Neil
Christopher
I work at the confluence of people, place and program — connecting business and people strategy with the environments and experiences that bring them to life.
From global workplace and organisational change to entertainment and programming, the question is much the same: how do you turn strategy into something people can actually experience?
People
Understanding the organisation, its culture, leadership, behaviours and the people who will use the place.
Place
Turning strategy into physical environments — workplace, interiors, circulation, identity, brand and experience.
Program
What happens there: activity, content, entertainment and the things that make a place active, social and memorable.
A career connecting strategy, design and experience.
The interesting part is often what happens between the strategy and the finished project.
I have spent much of my career working across that entire journey: understanding the organisation, framing the problem, developing the strategy, building consensus, directing design and working with teams to make sure the original idea survives implementation.
That means being equally comfortable with senior leadership, HR and business strategy as I am with designers, consultants, vendors and delivery teams. The objective is not simply a good idea. It is a good idea that can become real.
I have spent most of my career somewhere between the idea and making it real.
I began in design and workplace, eventually leading projects, teams and client relationships across Australia, New Zealand and Asia. At Gensler I was a Design Director and APME Technology Firms Practice Area Leader, working with organisations including Meta, Microsoft, Adobe and Citrix.
My work with organisations such as Johnson & Johnson and Cochlear put me on the other side of the equation — developing workplace strategies and standards themselves. At the Asian Development Bank, workplace became a vehicle for organisational change across a 150,000 sqm campus.
More recently, organisational strategy and entertainment programming have extended that thinking rather than taken it somewhere else. The thread is still people, place and experience — with program adding another layer to how places are activated, understood and enjoyed.