It's good to talk

There has been a lot of talk on this blog lately about how an
organisation's structure and infrastructure (which, in Future Shape of
the Winnerparlance, we call its Architecture) can affect the ability of
its people to innovate, or even just to get things done. For many of our
clients there is a limit to what they can do to change organization
structure or infrastructure, and yet, if they want to release the
potential of their people, we believe there has to be a way around this
dilemma.

So, it was with great delight I read a recent study done by Google, that
has uncovered some fascinating insights into how information flows
around their organisation. Google has been able to correlate information
flow amongst their employees with a whole variety of factors; a person's
department, their membership on email lists, projects they had worked
on, friends, where they went to college, etc., etc. ...

What they have discovered is that by far the most significant influence
on who knows what is their physical location at work. Their study has
found that social and professional proximity matters very little,
whereas people who sit near each other in the office tend to know the
same things.

Over the years, I have seen a number of situations in which my client,
apparently restricted by organisation charts and structures, has simply
decided to sit people together who ought to collaborate, without
changing any reporting relationships. Particularly when there is a
customer service dimension to the work, the natural outcome of such a
relocation is that everyone settles into a pattern of sharing that has a
significantly positive effect on the work.

The study findings were rather surprising to me in today's world of
multiple virtual connections. And yet one conclusion is rather
depressing–if you really want to influence a person's behaviour, must
you live in their world? So, what can we do in our dispersed
organisations? Are we doomed? How are organisations that you know well
overcoming the problems of distance in getting their messages out there?

Quoted from Tom Peters