The Power of Serendipitous Encounters – Samsung is Building to Create People Collisions for Idea Generation

Isolated silos, where people only interact with folks within their silos, are so yesterday.  Such organizational structure, and such architectural structure, are detrimental to idea creation.  Ideas are created by lots of cross-interest interaction.  And you can’t quite always “schedule” or “mandate” such interactions.  But you can make space for these to happen.

What the inside will look like

A lot of companies are beginning to understand this.  Steve Jobs grasped it, and at Pixar demanded a building that made it more likely to happen.  The latest addition to this concept is Samsung.  Here’s an article from The Atlantic on the new Samsung headquarters going up in Silicon Valley:  What Samsung’s New American HQ Says About the Korean Giant – The architecture of fitting in in Silicon Valley by Alexis C. Madrigal.

And here’s a key excerpt from the article:

Inside, the focus is very different: on interaction, collegiality, a chance for employees to see what their colleagues are doing, and even better to run into them on the way to or from a meeting or the gym. Many new high-tech campuses — by Facebook, Apple et al. — put an architectural and rhetorical premium on this kind of serendipitous encounter and how it can boost a company’s creativity. This was the basis of Marissa Mayer’s edict that Yahoo employees stop working so much from home; as she put it, people are “more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

The evidence is pretty much in – ideas are born in such spaces.  They are given birth when folks who would not normally meet together or work together have those unexpected, wonderful conversations.    Important, valuable, profitable, sometimes life-changing ideas are born out of such conversations.

Now, here’s a challenge.  For many in today’s free agent nation world, since they work as “Lone Rangers,” they may not have a space for such serendipitous encounters, such interactive idea-generating collisions.

We’re going to have to find places to make this happen on our own…