A newly published book that got my attention this Spring comes from Prithwiraj Choudhury, a former professor at The Wharton School and currently on the faculty at the Harvard Business School, titled “The World Is Your Office: How Work from Anywhere Boosts Talent, Productivity, and Innovation.” Choudhury leverages some wide-ranging research and his own years of studying the world of office work to create a provocative read. As you might guess from the title, he makes an impassioned case for the value of working from anywhere (WFA) and especially contrasts it with working from home (WFH), likely an important and helpful distinction these days. He is especially harsh toward mandates for returning to the office (RTO). Anyone sick to death of the acronyms yet? WTF.
In advocating for working from anywhere, Choudhury identifies some crucial conceptual points, many of which represent a strong argument for not relying heavily on central company workplaces. He also, in my view, falls victim to ignoring some crucial benefits of gathering groups and teams in a common setting for in-person interaction. But I nevertheless recommend the book for generating some important thinking about the workplace of today and tomorrow, and perhaps even expanding the scope of that dialogue.
One idea especially caught my attention. Among the suggestions for how to maximize the benefits of working from anywhere, Choudhury attempts to counter one of the perceived benefits of in-person workplaces by calling for the management in work-from-anywhere organizations to plan for and implement what he calls digital “engineered serendipity.” Now the word choices themselves seem to pose a significant problem. The very definitions of each term seem to exclude their combination… serendipity signifying what is unplanned and spontaneous, engineered meaning what is carefully calculated and controlled. What’s the purpose of attempting to unite these seemingly exclusive concepts?
Certainly, serendipity has customarily played an important role as a catalyst for innovation and fresh insights. Workplace strategists have long believed that creativity can often spring from unexpected encounters, chance conversations, casual collisions of people and ideas. It is nearly a worn-out metaphor to speak about the watercooler as the locale for these sorts of serendipity. And workplace designers have, perhaps without speaking specifically about it being an engineering activity, have included in their planning layouts specific places and design devices to instigate interactions in the workplace that might be locations for serendipitous interchanges. Not a new concept. In fact, Steve Jobs was known to advocate having strategically located building atriums as natural places for crossing paths, specifically designing traffic patterns in both NEXT and Apple workplaces to prompt more spontaneous or serendipitous interactions among his creative teams as they moved about in their workdays. That was even well ahead of people working outside the office; we’re talking mid 1900s.
Choudhury seems to advocate having company managers in companies with large remote working staff to even create online opportunities for “spontaneous” interactions that might substitute for the proverbial watercooler or strategically located building cafes or coffee bars or atriums. It all rings a bit artificial and hollow, right? It’s challenging enough to attempt to engineer serendipity within in-person settings, let alone do it using our current online digital tools and platforms. We’ve all experienced far too many badly flawed online meetings, even after all these years of trying them, to think that some online activity directed toward creative serendipity would work well. Come on, man.
Embedded in this notion of working from anywhere is, I would submit, a crucial notion that is far more important than trying to engineer serendipity. It is the concept of intention and deliberate choice when it comes to where work happens, and perhaps most importantly with whom it happens. The quality of our work lives and the performance value that is contributed to an organization has the potential to be significantly enhanced when there is an intentionality and a deliberate set of choices about where we do what we need to get done and how we interact with others in that process. This is true on both an individual level and on an organizational level. Recently, the researchers at MillerKnoll, led by my friend Ryan Anderson, have helped launch and promote a framework to address this focus, calling it relationship-based planning, an appropriate effort to broaden the more common notion of activity-based planning, to include more explicitly the people factor. I’d likely prefer calling it “relational-based planning,” but that’s just a quibble for vocabulary precision. Regardless, it hits the mark.
I suggest that we stop, or at least take a serious pause, around the debate about work from home, or work from anywhere, or returning to the office policies. Let’s focus more on the crucial issues of what sort of work needs to get done and with whom we need to do it. If we effectively address these questions of task and collaborators, the role of place will be a decision that sits on that foundation, a far sturdier platform than a conceptual set of business ideas about remote work or in-person policies. Place will be determined by a thorough and honest appraisal of the “what and with whom” and certainly creating opportunities for serendipity should definitely be among the objectives for working in those spaces.
Though it is difficult to imagine truly engineering serendipity among an office workforce, it is nevertheless worth including it in our planning, but let’s not pretend it could possibly occur genuinely using an online screen.