IN Conversation IN Conversation

Change management consultant and author Jennifer Bryan invited Mark Eltringham to share a Cosmopolitan and discuss how firms can better help people to thrive in a rapidly changing world. Along the way they talk about the futility of trying to work out how much time everybody should spend in an office, how an American came to use words like brilliant and Zed so effortlessly, the need for crises to get things moving some times, and what happens next.

For the second week running, the football talk takes place off mike. Joe Croft shares a coffee and a chat with Mark Eltringham. Instead of the mixed fortunes of Middlesbrough and Stoke City, they talk about everything to do with sustainability in office fitout and construction. They discuss the limit of accreditations and standards, the need to get beyond box ticking and greenwash and what best practice really looks like. They also discuss what might happen when our favoured recycled materials become scarce, and also how resource hungry the online and digital world is.

David Sharp joins Mark Eltringham over a bourbon to discuss a wide range of issues - and avoid one that won't help either of them. They discuss the ethics of artificial intelligence, why we need more friction in our lives (and less seamlessness), the philosophy of work, how to deal with social media, making your own life difficult on purpose, and the pleasures of finding out you are wrong about something.

Domino Risch uses her new found freedom to discuss the limitations of relying on a single place to get work done. Sharing a hot drink over numerous time zones, she chats with Mark Eltringham about what firms get wrong about hybrid and in-office work, the best places to have ideas and how hard the modern world makes it to achieve flow states. They discuss the potential of anthropology to change the way we work. And what the current news about Deutsche Bank's insistence people come into the office on Mondays and Fridays tells us about the avoidable tensions that exist in the tedious debate about remote and office based work.

Over a well-earned G&T, Antony Slumbers and Mark Eltringham discuss what makes work and workplaces great, the origins and wisdom of determining how much time people should spend in an office and how we escape the interminable binary loop of headlines about whether the home or the office is a better place to work. Antony talks about the role of AI in the future of work and property and what people should focus on in their changing lives.

It's bitterly cold outside but over a glass of hazy IPA, Nigel Oseland and Mark Eltringham warm to a conversation about fish guts, the sounds that make us cringe, what comfort means and what it would really take to get people to spend more time in the office.