Strategy

We are a multidisciplinary global practice that partners with our clients to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow. Our creative and collaborative approach, grounded in research and data, enables impactful transformation of organizations, cultures, and environments, driving business performance.
There’s a growing openness to being more provocative about the future. Clients recognize they don’t have a crystal ball — if they plan for one specific outcome, it’s unlikely to be the one that happens.
—Claudine Frasch, Strategy leader
Services
Our multidisciplinary team captures critical insights to inform user-centric solutions across our service offerings.

Workplace Strategy

Through our human-centric and data-driven approach to developing workplace strategies, we ensure that physical space, technology, operations, and HR policies work in concert to support businesses and people. The result is a flexible, responsive workplace that drives engagement and is more resilient, adaptable, and inclusive.

Experience Strategy

Experience Strategy digs deep into a user’s needs and expectations, and builds a comprehensive plan that choreographs that user’s journey — including elements of the built environment, digital interactions, services, activations, communications, and content. We align the journey with a cultural or business purpose to drive impactful design solutions and user engagement.

Change Management

We help clients create a positive change experience by developing engagement strategies and tailored communications to ensure lasting results. We analyze organizational readiness and the impact of change on diverse audiences, build change coalitions, facilitate leadership alignment, and implement informative campaigns that celebrate opportunity and reinforce an organization’s brand and culture.

Futures

Our Futures practice leverages research tools to better understand, prepare for, and influence the future. We frame multiple plausible futures to guide strategy, allowing clients to unlock potential and plan amidst uncertainty. We identify futures by exploring transformative forces reshaping our world – technology, climate, economics, next-gen expectations. We then evaluate impacts on various aspects of an organization to inform future-ready design solutions.

Portfolio Analytics and Strategy

Our strategists leverage proprietary tools to create real estate portfolio strategies that are efficient, flexible, sustainable, and geared to drive business performance. This work extends from occupancy planning to larger scale facility master plans and is rooted in deep data analysis and scenario planning.

Public Engagement

Public engagement is our process for working collaboratively with affiliated groups to frame opportunities and co-create solutions that improve the well-being of the participants. We focus on creating equitable and inclusive engagement processes in the context of planning, development and strategy projects.

Design Guidelines

Our strategists and designers work together with clients to develop, publish, and maintain comprehensive guidelines that communicate process, design, and operational decisions for real estate. Implementation and governance of design guidelines can generate cost savings, streamline project delivery, reinforce brand, and inform a consistent user experience across a portfolio.

Research and Learning

We conduct deep research into the questions and challenges facing our clients. We then create multimedia educational materials for use with internal teams as well as research summaries to help generate insights for decision-making.

Market Analytics and Strategy

We balance the science, art, and business of design to help clients make informed real estate decisions. Our use of spatial data, demographics, local market conditions, and real estate performance data, enhances our ability to measure and forecast. We help to accurately interpret information, derive meaning, and develop plausible scenarios about what to build and where.

Strategic Planning

Leveraging our well-defined design process, we develop strategic plans that are guided by our client’s vision, mission, and values. This work is done through a co-development process with key stakeholders and includes aspects of organizational and business planning and program development.

INSIGHTS

Planning for flexibility grows in value as organizations manage against uncertainty.

Accelerating political, economic, and technological shifts make the future harder to predict and more urgent to prepare for. Strategists help organizations expand scenario modeling and forecasting so they can stay agile when facing disruption. Outcomes include flexible leasing strategies, designing adaptive spaces, and adopting technologies that can quickly respond to changes.

 

AI reshapes operations and organizational culture.

AI transforms how work gets done, as well as the culture that surrounds it. Some organizations chase speed and cost savings, but true value comes from building AI literacy and encouraging deeper levels of critical and creative thinking. Strategy ensures AI strengthens values and collaboration, while the built environment provides the spaces that sustain culture and connection.

 

Local identity informs global workplace portfolios.

As markets continue to globalize, one-size-fits-all approaches fall short. Built environments must reflect local culture and community. Strategy helps organizations decide what to adapt and what to standardize, creating portfolios that are both cost-effective and authentically rooted in place.

Mexico City Day Zero project rendering
Design Forecast identifies the trends and design strategies that are shaping the future of the human experience and the built environment. We provide strategic advice, research, and projects from all 33 of Gensler’s practices to help clients prepare for transformational times.
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