Organizations often adopt a workplace model, policy, or design solution that succeeded elsewhere: a hybrid-work policy, a new office typology, a flexible-seating model, or a wellness program.
There is nothing wrong with learning from what has worked for others. The problem begins when leaders assume that a successful idea can be transferred intact from one organization to another.
It cannot.
A workplace strategy does not arrive unchanged. As soon as it enters a new organization, it is interpreted through existing habits, relationships, expectations, and ways of working. Employees decide—often quietly—what a new policy, space, or initiative means in practice. They adapt it, work around it, embrace it, or resist it.
The important question is not whether an organization should learn from elsewhere. It should.
The question is: what happens during the transition?
Boundaries are where transformation happens
We often think of boundaries as dividing lines: between organizations, departments, policies, physical settings, or modes of work.
But boundaries are also active zones. They are where people interpret an intention, decide how to respond, and give it practical meaning.
Consider a global hybrid-work policy. It may be clear in a leadership presentation. Yet, its real meaning emerges locally: in a team’s expectations about visibility, in the availability of spaces for focused work and confidential conversations, and in whether employees feel they have genuine permission to work flexibly.
Or consider a newly designed office. Its purpose may be to encourage collaboration, but employees experience it through ordinary transitions: arriving after a commute, finding a quiet place to focus, moving between individual work and meetings, taking a video call, or deciding whether a shared space feels welcoming and useful.
These transitions are not minor details. They are where strategy becomes experience.
Every transition begins within existing conditions and creates new ones. It changes the strategy being introduced, but it may also change the workplace receiving it: its patterns of interaction, expectations of leadership, use of space, and understanding of what work is meant to look like.
A cross-cultural perspective on transition
This question was central to my recent talk at the University of Florida, where Professor Hui Zou invited me to speak in his interdisciplinary humanities course on Eurasia.
My talk, “Spatial Concepts of Japan from Cross-cultural Perspectives,” examined Japanese spatial thinking through the movement of cultural forms and ideas. Rather than treating Japanese culture as isolated—or Japanese architecture as inherently “unique”—I focused on the practices, forms, and influences that arrived in Japan from elsewhere, and the long processes through which they were reinterpreted and transformed.
What resulted was neither simple preservation nor imitation. Ideas acquired new meaning through their relationship to a particular place, culture, and way of life.
This is not an argument for importing Japanese concepts into workplace design as aesthetic shorthand or ready-made models. It is an invitation to look more closely at how meaning is formed.
Cultural forms, like workplace strategies, change as they cross boundaries. They are received, interpreted, adapted, and shaped over time.
Three spatial concepts that help us see transition
Three Japanese concepts offer useful lenses for thinking about these processes—not as formulas to apply, but as ways to notice what is often overlooked.
Hashi (端): threshold and edge
Hashi can refer to an edge, margin, or threshold. A threshold is not simply where one condition ends, and another begins. It is a condition in itself—a place where expectations shift, and choices are made.
In the workplace, thresholds are everywhere:
- between home and office;
- between focused work and collaborative work;
- between a formal policy and a team’s informal norms;
- between an organization’s stated values and employees’ daily experience.
Leaders often focus on the spaces or policies themselves. Yet the experience of moving between conditions may be equally important. If that movement is confusing, exhausting, or unsupported, even a well-intended strategy can create friction.
Ma (間): the in-between
Ma is often translated as interval, gap, or “the in-between.” It calls attention not only to things themselves, but also to the relationships and intervals among them.
An interval is not empty. It can allow room to pause, adjust, recover attention, and shift from one activity or relationship to another.
In workplaces, employees move continually between modes of work: from concentration to conversation, from an online meeting to an in-person one, from individual responsibility to collective decision-making. When these shifts are not supported, the result may be cognitive overload, interruption, and unnecessary stress.
A workplace designed only around destinations—desks, meeting rooms, amenities—can overlook the conditions that help people move between them. Yet those in-between moments often determine whether the workplace feels coherent, demanding, restorative, or fragmented.
Utsuroi (移ろい): gradual change
Utsuroi evokes gradual transition and change over time.
This is especially relevant to workplace transformation. A new office, policy, or workplace program does not immediately create new behavior. Change occurs through repeated experience: through what employees find possible on an ordinary Tuesday, what managers reinforce, what teams learn together, and what the organization is willing to adjust.
A workplace is not finished when a policy is announced or when a renovated office opens. Its meaning continues to develop through use.
For leaders, this means that implementation is not the final stage of workplace strategy. It is the beginning of learning.
Where workplace transitions succeed—or fail
Many workplace initiatives are evaluated in terms of broad outcomes: attendance, engagement scores, utilization rates, or real estate costs. These measures can be useful, but they do not always reveal where the experience is breaking down.
Often, the critical questions are more immediate:
- What happens when an employee needs to move from focused work into a spontaneous conversation?
- Can a person take a confidential call without disrupting others or feeling exposed?
- Does a hybrid meeting enable genuine participation for those joining remotely?
- When an employee comes into the office, do the environment and social norms support the work they have been asked to do there?
- Does a new space make desired behaviors easier—or merely ask people to behave differently within the same constraints?
The transition from policy to lived experience is particularly important. A flexible-work policy can sound empowering, but it may feel very different to an employee navigating inconsistent team expectations, inadequate acoustic privacy, or an office that does not support the tasks requiring in-person presence.
Likewise, the transition from leadership intention to employee interpretation can determine whether a workplace initiative earns trust. A space, amenity, or policy communicates something. Employees decide through their experience whether that message is credible.
Leaders should not ask only whether a workplace strategy is good in principle. They should ask how it will be received, translated, and sustained through the transitions of everyday work.
Before design begins
Before importing a strategy—or beginning a workplace project—leaders need to understand the transitions it will require.
They might ask:
- What current patterns of work will this change?
- Which boundaries will employees cross differently?
- Where could a good intention create new friction?
- What needs to be adapted rather than simply adopted?
- How will we learn from people’s experience and adjust over time?
A workplace strategy cannot be imported because it is not a product. It becomes real through the people who interpret it, the spaces that support it, and the transitions that make it part of everyday work.
That is the conversation worth having before design begins.
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