WFH? RTO? REMEMBERING THE ALLEN CURVE AND WHY IT MATTERS NOW Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
About A robust scientific finding from decades ago mapped the richness of information flows against how far apart people sat at work. Called the Allen Curve after MIT’s Thomas J. Allen, who discovered it, it shows a precipitous drop in information flows as people were separated at work.
Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
For all the passionate conversations about new working arrangements for the knowledge working classes, we seem to have glossed right over one of the most robust findings in communication theory. It’s called the Allen curve, and reflects the conclusions of a series of studies that MIT’s Thomas J. Allen conducted in the 1970’s, published in his now-famous book Managing the Flow of Technology: Technology Transfer and the Dissemination of Technological Information Within the R&D Organization.
Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
Who really needs to be within 8-10 feet of each other? And who can safely be elsewhere?
This is hard work
So, if a team needs rich flows of information to solve problems, come up with novel solutions and benefit from being co-located somewhere, you’ve only got about 10 meters to play with. Once people are outside that magical radius, much more effort needs to go into the sharing and processing of information. If people are on Zoom screens, not physically present at all or present at different times or on different days, the communicative benefits of close proximity disappear.What that implies is that communication efforts need to be much more proactive if we want to regularly engage people working without physical proximity. And this is hard work.
Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
This has fascinating implications for what I’ve come to call the “permissionless” organization, in which teams can selfmanage using technology for coordination and planning, in many cases changing the job of the manager to one of support and coaching. For many organizations, the fundamental unit of work is a small team – what Amazon famously called “two pizza” teams (meaning that it can be adequately fed on two pizza’s). And for many of these teams, there is simply no substitute for being together physically.
Small teams as the basic units of work Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
Meanwhile, at Valize
We’re enjoying some physical proximity this week at our team offsite in New York. We’re making plans for a robust 2024, including the launch of our new SparcHub Sage software, designed for small companies and teams. You can see a short demo of what it does at this link. It is software designed to make implementing the discovery driven growth method easy and transparent. We are also continuing to build out our learning guides, which inform learners at key checkpoints in the process, and which we see as a valuable tool for upskilling at scale.
Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
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Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
Thank You
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