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Why companies like Best Buy design their office spaces to encourage more employee interactions

The bulk of my work concerns people's interactions with technology, and my field is currently in a remarkable period of development. Just five years ago, most people used computers and mobile phones through very limited means of input -- the tools essentially reduced the people using them to fingers: typing, pressing buttons, mousing, or maneuvering a joystick.

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward. With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth. Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.

Recent evolutions in our understanding of physics and biology indicate that our environment, including ourselves, is the result of a far-reaching process of interaction and complementarity. Apparently, something makes that matter and organisms -automatically- collaborate growing to larger and more complex entities. Is there a place for business in the universe?

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than on their behaviour taken separately - Russell Ackoff

We give a lot of talks and presentations about the ways and places companies and their employees learn the fastest. We call these learning environments creation spaces - places where individuals and teams interact and collaborate within a broader learning ecology so that performance accelerates.

Over the last year, I've been doing a lot of research on how organizations will need to evolve to meet the demands of the 21st century. The central premise of this work is that new technologies, most of which have appeared only within the last decade, greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. The frontier of human productive capacity today is the power of extended collaboration - the ability to work together beyond the scope of small groups.