To start off the year and to follow up on my article « Can We Please Not Say Hybrid, Please? » from the 2026 Hospitality Yearbook I sat with Josiah Mackenzie again for the Hospitality Daily podcast –
Exploring why hybrid is an interregnum when we need transformation, how it’s just the reign of hyper-specialization continued: defunct boxes reassembled, not reimagined, disguised as innovation. Why the Toyota Prius taught us that hybrids can be valuable as a wake-up call, a kick-off into the future, but will never be the future itself. Why we need day-one thinking, and how a discovery framework built on convergence, fluidity, and versatility can get us there. And as a consequence but also to catch up with our current economic moment , why this demands new metrics—not footprint and frequency, but engagement and duration.
Or to put it more precisely: how much of someone’s life do we hold space for?
Link to the article in the comments.
But we also talked about a bigger truth, a deeper shift that’s really at the heart of this:
Designing for essential human needs (not for developer spreadsheets)
Connection. Presence. Belonging. Discourse. Nourishment. Growth. Contemplation. The eternal values people crave. The jobs to be done if you believe in hospitality.
The legendary hotels understood this and built their legend status on this. The Paris Ritz a century ago, Chateau Marmont, the Chelsea – gravitational points of society, places where revolutions happened and great deals were sealed. People resided there for months, sometimes years. They weren’t designed as streamlined accommodation factories. They were designed for life. For community, long before that term became a thing.
We’ve spent decades optimizing for average satisfaction scores instead of outstanding experiences. We standardize everything—service interactions, spatial configurations, operational protocols—until our people are always stuck in the manual. We hyper-specialized until nothing was interesting anymore, then invented points programs because there was literally no other reason left to be loyal.
But great hospitality requires being in the moment. Reading the room. Paying attention to the actual humans in front of you. (And I do urge you to check out Susie Arnett’s « Why Presence is the Next Amenity » in the Hospitality Yearbook for more context.)
Being in the moment, not in the manual.
Designing for essential needs means observing, not predicting. Supporting, not defining. Not chasing trends but understanding eternal truths about what people need from the spaces they inhabit.
Full episode drops this week on hospitality daily and wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks go out as always to Josiah for having me on and for a great conversation!