One of the greatest unsung human skills is our ability to tell if those around us are aligned with our intentions. To assess these variables, and judge when others can help you and when they could use your help, we rely on cues that range from the obvious, such as when a colleague closes their door, to the subtle, such as how quick they are to make eye contact. When it comes to interacting at work, the variables are how much someone wants to interact at any moment, and who is open to interacting with them - but the principle is the same. It looks at how to find the best pairings of couples, so there are no two people who both prefer each other over their current spouses. Here the mathematical analogy is known as the Stable Marriage Problem, extensions of which earned a Nobel prize in economics in 2012. The ideal is to interact with others as the need arises, but only in proportion to how much we need them and how open they are to being interacted with. Because most organisations are making something new or operating in an uncertain environment, we can hardly predict what we will focus on, much less when we will want to interact. Yet this is also flawed, since we don’t know in advance when the need for interaction will arise. worker interacts whenever and with whomever they want, regardless of the effects.Īt the other extreme is scheduled alternation between focus and interaction: for example, working in the office one day and from home the next. But this is vulnerable to the so-called greedy algorithm, in which everyone makes the locally optimal decision. At one extreme, there is the open plan office, which invites us to do both at the same time. The tricky bit, though, is knowing how to combine focus and interaction. This is the magic ingredient that makes an organisation more than the sum of its parts. It is interaction with others that adjusts our direction of focus and gets us unstuck by providing a skill or insight we lack. If focus is the engine of an organisation, its rudder is interaction. A fair definition of an organisation, in fact, is a team of people who achieve more together than they would independently. Some problems, though, are too complex for just one person to solve, so you need a team. Whether you’re writing an email, doing a sketch, making a pizza or solving an equation, focus is the engine that drives it. In any company - from a tech start-up to a bank to the physics institute where I work - the primary tool for solving problems is solitary focus. Yet when you analyse what work is, and how it functions, it turns out there is a fundamental reason why office-based work will always have the edge over the remote-working option. To go back in or not to go back in? That, as we emerge from the biggest remote-working experiment in history, is very much the question. The shorter version of this article appeared in the Daily Telegraph on June 6, 2021.
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