If You Want More Creativity, Move the Kettle

Wonderful things happen when great people work together. 

Alex Pentland

Alex Pentland is a professor at MIT who combined staff identity badges with GPS positioning technology. This enabled him to observe the movements of workers in an office much in the same way as we might watch streams of ants crossing the ground. Among the many fascinating findings in his book, Social Physics, he notes, ‘Email has very little to do with productivity or creative output.  I have found that the number of opportunities for social learning, usually through informal face-to-face interactions, is the largest single factor in corporate productivity.’  He goes on to say, ‘Most of the time, in most places, innovation is a group phenomenon.  The most creative people are actually people who go around and collect ideas from lots of different people, play with them and bounce them off other people.’

You might have a great idea in the shower or driving to work. But to develop and improve that idea you need direct conversations with your fellows. It becomes a bit like a jazz jam session where one musician starts a theme and the other band members pick it up and take it in different directions.

Bruce Daisley

Bruce Daisley is former European Vice President for Twitter and host of the popular business podcast, Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat. He has written a book entitled, The Joy of Work, in which he gives 30 pieces of advice to ‘fix your work culture and help you fall in love with your job again.’ One of the 30 tips is based on Pentland’s work above.  It is – move the kettle.  If you want to improve collaboration and innovation then think hard about the location of the water cooler, the coffee machine and the kettle.  If you want two departments to work better together then put a shared resource like the kettle between them. Set up soft spaces, maybe with sofas, to encourage informal discussions.  And if you encourage people to work from home and to rely on email communication then you are inhibiting innovation and collaboration.