headed by Frank Duffy and John Worthington. In their writings, their projects and their talks, they promoted the idea of a distributed workplace for footloose nomadic office workers who could work anywhere they wanted. Early adopters were IT companies and consultancy firms. The public sector showed a lot of interest as well. In countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK, government organizations launched pilot projects and experiments based on these new ways of working.In the decade that followed, the concepts popularityIn 1997, Francis Duffy published his classic The continued to rise. It was then that the term activity-basedNew Office, in which he discussed the concept working was coined by the Dutch workplace strategist Erikof the club office, described as an office where individuals and teams occupy space on an Veldhoen. 7The increased adoption rate was accompaniedas-needed basis, moving around it to take by more critical notes as well. For example, in its studyadvantage of a wide range of facilities. 8The State of the Office, the British Industrial Society wrote that It [the flexible office] might be all the rage, but not with employees and that private offices for senior staff remain the norm, even while non-territorial forms of flexible working are introduced for everyone else. 9And so it was. There were both success stories and projects that failed. Many organizations were simply not yet ready for such radical change. For many managers, the status of a private office was still too important. Mobile technologies were still too slow or too expensive. And there was still too much paper around. Employee retrieving her flex-suitcase with Today, twenty years later, the world of work is morepersonal items at the office of the Dutch receptive to the ABW concept. Many of the technologicalinsurance company Interpolis (1998). In the Netherlands, this project created a wave of media and practical challenges faced by the early ABW projectsattention for the flexible workplace concept. have simply disappeared. Wireless networks, smartWorkplace consultant Erik Veldhoen, who was devices, long battery life and cloud computing are noresponsible for the project, would later coin the term activity-based working. (photo: Hollandse longer novelties but mainstream solutions, and they haveHoogte)made mobile work easier than ever. Even the paperless office is, at last, coming of age. And, just as important, many managers and employees seem to have become used to the concept. ABW is no longer shockingly newmany employees have been there and done that. Another factor is that remote working has become much more common. The number of people who frequently work from home has been slowly rising in past decades, but the Covid-19 crisis has really pushed the concept into the mainstream. This will further increase the relevance of ABW as working from home reduces the need (and probably also the desire) for having a personal workstation at the office. 16