Where’s the Water Cooler Now?

Tom Allen, professor of organizational studies at MIT, entered the cannon by describing what’s become known as “the Allen curve,” which expresses how physical proximity impacts collaboration. He wrote a book in the mid-80’s called Managing the Flow of Technology, where he describes the findings of more than a decades’ worth of research on communication in science and engineering labs across the US.

One of the interesting findings from his research is the bearing of proximity-enhanced-collaboration on idea generation. He found that, “High performers consulted with anywhere from 4 to 9 organizational colleagues on a given project, whereas low performers contacted one or two to colleagues at most. This suggests that increasing the number of colleagues with whom an employee consults contributes independently to performance.” As Jonah Lehrer says in Imagine, "According to Allen's data, office conversations are so powerful that simply increasing their quantity can dramatically increase creative production; people have more new ideas when they talk with more people. This suggest that the most important place in every office is not the board room, or the Lab, or the library. It's the coffee machine.” Or, as Steven Johnson so eloquently described Kevin Dunbar’s excellent study of science labs in Where Good Ideas Come From, it’s “not the microscope. It was the conference table.”*

The question I’ve been pondering in these recent days is, where’s the coffee machine now? Especially for serendipitous interactions, the video conference hardly replicates the conference table in Dunbar’s studies. What we need is a new kind of water cooler.

*Full text too good not to quote: “With his science like molecular biology, we inevitably have an image in our heads of the scientist alone in the lab, hunched over a microscope, and stumbling across a major new finding. But Dunbars studies show that those isolated eureka moments were rarities. Instead, most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, or a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work. If you look at the map of idea formation that Dunbar created, the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.”

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