From Pollock to Picasso: Bringing Order to Office Restacks
- Peter Stansfield
- Apr 14
- 4 min read
Being asked to manage an office restack can feel a bit like being handed a Jackson Pollock painting.
There is plenty going on, but working through the complexity, the messy composition, and where to even begin is another matter entirely.
That is often the reality of office restacking. On the surface, it can sound straightforward. Move a few teams, free up some space, improve adjacencies, and make better use of the office. In practice, it is usually far more complex than that.
Every move has a knock-on effect. Shift one team and another is affected. Increase desks in one area and you reduce flexibility somewhere else. Try to reunite a split team and suddenly you are reshaping the balance of an entire floor. A restack is rarely just a move exercise.
More often, it is a problem-solving exercise.
Why office restacks become so difficult
One of the main reasons restacks become difficult is that the planning process is often still too manual.
In many organisations, the tools on hand are spreadsheets and PowerPoint. They can get the job done, up to a point. But they also create a process that is time-consuming, calculation-heavy, and harder than it should be to manage with confidence.
That usually means teams manually checking headcounts, desk numbers, team locations, floor capacities, and adjacency needs across multiple files. It also means there is more room for mistakes, more version control issues, and a greater chance of missing the flow-on effects of moving one team from A to B.
The more complex the office, the more difficult that becomes.
And once the stack itself is messy, the planning process usually is too.
Split teams. Functions scattered across floors. Poor adjacencies. Desk pressure in the wrong places. A layout that may have evolved over time without anyone stepping back to rework the whole composition. Once you properly map the current state, the scale of the problem often becomes much clearer.
That is when many organisations realise they have two problems, not one: a messy process and a messy stack.
The usual alternative
The usual alternative is to jump straight to enterprise SaaS platforms that include block and stack planning.
There is a place for those tools. But in many cases, block and stack planning is only one feature inside a much broader workplace software offer. That can include other modules, systems, and functionality that an organisation may not need, may not use, or simply cannot justify the expense of.
For some, that makes the leap difficult.
Not because better planning tools are unnecessary. Quite the opposite. It is because the available options can feel too broad, too heavy, or too expensive relative to the actual need.
Introducing Work Stack
That is where Work Stack fits.
Work Stack was developed to fill that gap. It provides a practical way to visualise the current workplace layout, test future options, and support better decision-making without turning the whole exercise into a manual planning headache.
That matters because a restack is not just about drawing moves on a page. It is about understanding what the current state is telling you and then testing a more coherent future state.
A good planning tool should help make the existing issues visible. It should show where teams are split, where functions/divisions are scattered, where desk supply is under pressure, and where the overall composition of the stack is working against the organisation rather than for it.
It should also help you move beyond simply documenting the problem.
From seeing the problem to solving the problem
This is where Work Stack’s Auto Stack feature becomes particularly useful.
The challenge with most restacks is not identifying that something needs to change. Usually, people know that already. The harder part is testing a better arrangement in a way that is structured, credible, and efficient.
Auto Stack helps do that.
It supports the move from a layout that feels unresolved to one that is better organised and easier to interpret. Teams can be grouped more logically. Functions can be aligned more sensibly. Different scenarios can be explored more quickly. And the visual output becomes much easier to explain to others.
That does not remove the need for judgement. Nor should it. Workplace planning still requires experience, trade-offs, and decision-making. But it does make the exercise more structured and less dependent on manual rework.
Pollock vs Picasso / Chaos vs Order
The Pollock versus Picasso analogy is obviously a simplification, but it works because it gets to the heart of the issue.
Office planning is complex. It should not be treated as if it is simple.
But there is a difference between complexity that is unmanaged and complexity that has been worked through properly.
One feels chaotic. The other feels controlled.
One is difficult to read, difficult to explain, and difficult to act on. The other still contains complexity, but it has structure. You can see what is happening. You can test what comes next. You can explain the logic behind the moves.
That is really the shift Work Stack is trying to support.
Not the removal of complexity, but the ability to manage it confidently.
From chaos to order. Less Pollock, more Picasso.
