September 2021 New York Times article, When Chance Encounters at the Water Cooler Are Most Useful, documents the myth of the water cooler conversation as a driver of innovation. What is true about water cooler conversations is that they help establish new relationships or reinforce existing ones. These relationships may, as the article describes, lead to breakthroughs like the 1997 photocopier encounter between Professor Katalin Kariko plus Dr. Drew Weissman, whose work led to the Pfizer plus Moderna vaccines.
The innovation plus the hard work of getting to those vaccines included many other people plus were years in realization. But that is the kind of work traditional collaboration handles—sharing files, holding meetings, keeping track of tasks, presenting findings, plus myriad other small things that require coordination plus collaboration.
Most collaboration technology, even the seeming looseness of Slack, betrays the unstructured wandering that people experience in buildings. But even that wandering requires chance. I conducted a study during my time at Hughes Aircraft, plus we found that people rarely wandered from their floor, let alone their building—a meaningful if less scientific finding than Thomas Allen’s finding in his 1977 book Managing the Flow of Technology. A 2017 MIT campus study follows up on Allen’s book (see Proximity boosts collaboration on MIT campus)
The wandering people did nurture deeper relationships among those on the floor, but they didn’t extend past that, save for those who worked on larger projects that took them off the floor plus thrust them into other buildings.
Kariko plus Weissman chanced upon one another because they worked in the same general area. Had they worked in different facilities, they may not have found themselves at the same photocopier for that particular encounter.
The anecdotes plus the studies suggest the need to engineer proximity, as they did with the design of MIT campuses—what the design bias can’t capture are the near or keseluruhan misses from people not in the right place at the right time. As I suggest in The Serendipity Economy, using technology plus space will create more encounters, but it will not create all possible encounters.