Collaborate With Colleagues by Being Closer to Them
During a performance review, I once asked my manager to ask why I no longer collaborate on projects with a colleague who lives in New York (I’m in San Francisco). We had Slack, email, and Hangouts at our disposal, but in the end the real answer was simply “because he lives all over the country.” No matter how good your virtual instruments are, connecting with people who are working on projects outside of your office can quickly get complicated. Now there is science that really supports this theory.
A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the closer you are physically to a person, the more likely you are to collaborate with them. While my first reaction was “No kidding!” the obvious answer isn’t as obvious as you might (and I thought so).
Although it is obvious that you will be more likely to partner with someone who works in the same office, or at least in the same city, than with someone who lives across the country where you sit in that office may also play a role.
The researchers reviewed 40,358 published articles and 2,350 patents based on MIT research between 2004 and 2014. In it, they found that how close you sit to a person can have a huge impact on whether you cooperate with them or not. Even a few hundred feet can make a huge difference.
“It’s intuitively clear that there is a connection between space and collaboration,” notes Claudel. “That is, you have a better chance of meeting someone, chatting and working together if you are nearby in space.” However, he said, “It was an exciting result to find it in articles and patents, especially for transdisciplinary collaboration.” He adds, “In many ways, this data does indeed support the Allen curve.”
Allen Curve? This is a theory pioneered by Thomas Allen, professor emeritus at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and author of the 1977 book Technology Flow Control.
Its curve, well, curve, proves that cooperation and interaction is less the further you move away from someone. Even 10 meters can make a difference.
A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people who worked in the same workplace were three times more likely to work on documents with those sitting in the same place than people working 400 meters away. When the two people were 800 meters apart from each other, the chances of cooperation were almost halved.
The important takeaway here is that if you want to collaborate with someone on a project, be it an academic job or planning a party, the first step to success is to be physically close to that person.