Part II — Seeing Organizational Flow · Chapter 20 · 6 min read · First Public Draft

Place

Where the Work Actually Happens

The friction of place is personal, which is exactly why it keeps being solved collectively.

Reduces frictionCreates valueHandoff loss

Covid was a tragedy and I have no wish to live through anything like it again.

It also settled an argument that had been going nowhere for a decade. Working from home went from something that required justification — occasionally something close to forbidden — to something an entire economy did on a Wednesday, because there was no alternative. Whatever else that period cost, it removed the need to speculate about whether it could work.

What we learned is more interesting than either camp wanted.

For a lot of people it removed a real and unglamorous friction.

Not work friction. Life friction. The commute, the school pickup that required a favour, the appointment that consumed a half-day of leave, the daily negotiation between being a functioning employee and a functioning family member. For many people that friction was substantial, invisible to their employer, and being paid for entirely out of their own reserves.

Removing it did not make those people lazier. It gave them back capacity they had been spending on logistics.

For others it was genuinely worse, and that’s not a character flaw either.

Some people found the distractions unmanageable — the washing machine, the children, the house full of small unfinished tasks. Some people need other people in the room to think properly. Some found the isolation corrosive in a way that took months to admit to.

And some found, for the first time in their working lives, the uninterrupted focus they’d always needed and never had, and produced more than they ever had in an office. That happened too, quietly, to more people than the debate usually allows for.

All of these are true simultaneously, about different people, in the same team.

Which is why the return-to-office argument keeps missing.

The friction here is personal. It varies by individual, by task, by week, by what’s happening at home this month. Any policy that resolves it in one direction resolves it correctly for some fraction of people and incorrectly for the rest, and no amount of conviction about collaboration changes that arithmetic.

I don’t hold a position on where people should be, because I don’t think there’s a position to hold.

The argument I hear most is that people don’t actually work at home. It’s worth taking seriously, because it isn’t entirely wrong.

Some people genuinely do less at home. That’s true, and pretending otherwise makes the rest of the case sound naive.

It’s also nowhere near the whole picture. Plenty of people work more at home — longer, later, and with far more difficulty stopping, because the thing that used to end the working day was a commute and now nothing does. That’s a real risk too, and it’s the one nobody writes a policy about, presumably because it looks like commitment.

And wherever that is happening, it was usually happening in the office too — just where somebody could see it, which an office is very good at and which is a different thing from it not happening. The building also changes the shape of it. Time that goes quietly at home goes sociably in an office: the long chat at a desk, the conversation that pulls three people out of what they were concentrating on. Neither version is anybody’s character. But one of them is invisible and one of them is shared out across everyone sitting nearby, and only one of those shows up as a problem.

So it isn’t a location problem. It’s a performance problem, and it was one before anybody worked from home. Location policy is just an unusually blunt instrument for addressing it — you constrain everybody in order to manage a few, and the few adapt within a fortnight anyway.

The mixed meeting is where the friction actually shows up, and almost nobody counts it.

Half the people in a room, half on a screen. The room develops its own conversation — the aside, the quick sketch, the exchange of looks that settles something without anyone saying it formally. The person on the wall gets the audio and none of the rest. They are physically present as a rectangle and functionally absent as a participant, and after the third time they stop trying to interject, because the timing is impossible and interrupting a room from a screen requires more social nerve than the point is usually worth.

Then someone summarizes the meeting afterward and their perspective isn’t in it, and everyone genuinely believes they were included.

Many teams are distributed now. That’s fine. Distributed is workable. Half-distributed, meeting by meeting, without anyone deciding it, is where people get quietly dropped.

And there is friction you only ever hear about standing next to somebody.

Somebody mentions, while the coffee runs, that they have been waiting three weeks on an answer from a team you happen to speak to on Thursdays. It was never going to be raised formally. It is not a crisis, it is not on anyone’s agenda, and putting it in writing would have made it look like an escalation of something they were not trying to escalate. Said sideways next to a machine, it costs nothing. Ten minutes later it is solved, and neither of you would describe what just happened as work.

That is not nostalgia for the office, and it is not the collaboration argument, which I find mostly decorative. It is narrower and more mechanical than that: being near somebody lowers the threshold for mentioning a thing that isn’t quite worth a message. Remotely, that threshold is higher — you have to decide it merits somebody’s attention, pick a channel, and be reasonably confident you have the right person. The conversation still exists. It just requires someone to be invited into it, and the ones nobody thought to invite you to are precisely the ones you would have overheard.

Which is an argument for a mix rather than for a building. Enough shared presence that the accidental conversations still happen, and enough freedom that nobody spends their week commuting in order to have them on a schedule.

And the drifting attention is telling you something, though usually not what people assume.

If somebody consistently cannot hold attention in a particular meeting, that’s information rather than a character assessment. Occasionally they’re tired. Reliably, in the same recurring slot, week after week? That’s a signal about the meeting.

Half a room quietly multitasking is the cheapest attendance record you’ll ever get on whether a forum is still earning its place. Everyone present is voting with their attention, and the vote is unanimous and unspoken.

The place is negotiable. The presence isn’t — and only one of those two gets written into a policy.

What moves this is making both modes genuinely work rather than picking a winner, and then extending the trust to everybody rather than selectively. Selective trust is worse than none, because it’s visible: people know exactly who is being watched, and everyone else adjusts to avoid becoming that person. The rules that matter turn out to be about meetings rather than about buildings.

Cultivating this: Growing the Team, in Part III.