Human history is full of things that once seemed perfectly reasonable and that we now look back upon and wonder, what in the world were they thinking? For centuries, illnesses were treated by bleeding patients, attaching leeches or heating cups to create suction that was thought to draw sickness out. Even indoor plumbing was once greeted with suspicion. Why would anyone intentionally bring human waste into the same building where they lived, ate and slept?

The people living during those times were not necessarily foolish. They were operating within the accepted knowledge, technology and social conventions of their era. They did things a particular way because that was how things were done, until science improved, technology improved, infrastructure improved and eventually the old way stopped making sense. If I took the time, I could probably come up with dozens, if not hundreds, of practices that were considered perfectly normal until society discovered a better way.

Which raises an interesting question: What are we doing today that people 20, 50 or 100 years from now will find equally absurd? Mark Dixon thinks commuting to work may be one of them.

Dixon is CEO of IWG, the world’s largest workspace provider and the company behind Regus, Spaces and other flexible-workspace brands. In a recent Fortune article, he predicted that routine commuting could essentially disappear within the next 15 years. His description of how future generations may look back at us is wonderfully provocative: “In the future, you’re going to explain to your kids that you used to commute,” a little like explaining why earlier generations trusted leeches. Dixon predicts they will consider it “mad stuff” that employers once required people to travel long distances simply to sit down and use a computer.

He goes further, suggesting that our children simply won’t understand why people routinely traveled long distances to use equipment that was available everywhere. “The workplace of the future is everywhere,” Dixon said. His expectation is that it will eventually seem perfectly normal to pull out a phone, find the nearest appropriate place to work and go there.

That is a fascinating way to frame the discussion because we have spent the last few years arguing about remote work almost entirely in the present tense. Should employees work from home? Should companies mandate three days in the office, or four, or five? Are remote employees productive? Are CEOs who demand office attendance restoring corporate culture, or desperately trying to recreate 2019? We have been so busy fighting over where the pendulum should stop that we may have missed what it actually taught us.

The Pandemic Was an Experiment, Not the Answer

I’ve been writing about and advocating for remote and flexible working in one form or another for nearly two decades — like in this piece from 2014 — so I certainly did not discover remote work during COVID, and I never believed that its benefits would disappear when the pandemic did.

At the same time, I don’t believe what happened during the pandemic represented the ideal model for the future of work. COVID violently shoved the pendulum all the way to one side. Companies that had previously insisted people could never work remotely suddenly discovered that virtually everyone could. Offices emptied almost overnight, dining room tables became desks, bedrooms became video studios, and organizations tried to reinvent decades of operating practices in weeks. For a while, some people concluded that the office was dead. It wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean remote work failed either.

What we are experiencing today is largely the predictable swing in the opposite direction. Organizations went too far toward “everyone works remotely,” and many are now overcorrecting toward “everyone comes back.” Neither extreme is particularly thoughtful. Psychologists sometimes describe part of the problem as belief perseverance: once we become invested in a conclusion, even contrary evidence can have a remarkably difficult time dislodging it. That helps explain why the remote-work debate so often feels more ideological than analytical.

Perhaps we should stop treating the pandemic as the moment when we were supposed to discover the final answer and instead recognize it for what it really was: the largest uncontrolled experiment in knowledge work ever conducted. It showed us what worked, what didn’t, and which assumptions about work existed only because nobody had ever been forced to challenge them. Much of that learning is now being ignored amid the emotional arguments surrounding return-to-office mandates.

The Lessons We Should Have Learned

Presence Needs a Purpose

One of the simplest lessons should have been that there is no point in going to an office merely for the purpose of going to an office. That does not mean offices have no value. Quite the opposite. There are excellent reasons to bring people together: a weekly or monthly team meeting, mentoring new employees, collaborating around a whiteboard, building relationships, working through a difficult problem together, or even having an ice cream social. Culture, relationships and human contact matter, but there should be a reason for the trip.

If I leave home and spend an hour traveling somewhere, I should know what I am accomplishing by making that trip. If I visit a customer, attend a conference, stay home because I need six uninterrupted hours to finish something, or travel to an office, each choice should have a purpose. “Because Tuesday is an office day” isn’t much of one, and “because the CEO likes seeing people at desks” is even worse. Policies based primarily on management preference rather than business purpose are unlikely to survive indefinitely. A company can mandate them for a while, particularly when labor markets favor employers, but that does not make them the best long-term way to organize knowledge work. And pendulums don’t simply swing once and stop. There are almost certainly more backswings coming before we reach anything resembling equilibrium.

The Two Hours Nobody Talks About

There was another lesson from the pandemic that somehow became controversial despite being mathematically obvious: Commuting consumes time, and for many knowledge workers, it consumes an enormous amount of it. The Fortune article notes that an average New York commute is around 53 minutes each way. A typical round trip can therefore consume close to two hours, with plenty of people spending even longer.

When people stopped commuting during the pandemic, companies did not simply lose those two hours. In many cases, they got a significant portion of them back. An employee who previously left home at 7 a.m. to reach an office at 8 a.m. might instead start answering emails at 7:30. Someone who had to leave the office at 5 p.m.to make a train might finish something at 5:30 because there was no train to catch. The employee gained personal time and flexibility, while the employer often gained productive time as well.

Of course, that wasn’t universal. Some people abused remote work, just as some people have spent decades abusing office work. But the caricature of remote employees sleeping until noon, watching television and occasionally moving the mouse to keep Teams green never accurately represented most professional workers. For many, eliminating the commute created a genuine win-win: Employees felt more trusted and empowered, while employers gained people who were less exhausted, more flexible and often willing to return part of their former commuting time to the company. We eliminated hours of completely nonproductive activity and somehow failed to recognize that as one of the great productivity opportunities of modern work.

We Also Discovered That Managing Is a Skill

Remote work exposed something else many organizations probably would rather not discuss: weak managers. For generations, companies have promoted excellent individual contributors into management almost automatically. The best salesperson becomes the sales manager. The strongest engineer gets the engineering team. The person who closes the most deals suddenly becomes responsible for developing 10 other people. The Peter principle identified the problem decades ago, but distributed work made it much harder to hide.

A manager overseeing people who are not physically sitting within eyesight actually has to manage. They have to communicate, establish objectives and measure results instead of chair occupancy. They need to know when a phone call is appropriate, when video is useful, when a group chat will do, when someone should simply be left alone to finish their work, and when getting everyone physically together really will accomplish something the technology cannot.

Those are management skills, and companies should hire managers because they possess them and train managers to develop them. “We need everybody back because otherwise I don’t know what my people are doing” isn’t a compelling argument against remote work. It’s a pretty good description of a significant management problem.

We Also Learned That the Office Itself Has to Change

There is another implication to all of this that is particularly relevant to those of us who spend our lives around AV and collaboration technology. If the future office becomes someplace people visit because there is a reason to be there, rather than someplace they occupy by default every weekday, the technology in that office has to become much easier to use.

In Dixon’s version of the future, I may work from home Monday, meet colleagues at a corporate office Tuesday, spend Wednesday at a client facility and use a nearby flexible workspace Thursday. I cannot reasonably be expected to understand four different meeting-room architectures, know which cables to carry, remember which room is Teams and which is Zoom, or call IT every time I encounter an unfamiliar touch panel. The challenge also runs in both directions: I may be the visitor walking into an office I’ve never seen before, or someone who works in a completely different meeting ecosystem may be visiting mine. Standardizing internally on Teams, Zoom, Webex or another platform cannot mean building rooms that become awkward the moment a guest arrives using something else.

That is why I’ve become increasingly interested in systems that make the room adapt to the user rather than requiring the user to adapt to the room. Barco’s ClickShare Hub is a good example of the direction I mean. A room can operate as a native Microsoft Teams Room, while someone arriving with a laptop for a Zoom, Webex, Google Meet or other meeting can use the room’s camera, microphones, speakers and displays through wireless BYOD. The important part isn’t the brand name on the box. It’s the philosophy behind it: The meeting room should be useful regardless of which meeting the person happens to be attending.

That kind of flexibility becomes more important if Dixon is right. The office of the future won’t necessarily know who is walking into it, which company employs them, which meeting platform they’re using or which device they’re carrying. The technology simply has to work. If we’re asking employees to travel somewhere because being physically together has value, the last thing we should do after they arrive is waste the first 15 minutes figuring out how to start the meeting on a custom-programmed touch-panel.

Maybe 2020 Was Just the Trial Run

Taken together, these are what make Dixon’s prediction so intriguing. Research referenced in the Fortune article suggests that long daily commutes could largely disappear by 2040, with 80% of Gen Alpha respondents expecting flexible work to be the norm and only about a quarter believing they will tolerate a commute longer than 30 minutes. That doesn’t mean everyone will work from a bedroom. Dixon’s vision is broader: “The workplace of the future is everywhere.”

That could mean home, a neighborhood coworking center, a corporate office, a customer location, or someplace we haven’t invented yet. The important concept isn’t remote work as much as it is work-location autonomy: giving knowledge workers reasonable control over where they perform their work based on what they need to accomplish that day. Need uninterrupted concentration? Stay home. Need mentorship? Go to the office. Need intensive collaboration? Get everyone together. Need to see a customer? Go see the customer. Location becomes another tool selected for the task rather than a ritual dictated by tradition.

That could change much more than offices. If people no longer have to organize their lives around commuting distance from a particular building five days a week, they can choose where to live based on quality of life, affordability, schools, family, climate, religious or cultural communities, healthcare, or simply where they want to be. Cities, offices and gatherings won’t disappear, but the reasons for them may change.

Perhaps that is the larger lesson hiding underneath the remote-work debate. The pandemic was not a permanent operating model. It was a trial run that exposed our strengths and weaknesses on a scale we could never have intentionally created. The current return-to-office backlash does not erase what that experiment taught us.

Ultimately, I suspect the answer will be neither the deserted offices of 2020 nor the mandatory five-day commutes some organizations are trying to resurrect. It will be a more mature model in which knowledge workers have greater autonomy to determine where they can most effectively accomplish what needs to be done, offices earn the commute by providing experiences worth traveling for, managers manage outcomes rather than attendance, and technology makes moving among all of those places essentially invisible.

Dixon believes that within 15 years, our children may find it bizarre that people routinely traveled enormous distances merely to sit in front of a computer. I don’t know whether his timetable is right, but I think his perspective is. Someday, people may look back at millions of workers getting up before sunrise, spending an hour sitting in traffic or packed into trains, arriving at office buildings, opening laptops, walking into stunningly complex conference rooms, joining video meetings with people somewhere else, closing those laptops eight hours later and spending another hour traveling home.

They’ll ask the same question we ask when we read about so many accepted practices from the past: Why did you do that? The uncomfortable answer may simply be that, at the time, we still hadn’t convinced ourselves there was a better way.