I helped David Rock and the team at Neuroleadership Institute work on this article over the last couple of weeks. It also appears on David’s LinkedIn, but I liked the arguments herein and wanted to put it on my Medium as well.
Seen this recently in New York Times Upshot? “There’s no evidence of innovation being boosted in the office.”
We keep hearing the opposite, however, and it’s arguably been the central debate happening around the next phase of work.
For example, Nancy Baym, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft, has been recently sounding the alarm that 14 months of Work From Home is fracturing the innovation landscape in organizations. “No new ideas are getting in” and “groupthink is a serious possibility,” she says in a piece in Harvard Business Review and ‘social isolation is killing productivity’ she says in a piece in HRD.
This perspective has emerged from the Microsoft 2021 Work Trend Index, where one major takeaway was that 67% of employees are now craving more in-person collaboration with their colleagues. All well and good.
There is lots to like about Microsoft’s research in this space, where they collected huge amounts of data to see how people interacted. Many of their findings make sense. And Jamie Dimon, who runs one of the largest banks in the world (JP…
