Strategic Minds: Rachel Newell (Rapt Studio) — From Workplace Design to Strategy Consulting
The importance of workplace design, an Agile approach to strategy and how Rapt Studio expanded from architecture and workplace design into strategy.
Rachel Newell, Head of Strategy at Rapt Studio
Rachel Newell leads strategy at Rapt Studio — the design firm behind the beautiful spaces of Github, Fender, and Vans. In 2017, Inc. featured their design of Ancestry’s headquarters on its list of the “10 Most Beautiful Offices”. While Rapt started as an architecture and workplace design firm, the studio has since expanded its offerings into strategy consulting and brand design.
Before joining Rapt, Rachel was a Strategic Account Director at creative agency School of Thought, providing strategy leadership to a small group of creatives. She also spent a large part of her career at Attik, overseeing and running major US brand and advertising accounts such as Scion, Toyota’s youth brand at the time.
As part of the interview series Strategic Minds, we talked about the importance of workplace design and the different, emerging role of strategy in a design firm running on Agile.
Please note that this interview is an edited transcript of a conversation Rachel and I had in person. Please excuse any grammatical irregularities.
Rapt Studio’s core competence is workplace design but is expanding into other territories. Is this a response to shifting problems on client-side or just a natural trajectory because things are often interrelated?
There’s a number of reasons for how we have evolved. When we work with a client to figure out how they need to configure their workspace, it’s not about designing pretty spaces based on look and feel. It’s about understanding how people need to work and understanding the outcome for the spaces. So woven into workplaces are all sorts of things, not just functional desks, lighting, noise level, but also: Why do you come to work? How can you be productive, what’s purposeful for you?
All of these more esoteric and qualitative drivers that are often culturally driven. We’ve recognized in our approach that digging deeper into the culture, the brand, the emotional, qualitative stories is where the heart of the design should be placed. And in asking these questions of everybody within an organization, we start to see a bigger story emerging that isn’t just about space. It could be about how they’re currently communicating their brand or how they onboard people or it could be related to their product and customer experience if we’re designing around a space that has a consumer perspective.
What we help companies understand is that there is a broader context for experience. As we’ve had these conversations, we have been able to extend our value into solving some of those other problems. We’ve built expertise in customer experience, for instance. Helping new brands understand what their customer pipeline needs to look like and customer journey, what the moments of value are. We’ve helped clients who perhaps have lost their way in their brand, either rebrand or, with startups, define their entire brand.
We are doing communications strategy for a client right now, helping to understand who their audience segments are. The key messages that need to be communicated, and tactics. So there’s any number of strategies we might develop for a client. A brand or any type of other strategy, such as retail experience. We could conceivably see ourselves doing product development strategies. Looking at the portfolio of services and thinking about features and products that could be added on.
Why is workplace design so important?
What we fold into our design is the latest information around how to design for human health and productivity. We have worked with clients to specifically design environments based on neuro-aesthetics. There is research that proves that you can experience less stress within a space because of music or furniture design or lighting etc. We use research on circadian rhythms, to help show clients why lighting needs to feel natural. We design based on the sun’s path to promote productivity and understand different types of productivity throughout the day. For example, more creative work in the morning, other types of work in the afternoon.
But the functional requirements of space are not the only things that are important. There are so many studies out there that talk about the importance of a happy workforce as contributing to retention — how long people stay — as well as recruitment. A lot has been written around the importance of purpose as a value. So when you start to see a shift with these more emotionally driven considerations, there’s absolutely a bottom line why these things should be considered in workplace design.
Can most problems organizations face be boiled down to organizational culture or organizational design challenges?
Yes, absolutely, because most organizations are based upon scale and growth. And if you haven’t got a clear understanding of what your purpose and culture is, and the things that differentiate you in the marketplace, you can’t be ownable and you can’t scale.
It’s ultimately about growth and scale. But when we know that emotional and cultural considerations are absolutely vital for success (because we’re all human), we now demand more from our workplace and we demand more from our experiences of life. You can’t take that back. You can’t unknow that now. How the world has changed and shifted, and it shifted on the outside in terms of brands and what consumers are demanding of their brands. Because now there’s almost 100% transparency between what happens internally in an organization and what happens on the outside, you have to be much more careful about the emotional messaging side of things.
What are some of the ways in which organizations can improve culture? Rituals, certain routines, a better onboarding process?
It depends very much on the company. Rituals are important but they have to be born from authenticity. You can’t force a ritual. You have to understand what the things are that the workforce gravitates towards, and then create experiences around that.
Seeing the end result and tying employees closer to the end result that they’re working towards is really important. With some of our retail clients, even though we’re designing workplaces, the role of the customer has become more important. Having direct contact with the end result of what they’re working on provides a tremendous lift in terms of ‘why the hell am I here?’. So deepening the engagement between the end-user and the workforce itself is definitely something that can be strengthened.
You have to think about the momentum and the passion you harness. Part of the things people feel sad about when organizations scale beyond a certain size is losing that connection to the coalface. To be at the coalface of something means to be really there up close to where it’s happening. As a startup you are, but the bigger you get, the more removed you become. So I think continuing to feel empathetic for your customer is important.
The other thing employees and employers often find is the difficulty of managing remote workers who are not on site. When you scale regionally and globally, how do you create unity amongst an organization while maintaining all of these regional differences? Even, for instance, the term “headquarters” is something that can evoke a feeling of exclusivity and hierarchy within an organization that creates barriers to inclusion. So how do you as an organization create points of empathy beyond your own walls for your growing employee base? Those are the things that really intrigue us at Rapt.
What is the role of strategy at Rapt? How is it embedded in the overall work?
At Rapt, our understanding and belief is that strategy is at our core. It’s more of an attribute than a deliverable. Thinking strategically is about looking creatively at a problem. To be strategic, to think strategically is a component that we all have the capacity to do. And that’s what we encourage. So ultimately, nirvana for Rapt is where everybody naturally is a problem solver and is able to think contextually about design, rather than just responding to a single tunnel view.
As we have grown from our architectural roots to expanding into other areas, the firm itself is also shifting in terms of how we respond to these new layers of business. We don’t want a strategy department. I’m Head of Strategy in the sense that it gives me some flexibility to consider strategy as a discipline. But how we involve strategy in our work is as an integrated part, a component of our teams.
Every team has a strategist but the goal of the strategist is not to do all the work. The goal of the strategist is to support almost like a coach. How can the team deepen their understanding of how to solve design problems or any other type of problem using strategic frameworks? We need strategists to help impart frameworks, ways of thinking that can help unlock that in the team.
Rapt operates in Agile. That’s a really different structure to some other design firms. Agile means that we have team members with very different functions or roles or backgrounds, but collectively, they come together to work on a project.
Often, strategy is a role in a design firm that’s in a “waterfall way of working”, upfront at the beginning of the project. The strategist mainly helps to outline what the problem is, who the audience is and what the story is. And then they brief the design team who picks it up, like a baton, and runs with it. Maybe the strategist checks in throughout that process, but they’re removed to more of a background role. That’s especially the case in large agencies where you have siloed ways of working — so there isn’t a lot of that cross-pollination.
Here at Rapt, we have the whole team working on a project from start to finish. The strategist is one voice across the project. Equally, the rest of the team are involved in the upfront work — they decide what questions to ask at a client briefing and kick-off. They’ll be involved in thinking about what a research methodology might look like and conduct research. The strategist helps them workshop certain things. But the strategist’s job isn’t to do everything. It’s the team, as a collective effort. Including playing back findings.
What are the advantages of this approach?
What we find is that having these multiple perspectives throughout that process allows our strategy to be deeper and richer than if it was an individual strategist alone doing it — because you have multiple perspectives.
If the whole team has been involved in the process at the beginning, then we can move so much more quickly into design, because you can’t help but think about solutions and design early on. You can be very iterative and move very quickly. It creates efficiency in how we can do things better, but is also faster. If we have a strategist involved in what would be more traditional production and DD (design development), some of the later phases of a project, they can bring a perspective that hasn’t been there before. Perhaps allowing us to, again, solve design problems quicker or come up with things that we would never have thought about.
So strategy from our perspective is about creating diversity and richness in the design solution. And our process.
How is this different from a more traditional brand strategy approach?
What I think the biggest challenge is for a strategist coming into Rapt is the fact that you are no longer the smartest person in the room, and it is no longer just your sole responsibility to come up with the answer. That can be a very different world to live in. How you have shown up as an expert to this point is not how you necessarily need to apply your expertise going forward.
The characteristics for strategists at Rapt have to be about feeling confident in ambiguity. Many of the projects we get asked to do are solving new-to-the world problems, things there isn’t a benchmark or case study for how to go about solving.
Brand strategy, traditionally, is more about “you do this, you do that.” There are established frameworks for brand strategy. That’s one of the component projects we would do. But if, for instance, you are helping a client understand how to adapt to thinking about an entire city or any other multifaceted interwoven problems and how to look at what’s a priority, it’s not clear what the answer is. These are problems where there isn’t a guide map.
So a critical requirement for strategists here is to have a level of self-confidence and experience to be comfortable in not knowing what the answer is. This experimental role of strategy is something we really encourage. To try a lot, to have failures. Because we work in an agile way, we tend to solve strategic problems in sprints. What is the problem we’re trying to solve this week? How can we conduct experiments into that problem? To then learn and do better. So we are more and more breaking the waterfall process as it traditionally extends to strategy in favor of trying to experiment with thinking.
What are other differences between the traditional role of strategy, particularly in advertising agencies, and how you operate?
There’s a couple. Much more siloed work environments in advertising. More department-driven roles and responsibilities. Having continuity throughout the process in terms of voice and ownership often doesn’t really exist. From an account director perspective, I probably would have been the only voice offering continuity across that.
One model on the agency side is the account model where you would have a single piece of business, and you would cultivate all sorts of programs for that client across the board. You’d manage their seasonal calendar and be orchestrating above the line and below the line activities. And the client would look to the agency to give directions to what they need to be doing in the marketplace — highly consultative. If you are an agency of record, you’re providing high-level consultancy on what they should be doing. Traditionally, architects have not done that.
Traditionally, architects have been more about the deliverable. You’re hiring us to do a building, we will design it and there you go. That relationship is more transactional. That’s the difference between a traditional agency versus an architectural model.
But that’s what has changed at Rapt. More and more, we’re adopting the account model for our clients where they come to us when they’re looking to prioritize what their next move should be. We’ve increasingly become retained by clients to be that thought leader partner.
It seems that agencies are rather shifting into the other direction with more project-based work and less of the traditional agency-of-record model.
I think partly that shift has to do with the fact that agencies haven’t always been able to respond very quickly to changes and haven’t adopted a more agile way of thinking. It’s a more predictable waterfall process. That’s just not what our marketplace is built around anymore. With the growth of technology companies, the way business is done is changing.
So for example, working with some of our top tech clients, we’ve had to change how we present. In an agency model, you would have a presentation to a client. “This is the first round of concepts”, for instance, “our strategy here is X, let us take you through it”. But it’s finished thinking. You’ve spent the time getting to this place, and here it is. Whereas with our tech clients, we might go in with 25% done, “here’s what we’re thinking, give us some live feedback”. Maybe we’re at 50% and we bring them into an iterative process. Maybe they even see a live document in the works and they don’t even know what it is yet.
We’ve had to relinquish the control of having to be perfect and finished in favor of exposing the client to the thinking and ideas that are most important. Allowing them to be part of a process that enables us to either course-correct, or for them to feel comfortable in the direction we’re going, or even “Yes, and — how about we go even further?”. So it is a really different way of working, and not comfortable for everybody.
Are you aware of other places that apply an agile approach to strategy?
People usually do that in terms of product development. It is a methodology that comes out of startups. It’s a mindset. In fact, our strategy director, Michelle, comes from a startup background. This brought an understanding of how to tackle difficult problems, which seem immense, but break them into a systematic way of testing and solving. I thought that could be an interesting approach for us as a company, moving fast, thinking about new problems in different ways.
When you couple that with, say, a design director who also has a different way of thinking about design problems, that really changes methodologies and experimentation. What we’ve done in the last year is to bring out this approach. And through the successes that we’ve had with market-leading clients, we’ve gained a lot more trust from these companies and permission to be very experimental.
What do you think is the future for Rapt with this model?
I think we will be much more of a challenger in terms of strategic thinking. The notion of the category disruptor as it relates to product development is maybe what we are as a design or strategy firm. One of the ways in which we’ve shown success has been that we get hired by very large companies to be the “agitator”, coming in to shake up creative thinking when other partners perhaps have more of a traditional mindset. So maybe there’s a need to push a little deeper to do something different.
But we very much appreciate that those more traditional partners can have tremendous value to offer. It’s about tension. How we introduce tension in the creative process as a supportive way where we work collaboratively with these more traditional partners. Other architecture firms or other major design firms, for instance. Any competitors in our immediate set, we partner with them as opposed to feeling like they’re competitive.
What we’re starting to see is that cooperation with what would traditionally be competitors is actually turning into being a remarkable set of partnerships we’ve developed. Being able to set aside the control that strategists like to have, being open to new ways of doing it, has proven to be really interesting for us.
What other places are doing exciting work at the moment?
I actually think that the exciting ways of working that are different are coming from outside of established models, they’re on the fringes. The kids that are thinking of breaking the rules. The freelancer world is rife with incredibly intelligent people. And there’s a lot of communities that are doing really critical thinking and agitating. These are models of interest. I wouldn’t want to join another company at this point. I’m interested in ideas and new ways of thinking. Greta, for example. It’s the people out there that are challenging. It’s the new ways in which ideas are formed and problems are being solved that interest me, not the format, the structure of a company.
Is there any specific community you have in mind?
I’m an activist at heart. So looking towards the growth of groups like Extinction Rebellion. A few years ago, I talked to somebody from the Pirate Party in Iceland. They’re introducing new models of government. WikiLeaks, all of these types of initiatives. Different types of challenging norms and conventions are really interesting.
Thank you for your thoughts on strategy, Rachel!
What Rachel finds interesting:
“I’ve been a big fan of The Do Lectures for years — they are excellent collators of current thinking.”
If you enjoyed reading this interview, keep an eye out for other interviews in the series Strategic Minds: Conversations with strategists across different disciplines exploring their view on the nuances of strategy.
