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The changes now being experienced in the workplace, driven by market pressures, changing demographics and new technologies, are real and accelerating. Since change remains the one constant when it comes to workplace planning, further transformations within the workplace over the next 20 or 30 years can be expected. Hence, this paper aims to demonstrate how to use a scenario planning futures approach in a changing, complex and uncertain workplace environment. As well as provoke thought and discussion about its long‐term future.

At the Futures Academy in Dublin Institute of Technology, a systematic methodology for exploring and shaping the future has been developed, called the “Prospective through scenario” process. Each stage of the process is discussed in detail throughout this paper, as well as how the process is applied in the Johnson Controls workplace of the future study.

The creative “futures studies” approach can deal effectively with change, uncertainty and complexity in the workplace environment, by allowing those concerned to think, plan and act proactively rather than reactively as well as provide effective facilities management and real estate strategies.

Real estate organisations need to take the long view, for the greatest risk of our time is being overtaken by inevitable surprises that could have been foreseen and for which we could have been prepared.

Discussion and debate about the future of the workplace is inevitable and futures tools and techniques can facilitate this process.

This paper aims to demonstrate that it is important to have a methodological process that is reflexive and flexible to achieve fluid interactions that add rigour and energy to the overall process of a built environment project.

This paper outlines the Prospective through Scenarios futures process used in a study called the “Workplace of the Future”. It also discusses how and why the methodology evolves over the course of the project with participant feedback as the main source of information for the analysis.

Change is the one factor in the Prospective through Scenarios methodological development that ensures the participants to think deeply and laterally in a futures process, from which a value‐driven process is achieved.

Novel futures techniques have been applied to a discipline that is usually reactive and quantitative – workplace provision and facilities management.