Lateral Thinking for Every Day

48

Move the kettle!

Alex Pentland, a professor at MIT, 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. His findings are included in his book Social Physics.³⁵ 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 ...