we already had Taylor Swift.
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That was super challenging.
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One of the biggest stresses.
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I mean, even if your event is free and you have catering and you have, I don't know, whatever, some big name coming, they'll oftentimes still struggle to not even get the place full, but to get the place not embarrassingly empty.
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Not embarrassingly empty.
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Ouch.
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That's the founder of one of the most respected events in the Northeast talking about his own year one.
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So when I asked why it's harder up here, because I'd always viewed it as a numbers thing, Herb shared a more nuanced perspective.
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I feel like, like down in London, because of the density of just the sheer density of people, that you can have some fairly mediocre events in terms of content, but they still get the footfall, they still, you know, so the sponsors are happy because the place is nice and full and all that sort of stuff.
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Whereas 250 miles north up here.
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The content does need to be good in order to give people a reason, whether they're based in the region or coming from outside the region, to make the journey.
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But then there's the added challenge of building audience.
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You know, if you speak to people in culture and things like that, audience development is always a huge, a huge challenge.
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So it isn't just that there are fewer people, it's that the bar is higher.
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In London, a mediocre event can fill a room because that room is surrounded by a metropolis.
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Up north, mediocre equals empty.
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You have to be better to get the same result, which puts an enormous amount of significance on what you actually put on that stage.
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And here's where two seasoned event experts disagree.
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Sort of.
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Katie at Clerk enwell still targets big names.
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The official talks program still remains the one where we will try to get big names, recognizable brands, and content that speaks to the audience and represents the show.
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But not quite in the way you'd maybe think.
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I don't want to get someone to stand up and say, here is my chair, this is how I made the chair.
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It's not interesting for the speakers.
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I would rather hear the backstory of a designer than someone presenting how they created their chair.
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I always work on the basis of what would I want to stop and listen to, because we are all-time poor.
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So if you're going to decide to stop and listen for an hour to someone talking, it's going to have to be good, right?
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And the trick she's landed on after years of doing it is that if you get the right people, the topics look after themselves.
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What I've realized is if you get good people, new and old, established and emerging, what they do is they bring their opinions on all of these things to the table by default.
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So you don't have to have a talk on sustainability because you know that if you bring in a new designer, they're going to talk to you about how they're weaving that into their work or developing their business.
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Whereas Herb's gone the other way, he started out paying for keynotes and then stopped.
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We knew that to be a sustainable event, we weren't going to be able to afford to pay keynotes big money.
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We did the first year and maybe in the second year as well, but the feedback we got was kind of like, yeah, they were they were good, but like they didn't like make the event.
00:21:26.960 --> 00:21:32.160
I'm not coming back next year because I'm expecting an equivalent star to be there, right?
00:21:32.160 --> 00:21:36.400
The problem about becoming big is that oftentimes you can just live off your name.
00:21:36.400 --> 00:21:37.200
That does happen.
00:21:37.200 --> 00:21:41.519
If you can get a big name or big company to come, then great.
00:21:41.519 --> 00:21:45.680
I I would say make sure though they can actually deliver the goods.
00:21:47.920 --> 00:22:02.799
And if that wasn't enough for Paul and his team to unpick, there's also Darren Richardson, who you'll meet properly in a minute, with a third view, which is that the most interesting thing you can do with a stage is put Someone on it that nobody expected.
00:22:05.200 --> 00:22:13.440
A friend of mine is called Morag Myerskoff, a graphic designer who's become um an artist and does huge public art around the world.
00:22:13.440 --> 00:22:17.519
But Morag works with colour and how a colour affects emotions.
00:22:17.519 --> 00:22:19.599
And you know, she's an amazing individual.
00:22:19.599 --> 00:22:26.079
And if we had something like that as a speaker, that would kind of challenge people's like, why is Morag there?
00:22:26.079 --> 00:22:27.440
Why is that?
00:22:27.440 --> 00:22:37.200
Finding the right people who've got interesting perspectives that can elevate it out of a simple expo that has a bit of furniture stuck in a room that takes it to something that has an opinion on the world.
00:22:37.440 --> 00:22:43.839
Big names, emerging names, and names that take you by total surprise from outside your world.
00:22:43.839 --> 00:22:49.279
Three different answers, and honestly, all three are probably right-ish.
00:22:49.279 --> 00:22:52.799
So, um, over to you, Paul.
00:22:52.799 --> 00:22:56.319
I can't wait to see how that lineup takes shape.
00:22:56.319 --> 00:22:59.759
Now, about the event name.
00:22:59.759 --> 00:23:09.039
In some parallel dimension of the multiverse, there's a version of the last four months where none of this part of the story happened at all, and Paul just got on with it.
00:23:09.039 --> 00:23:14.400
Because when Paul first contacted Terry McStay about his idea, Terry offered some advice.
00:23:14.400 --> 00:23:19.200
It doesn't really matter what you call it, the name stops mattering the minute people turn up.
00:23:19.200 --> 00:23:20.319
Just get on with it.
00:23:20.319 --> 00:23:23.359
Paul says Terry's advice was simple.
00:23:25.519 --> 00:23:34.960
You know, we do we agonize over a lot of these things, and then afterwards it just becomes not irrelevant, but it's not as precious as you first thought it was.
00:23:35.279 --> 00:23:36.240
Good advice?
00:23:36.240 --> 00:23:40.640
Well, we'll never know, because in this dimension, things played out differently.
00:23:40.880 --> 00:23:44.559
Darren Richardson, creative director at Gardner Richardson.
00:23:44.559 --> 00:23:48.960
We're a strategic brand communications agency based in Newcastle.
00:23:49.279 --> 00:23:51.920
Darren is originally from Teeside.
00:23:51.920 --> 00:24:08.000
He got pulled into this by Elliot Brook from deadgood, someone we're hopefully going to hear from later in the series, from an award-winning furniture business founded by Northumbria University graduates, because Elliot thought it mattered that this event represented the region properly.
00:24:08.000 --> 00:24:11.519
The working title at that point was Design Up North.
00:24:11.839 --> 00:24:14.720
And I think that felt like a first step of, you know, that's fine.
00:24:14.720 --> 00:24:21.519
Whenever we're developing thinking and ideas, but you have certain ideas that you immediately go to, then you throw it away, and then you go to the next level, the next level, the next level.
00:24:21.519 --> 00:24:25.200
Using the word up north sort of feels like it's poor us kind of thing.
00:24:25.200 --> 00:24:28.079
It felt a little bit apologetic rather than actually being a little bit more confident.
00:24:28.400 --> 00:24:29.359
Apologetic.
00:24:29.359 --> 00:24:32.160
That's a tough thing to hear about your own idea.
00:24:32.160 --> 00:24:40.559
So Terry says a name's not that important, but for Darren, a name and the language you use around it really matters.
00:24:40.559 --> 00:24:47.680
And Paul, who values both of their input, is frozen in between with a venue booked and the clock ticking.
00:24:47.680 --> 00:24:49.680
Darren's counsel was this.
00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:53.200
We always bring it back to a positioning narrative about what the customer needs.
00:24:53.200 --> 00:24:54.880
You know, feed the food the fish want.
00:24:54.880 --> 00:24:59.599
Because the name is the first hook that people are going to hear before they see anything they might hear it, or someone talks about it.
00:24:59.599 --> 00:25:15.839
And we kind of arrived at this idea of work beyond walls because it felt like it was answering that sense of you want this to transcend physical workspaces, embrace technology, embrace society, you know, what's going on in the world and how the world of work is changing.
00:25:15.839 --> 00:25:18.720
So it needs to have something that's a little bit more thought-provoking.
00:25:18.720 --> 00:25:23.519
It's an invitation to, you know, push the boundaries a little bit.
00:25:23.519 --> 00:25:27.279
It also will help entice people to think, well, what's that event about?
00:25:27.279 --> 00:25:28.079
I'm interested in that.
00:25:28.079 --> 00:25:30.240
You know, it's the sort of sizzle and the sausage kind of thing.
00:25:30.240 --> 00:25:31.680
The name becomes the sizzle.
00:25:32.000 --> 00:25:34.400
Sell the sizzle, not the sausage.
00:25:34.400 --> 00:25:36.400
That's the world we live in now, folks.
00:25:36.400 --> 00:25:38.559
Paul, however, wasn't so sure.
00:25:39.039 --> 00:25:43.839
He was a bit nervous about the name, so I ended up ringing him and actually saying that, mate, this is gonna work.
00:25:43.839 --> 00:25:45.759
Believe me, trust me, this is gonna work.
00:25:45.759 --> 00:25:48.720
It delivers everything that you want to achieve from this event.
00:25:48.720 --> 00:25:52.640
You want to kind of get people to go and think, you know, outside the box.
00:25:52.640 --> 00:25:54.720
You want to challenge people's preconceptions.
00:25:54.720 --> 00:25:59.359
Therefore, you've got to intrigue them with something that starts that conversation, start that dialogue.
00:25:59.359 --> 00:26:01.519
So I was fairly forthright on the call, actually.
00:26:01.519 --> 00:26:03.119
Fairly forthright.
00:26:03.119 --> 00:26:05.200
Here's how forthright.
00:26:05.200 --> 00:26:07.039
This is genuinely the right direction.
00:26:07.039 --> 00:26:10.079
And if you don't do it, mate, I'm gonna go and do it and I'm gonna do it better than you will.
00:26:11.279 --> 00:26:12.559
Now I should qualify.
00:26:12.559 --> 00:26:15.839
That lands a bit harder out of the full interview context.
00:26:15.839 --> 00:26:26.640
Darren says it's smiling, and it came after 10 minutes of him explaining to me that a huge part of his job is giving people the confidence to make a decision they might be a bit frightened of.
00:26:26.880 --> 00:26:31.359
I often say that we don't just sell creativity, we sell confidence to make decisions.
00:26:31.359 --> 00:26:33.599
And our job is to help people make decisions.
00:26:33.599 --> 00:26:38.319
We often come into situations where people don't like what we present, and that doesn't make me feel uncomfortable.
00:26:38.319 --> 00:26:42.880
That's quite reassuring because we've pushed it beyond the realm of what they're used to hearing.
00:26:45.119 --> 00:26:48.480
So Paul trusts Darren and buys into the concept.
00:26:48.480 --> 00:26:56.000
He takes it to his team, and well, it's growing on them, which might be the most honest thing anybody has ever said about a brand launch.
00:26:56.000 --> 00:27:02.160
Anyway, there's actually a small footnote to the naming socket that nobody seems to have spotted except me.
00:27:02.160 --> 00:27:12.559
There is a publication from the early 90s written by a seminal workplace firm called DETW for the British government about how work was going to change.
00:27:12.559 --> 00:27:15.759
It's called Working Beyond Walls.
00:27:15.759 --> 00:27:22.720
There were two more in the sequence that came after it, Working Without Walls, and years later, The Way We Work.
00:27:22.720 --> 00:27:25.839
Yes, I am that much of a workplace nerd.
00:27:25.839 --> 00:27:28.160
So I guess you can take that one two ways.
00:27:28.160 --> 00:27:41.200
Either somebody should have run a deeper web search, maybe got on the Wayback Machine, or, and this is probably a more useful view, the idea within a name that's over 30 years old still hasn't landed.
00:27:41.200 --> 00:27:45.279
Even after the post-pandemic hybrid working bun fight.
00:27:45.279 --> 00:27:49.119
Which is more or less exactly why Paul is putting on this event.
00:27:49.119 --> 00:27:54.079
There's one thing I keep coming back to about names though, and I got it from Herb.
00:27:54.079 --> 00:27:59.920
Thinking Digital was originally fronted by a company called CodeWorks, run by Herb at the time.
00:27:59.920 --> 00:28:05.599
By most conventions, it should have been called something like the Code Works Technology Summit.
00:28:05.599 --> 00:28:08.240
It wasn't, and there was a reason.
00:28:08.880 --> 00:28:16.559
People attached to the company at a senior level were quite keen for it to not be named after the company.
00:28:16.559 --> 00:28:21.359
So that should it explode and be this very public failure.
00:28:21.680 --> 00:28:22.480
Oh, interesting.
00:28:22.480 --> 00:28:23.279
Interesting.
00:28:23.759 --> 00:28:31.680
I would probably go down with the ship, but the ship itself would at least be spared some of the collateral damage.
00:28:32.160 --> 00:28:36.799
Which demonstrates that naming a thing isn't entirely a marketing decision.
00:28:36.799 --> 00:28:44.000
It's also a decision about whether you're prepared to risk putting your own name next to potential public failure.
00:28:44.000 --> 00:28:45.440
Risk and reward, eh?
00:28:45.440 --> 00:28:52.960
It can be a very delicate balance, and one that we'll only know in Work Beyond Wall's case after the event.
00:28:52.960 --> 00:28:56.880
Okay, let's say the name is spot on.
00:28:56.880 --> 00:29:04.720
Let's say the venue is inspiring, the talks are thought-provoking, and all of Workpattern's partners are consummate hosts.
00:29:04.720 --> 00:29:09.599
But why would anyone who doesn't live in Newcastle or Gateshead get on the train?
00:29:09.599 --> 00:29:13.680
Katie had an answer to that and it involved somebody we both knew.
00:29:13.680 --> 00:29:20.799
Mark was saying, if I'm gonna come across from Stoke, I want something that I'm not gonna get from anywhere else.
00:29:20.799 --> 00:29:28.960
I want to feel the region, I want to feel like I'm going to the Northeast, to a Northeast event that's gonna give me something that I can't get from Clerkenwell.
00:29:29.200 --> 00:29:30.400
That's a great point.
00:29:30.400 --> 00:29:32.880
It's like speaking to the locality of it.
00:29:32.880 --> 00:29:36.880
But again, you've got to find a way to reach your audience.
00:29:36.880 --> 00:29:41.359
You've got to find a way to reach the Mark Eltringhams, haven't you?
00:29:46.160 --> 00:29:48.559
Well, let's meet Mark Eltringham then.
00:29:48.559 --> 00:29:49.680
Mark Eltringham.
00:29:49.680 --> 00:29:53.119
I'm the publisher of uh a number of things these days, actually.
00:29:53.119 --> 00:30:01.359
The most ancient of them all is WorkplaceInsight.net, a blog stroke news website, which has been around since 2012.
00:30:01.359 --> 00:30:10.799
We also now publish a magazine, a print magazine, if you please, called Works, and been in the industry for 30 odd years talking about workplace design and management, more or less.
00:30:11.119 --> 00:30:14.160
Now Mark gets asked to support new things constantly.
00:30:14.160 --> 00:30:18.799
I've asked him myself more than once about some things that never even came to fruition.
00:30:18.799 --> 00:30:20.400
So I put it to him straight.
00:30:20.400 --> 00:30:26.000
What would need to be true for you to get on a train, cross the Pennines, and support work beyond walls?
00:30:26.319 --> 00:30:30.559
Well, I think it would be something that's related to the uniqueness of the region.
00:30:30.559 --> 00:30:37.359
You know, I I saw another conference program that you know covered issues that I I think I've seen before.
00:30:37.359 --> 00:30:41.839
When you look at all these these regions, you know, they all have their own challenges and their own opportunities.
00:30:41.839 --> 00:30:44.640
And I think that would be what would get me up there.
00:30:44.960 --> 00:30:46.880
And there are regional differences.
00:30:46.880 --> 00:30:52.480
Paul's already got data that demonstrates this, which he'll be building on in real time at the event.
00:30:52.480 --> 00:31:01.039
And nobody ever writes about them because the big city, big brand, knowledge worker writ large narrative casts a shadow across everything else.
00:31:01.440 --> 00:31:03.759
That whole thing about make the office worth a commute.
00:31:03.759 --> 00:31:07.200
I don't know what it's like travelling on the metro in in the Northeast.
00:31:07.200 --> 00:31:11.039
But I know I've got a 20 or 30 minute walk into work every day.
00:31:11.039 --> 00:31:12.480
So my commute is okay.
00:31:12.480 --> 00:31:21.359
When people are making that statement, what they mean is the commute into London Bridge or Waterloo or whatever, which is often a miserable experience, isn't it?
00:31:21.359 --> 00:31:22.880
And a lot of these statements are like that.
00:31:22.880 --> 00:31:27.119
And it's not just London-centric, it's uh it's kind of like an elite statement.
00:31:28.000 --> 00:31:28.960
So there it is.
00:31:28.960 --> 00:31:33.359
Give Mark something he can only get in the North East and he'll come.
00:31:33.359 --> 00:31:39.440
But give him another panel on hybrid working and return to office mandates, and he'll stay over in Stoke.
00:31:39.440 --> 00:31:40.240
Thank you very much.
00:31:40.240 --> 00:31:44.000
Which gets us to what Paul has actually promised.
00:31:47.119 --> 00:32:29.519
Work Beyond Walls is two days in an industrial building behind the station in Newcastle, where the whole space will be transformed into a workspace experience brought together by over 20 global brands, and the workplace side of the discussion will be through curator talks, seminars, and workshops as well, that we'll be doing to essentially bring and unite, I suppose, the design community, the business community, academia into one space to understand this subject better and work out what this is going to look like in the future.
00:32:30.960 --> 00:32:42.960
And the crucial bit, the bit that makes it different from a showroom, a trade show, or an expo is that for work beyond walls, the boiler shop is going to become a living workplace.
00:32:44.640 --> 00:32:45.920
We want it to be sticky.
00:32:45.920 --> 00:32:54.400
We need people to come in and get engaged with everything about it, the whole spirit of it, to share what their issues are, the challenges that they're facing.
00:32:54.400 --> 00:32:56.319
No one's going to be selling to these people.
00:32:56.319 --> 00:33:06.799
Where they will really get benefit from is the the various speakers that will be there that are to, you know, obviously sharing their insight, knowledge, research.
00:33:06.799 --> 00:33:17.200
But if they want to just use that space to work in for the two days to make productive use of their time whilst they're there, then so be it.
00:33:17.200 --> 00:33:18.960
That's great, that's what it's there for.
00:33:19.279 --> 00:33:20.880
Paul says sticky.
00:33:20.880 --> 00:33:24.480
David James, down in Cardiff, say sticky too.
00:33:24.480 --> 00:33:30.960
And Katie Richardson, talking about Clark and Well, said something pretty, well, sticky as well.
00:33:31.279 --> 00:33:33.359
I work for myself, I work on my laptop.
00:33:33.359 --> 00:33:40.559
If I'm going out for the day, I need to know that I can sit down, use my Wi-Fi, do some work.
00:33:40.559 --> 00:33:41.759
That's really important.
00:33:41.759 --> 00:33:44.000
The show has to think about things like that.
00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:46.240
You've got to attract people and have them there.
00:33:46.240 --> 00:33:49.119
Most people are professional and they're busy.
00:33:49.119 --> 00:34:03.279
Going back to Clark and Well again, I worked with Balks on an installation in Old Sessions House, and we created a lounge which showed the acoustics, and it was a stunning physical space.
00:34:03.279 --> 00:34:13.679
But within that, we created Wi-Fi, we had a DJ, we had a bar because we wanted the people to come and look at it, but we wanted them to sit and stay and work.
00:34:13.679 --> 00:34:20.639
And I think that's a really key component of any show, of any event is getting people there and keeping them there.
00:34:21.280 --> 00:34:24.559
Three people, three cities, the same answer.
00:34:24.559 --> 00:34:26.480
Sticky matters.
00:34:26.480 --> 00:34:32.159
Now, we're almost there for episode two, but I need to bring in one more person for a moment.
00:34:32.400 --> 00:34:33.440
I'm Will Easton.
00:34:33.440 --> 00:34:40.800
I'm currently head of Property and Workplace, and I've got 20 years experience in the built environment.
00:34:41.840 --> 00:34:43.920
I've known Will for years.
00:34:43.920 --> 00:34:58.480
He's opinionated, spiky, witty, very northern, and a bit like me, positively dissatisfied with the status quo of workplace design and management, and the lack of substance beneath so much of our sector's rhetoric.
00:34:58.880 --> 00:35:06.159
When I was in college, uh I always followed creative pursuits, and when you get into the world of work, that gets beaten out of you.
00:35:06.159 --> 00:35:20.960
What frustrates me is the lack of pace that we can often work at, the lack of vision and the unnecessary governance we put in place to do simple things.
00:35:21.280 --> 00:35:22.559
You get the idea.
00:35:22.559 --> 00:35:24.639
I love talking to Will.
00:35:24.639 --> 00:35:27.599
He was literally the first to commit.
00:35:27.599 --> 00:35:31.760
That single sign-up at the start of episode one, that was Will.
00:35:31.760 --> 00:35:37.119
Because he wants to be part of anything that has any chance of making a difference.
00:35:37.760 --> 00:35:47.599
I've been sat here for the past 12 months thinking, when can I get something quite exciting where I don't have to go and pay an arm and a leg for a train ticket in a hotel in London?
00:35:48.159 --> 00:35:58.719
So I thought that as the event and the work beyond War's brand started shaping up, I'd kind of use Will as a proxy for the rest of the audience that Paul needs and see what he thinks.
00:35:58.719 --> 00:36:02.000
I called him to test some of the new event blurb out on him.
00:36:02.000 --> 00:36:03.599
Hot off the press.
00:36:03.599 --> 00:36:04.239
Okay.
00:36:04.239 --> 00:36:08.400
The North East's first living workplace event.
00:36:08.400 --> 00:36:22.239
For two days, the boiler shop becomes a fully working workplace, settings you actually work in, workshops that challenge how you think, talks that change what you ask for, and a live survey reading the room in real time.
00:36:23.519 --> 00:36:24.719
That's exciting.
00:36:25.280 --> 00:36:29.920
Now, first part just repeat the
00:36:29.050 --> 00:36:33.039
The North East, the first living workplace event.
00:36:33.360 --> 00:36:33.920
There we go.
00:36:33.920 --> 00:36:36.800
The living workplace event, and that's the bit that got me.
00:36:36.800 --> 00:36:41.280
I mean, North East is great because then that puts a pin in the map.
00:36:41.280 --> 00:36:45.920
But when it's saying the first living workplace event, that's really interesting.
00:36:46.239 --> 00:36:49.280
I pushed him to bring that to life for me in his mind's eye.
00:36:49.599 --> 00:37:13.440
This might sound like a bit of a weird answer, but if I walk in to the venue on September the 9th, bright-eyed and bushy tails, and it feels like I am going into an immersive exhibition at a gallery or a museum, then within seconds I'll know it's worked.
00:37:13.840 --> 00:37:15.360
Okay, and flip that around.
00:37:15.360 --> 00:37:19.519
If you walk in and you see what will have made it fail.
00:37:19.920 --> 00:37:33.920
If I see a name badge on somebody's branded polo shirt, um, or the first question that comes out of somebody's mouth is, where do you work and what do you do?
00:37:33.920 --> 00:37:37.199
Then it might feel a bit like a traditional expo.
00:37:37.199 --> 00:37:40.800
So that is the tightrope that Paul Glaister needs to walk.
00:37:41.039 --> 00:37:41.679
Yeah.
00:37:41.679 --> 00:37:45.920
So there you go.
00:37:45.920 --> 00:37:47.199
Thank you, Mr.
00:37:47.199 --> 00:37:47.920
Easton.
00:37:47.920 --> 00:37:51.360
So creating the event is only half the job.
00:37:51.360 --> 00:37:54.159
And perhaps it's even the easy half.
00:37:54.159 --> 00:37:55.920
Any advice for Paul Herb?
00:37:56.239 --> 00:38:00.960
Don't underestimate the challenge of building a community and audience.
00:38:00.960 --> 00:38:08.639
Because it's the first event, and it's always challenging to, you know, ensure that there's there's healthy engagement.
00:38:08.639 --> 00:38:13.920
That's ultimately the thing that I see most often people like underestimating.
00:38:14.239 --> 00:38:15.599
And what about you, Terry?
00:38:15.599 --> 00:38:21.039
To not stop promoting it right until the day before.
00:38:21.039 --> 00:38:22.559
Don't let up.
00:38:22.559 --> 00:38:28.639
Almost pester people and nag people and make sure they come.
00:38:28.639 --> 00:38:35.280
If they said they're gonna come, it's making it look so incredible that they'd be crazy to miss out.
00:38:35.280 --> 00:38:39.599
And I think it has the potential to be at that level.
00:38:39.599 --> 00:38:42.239
I think it does have the potential to be unmissable.
00:38:42.480 --> 00:38:44.880
Which is, of course, Katie's bread and butter.
00:38:45.119 --> 00:38:56.320
And that is that's a multi-layered process of PR marketing, word of mouth, amplifying your visitors and getting their PR machines to work for you.
00:38:56.320 --> 00:39:00.480
There's a whole heap of things that you can and should be doing.
00:39:00.800 --> 00:39:04.559
I also asked Katie what she'd tell Paul if she were advising him.
00:39:04.559 --> 00:39:07.519
She'd never heard of Work Beyond Wars until we talked.
00:39:07.519 --> 00:39:08.719
This is what she said.
00:39:09.039 --> 00:39:17.119
Work is an amazing story that is still evolving for the workers, for the designers, for spaces, for products.
00:39:17.119 --> 00:39:24.079
That would be my core for everything, for the talks, for themes, because everything's in flux.
00:39:24.079 --> 00:39:29.039
The way that we work is in flux, it's changing, and design is changing around it.
00:39:29.039 --> 00:39:38.960
Design is shaping that and responding to it, and that is so interesting for me, and potentially for your brands as well.
00:39:38.960 --> 00:39:47.679
So I would bear that in mind because it's an evolving landscape, and maybe that is the core of what you're trying to communicate.
00:39:48.000 --> 00:40:01.760
So I think Paul's got the right idea, but if this event is going to be not embarrassingly empty, he's got a long way to go, and one thing's for sure, it is going to take relentless promotion.
00:40:01.760 --> 00:40:11.920
You have been listening to the inside story of Work Beyond Walls, written and presented by me, Ian Ellison, and produced by Dave Crackles.
00:40:11.920 --> 00:40:15.440
Thanks to everyone who's been part of this project.
00:40:15.440 --> 00:40:18.800
Episode 3 will be out in September.
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Subscribe to the show so you get it as soon as it drops.
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To join us on September the 9th and 10th up in Newcastle, head to workbeyondwalls.uk to sign up.
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That's workbeyondwalls.uk.
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You'll also find Work Beyond Walls on LinkedIn, where you can learn about talks and sessions as they're announced and get involved as the plans unfold.
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And please share all of this with anyone you think needs inspiring about how to make work better.
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Paul and the Work Pattern team would love to see you there.