Michael Wallis
Creative Director / Founder
@08:00, 26.08.2026
It started with a workshop.
Dr. Martens invited us to run a workshop with their new global leadership team about culture - not culture as a slide deck, but culture as a living thing. The noun and the verb. Noun: The arts, the customs, the shared behaviour of a company. Verb: the conditions you create for something to grow.
Our session was deliberately positioned as a high energy sprint at the end of three days of hard, focussed work reshaping the business. The ask from the CEO, “Let’s end on a high and have three initiatives ready to test by the end of the session.”
No pressure.
We built the session around honesty as a cultural superpower. Toyota has been paying employees for improvement ideas since 195 - a culture that made it safe to say what wasn't working. Domino's turned its business around with a national ad campaign that opened with "our pizza sucks." Pixar's Braintrust has no formal authority over a director; it can only give honest notes, which is precisely what makes the notes usable - Pixar had fourteen consecutive box-office hits building on that principle. Volkswagen on the other hand, couldn't tolerate failure. Its culture hid it, until Dieselgate cost over €31 billion in fines, settlements and buybacks.
So we built a space, an atmosphere and a very ambitious agenda and we ran the room itself as proof. Proof that diverse teams in a safe creative space can produce incredible work powered by AI.
Mixed teams - different departments, different seniority, different generations, several who'd never met before that morning - went from a blank page to pitchable ideas in a matter of hours, using AI as a genuine collaborator rather than a search box.
What struck us wasn't just the output. It was the energy. A 24-year-old and a 58-year-old, building something together, neither one waiting for permission, inspiring each other. You don't often see that in a leadership offsite. We wondered, watching it happen, whether we'd just built something bigger than a single workshop.
The feedback from Dr. Martens' CEO confirmed it. Ije Nwokorie, who'd brought us into Dr. Martens in the first place, was the person who saw the shape of a product in what we'd delivered as a one-off. So we decided to try and build it.
Over the past couple of months, the workshop has evolved into Work The Future (WTF): a high-value sprint format built for leadership teams confronting two problems we are seeing everywhere..
The first is generational. There are now five generations in the workplace at once, each with a different relationship to work, authority and technology - and the gap between them is wider than most organisations would like to admit. Annie Auerbach's Rift 2 report is a key pillar of our thinking and has been a genuine wake-up call for us: a “futureless“ 24-year-old and a 58-year-old on the same team, each fairly convinced the other one is the problem. Gallup puts the cost of workforce disengagement at $10 trillion globally.
The second is AI adoption. And it's tangled up with the first. The generation most fluent in AI tools is often the one most anxious about what AI means for their future at work, while the generation with the most authority to drive adoption is frequently the slowest to use the tools themselves. MIT's NANDA initiative found 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable return and Google Cloud's DORA research found that 70% of the value in AI transformation comes from people and culture, not the technology itself. Everyone bought the tools. Almost nobody has built the culture to use them well. This is an SME and Corporate sized problem.
WTF exists to close both gaps in the same room, at the same time.
There's a personal thread in this too. As a Gen Xer, working on WTF with Tom (Gen Y) and Bejay (Z - twenty-five years my junior, WT double F) - has been one of the more energising things I've done in a while. They bring a generational network reach, a "vibe coding" fluency and a default optimism about collaboration that's genuinely opened my eyes to how a newer generation of leaders actually wants to work. It's the two-problems-in-one-room principle, proven on ourselves before we've even sold it to anyone else.
WTF has only just started. We're building it in the open - running breakfast and lunch sessions with our combined networks of leaders, past clients and specialists to pressure-test the proposition before it is baked into a fixed offer.
There's a bigger question sitting underneath all of this, which we'll come back to properly: how do you make work more human and life more joyful, in a workplace that is rapidly changing - that doesn’t provide a ‘contract’ in the way it used to? For now, the invitation is a simple one - join us for breakfast or lunch, tell us what we're missing and help us build something worth the name Work The Future.
Visit the Work-In-Progress WTF Website
