I was a General Manager for BP in the UK when the company acquired Amoco in 1998.  My boss at the time, the now infamous Tony Hayward, told me to relocate 500 former Amoco employees into BP’s office building in Aberdeen, Scotland.  I said that the building was already crowded and he responded, “Al, if you can’t do it we will find someone who can.”  I was not proud of what I had to do.  We removed all of the walled offices and created an open-plan environment where workers were allotted about 100 square feet per person.  The professional office planner told me that people will mutiny when they have less than 130 square feet.  There was a lot of angst and anger when we made the change and for many months I was the most hated person in BP.  Eventually people became comfortable with the environment and although no one would tell me I suspected that a lot of people liked it.

Fifteen years of quilt was relieved when I read in Rachel Silverman’s Wall Street Journal that companies like Google, Salesforce.com, and Zappos are now deliberately designing office buildings with worker space at 100 square feet per person.  Researchers at MIT and University of Michigan have concluded that collaboration increases when people are forced to run into each other.  According to one researcher, “the more frequently you see and bump into a colleague, the more likely you are to eventually strike up a conversation.”  That conversation can lead to a relationship upon which information transfer can occur.  The most productive relationships are difficult to engineer through traditional organization structure.  It’s the casual employee conversation that leads to the innovations.  Google for example claims that innovations like Gmail and Street View occurred because a couple of employees ran into each other in a coffee room.

To read the WSJ article see:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323798104578455081218505870-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwNzEwNDcyWj.html?mod=wsj_valetbottom_email

Rachel Silverman calls it Serendipity; I call it leadership and those who have attended the Applied Leadership Seminar know what I’m talking about.   Here are some relevant high points from the seminar:

Great leaders create organizations that nurture relationships with the environment, internally and externally.  They know that nothing happens in the world without something encountering something else.

It’s a leader’s job to understand how people
relate to each other and propinquity defines how the physical environment affects the psychological proximity between people, i.e., we tend to like the people we see a lot.

The conversation is the relationship and no one in an organization exists independent of their relationship with others.

Conversation takes any organization structure and turns it into a living network where connections are made to emerging markets, opportunities, and possibilities.

Conversation is a “verbal message” and we share information and energy with others, borrowing from each other’s perspectives.

If conversations stop all possibilities become smaller until one day there are none.

We co-create reality by participating in relationships that evoke potential – we change as we meet different people and different circumstances.