By nine on Tuesday morning the same argument was running in three separate client Slacks. Amazon had told corporate staff to be back in the office five days a week starting in January, and the stated reason was collaboration, invention, culture. Everybody I work with had a position within the hour. The positions were considerably louder than any work that got done that day.
I have sat in the rooms. That is not a rhetorical flourish, it is most of a decade. Agency life is rooms.
Here is what I remember about them. The rooms were excellent at alignment. Twelve people would walk in holding twelve slightly different versions of the brief and walk out holding one, and everybody would feel the specific warmth of having agreed on something in front of witnesses. That warmth is real. It is also not insight.
Proximity is very good at producing agreement and very bad at producing a point of view.
Every genuinely useful strategic idea I have ever had arrived in one of four places, and none of them was a conference room. Reading transcripts at eleven at night. Walking to Stumptown in the rain with no destination past the coffee. In the shower. On the drive home, twenty minutes after the meeting where I said nothing useful at all.
Synthesis is a solitary act. You take the mess of what people actually said and you sit with it alone until a sentence shows up. You cannot do that with eleven people watching, because an audience turns thinking into performing, and performing selects for the idea that sounds best in the next four seconds rather than the idea that is right in six months.
The Amazon version of this comes with a particular irony. The company's most famous internal ritual is the six page memo, read in silence at the top of the meeting, invented precisely because a room full of people talking produces worse thinking than one person writing carefully by themselves.
Rooms are still worth having, for the three things rooms are genuinely good for. Getting a decision made and named. Reading a client's face when you say the uncomfortable thing. Onboarding somebody who does not yet know what good looks like. That is the list.
What gets sold as a collaboration policy is usually a supervision policy wearing better clothes, and the tell is that the argument is always about attendance and never about the quality of the brief. No seating chart has ever fixed a weak brief.
No seating chart has ever fixed a weak brief.
I wrote most of this walking up Burnside in the kind of Portland drizzle that never fully commits. Barnaby was asleep on the good chair when I got back and did not ask where I had been, or whether anyone had seen me being productive while I was gone.