How an off-site in a Spiegeltent was a creative escape from the corporate circus

Let’s be honest, corporate off-sites usually don’t scream creativity. They often end up being more about stale conference rooms and less about stirring up real innovation. 

At PatientNotes, we’ve embraced remote working and have ditched the traditional offsite for quarterly “on-site”. The face-to-face connection dissolves any unnecessarily pent-up tension from using the wrong emojis facial expressions and other asynchronous working hazards.

Back in 2017, I was “Girl Geek in Residence” for NAB’s Connecting Women in Technology program, led by technology executive Dayle Stevens. At that time, design thinking capability was a toolkit for customer experience and digital design teams, and Dayle’s goal was to take it to everyone. So she engaged John Kembel, design thinking educator and co-founder of d.global (a not-for-profit organisation born out of the Stanford d.school) to run a design thinking workshop.

Only problem was: we didn’t have a venue that would fit everyone!

In the “olden days,” you had to book any large meeting room or event space about six months in advance. They were often stale, no windows and overhead lighting that makes you want to nap if you’re in there after lunch. We needed somewhere that would not only accommodate over 100 people but also one that would flip the script on the usual stiff, formulaic brainstorming sessions. 

An accidental wrong turn on the way to 700 Bourke had me stumble across the Wonderland Spiegeltent, hiding temporarily on a random empty block around the corner from our office. Not your average corporate venue, the Spiegeltent is usually home to cabarets and circuses. With its dark wood, mirrored interiors, and intimate, circular setting, it’s definitely a place that demands you leave your preconceptions at the door.

“We often underestimate the power of our physical environment on our mental space. The Spiegeltent, with its aura of mystery and history of artistic performances, provided more than just another beige conference room — it helped to build an atmosphere where traditional corporate barriers could melt away, encouraging a flow of ideas that might seem out of place in the usual boardroom,” reflects Dayle Stevens.

“And I mean melt in a pretty literal sense as unexpectedly there was a heatwave and we had to tell everyone that casual dress meant shorts were definitely encouraged. But coincidentally that added another layer to the change we were trying to create. The cool corporate air was literally left behind.”

“For me, the practice of ‘design thinking’ offers a set of creative strategies and mindsets for innovating more confidently and more routinely — seeing opportunities where others don’t, and bringing new, novel, and needed solutions to the world,” Kembel shared at the time.

The hunt for the venue perfectly underscored a crucial lesson of Design Thinking: sometimes, the best solutions arise from urgent necessity. The constraint of finding a last-minute venue led us to a solution more aligned with our goals than any traditional space could have offered.

“Instead of thinking that innovation is someone else’s job, imagine if everyone felt confident in their own creativity, equipped to re-think and re-imagine their part of the puzzle, and empowered to lead the change they believe is required. The good news is that design thinking offers a set of practices that anyone can use to navigate, with greater confidence, the uncertainty, ambiguity, and risks inherent in the otherwise messy process of innovation.” 

“Design thinking offers a path for people to re-awaken their creativity and bring a whole new side of themselves to work, in small and big ways alike: to rethink how they might run a meeting, engage a client, manage a team, fix a business process, design a new service, transform a business, even disrupt an industry.”

For me, this experience was a stark reminder that creativity needs space — both literal and figurative — to breathe and flourish. It wasn’t just about finding a spot to gather; it was about discovering a space that could transform the way we think, collaborate, and innovate.

So if you’re navigating an off-site, on-site, or anything in-between, you can always ditch the cubicle, think outside the box, run away to join the circus, and trust that in a Spiegeltent, things always come full circle.

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