Numbe of words: 275

And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly. As Maria Konnikova reports in The New Yorker , when this concept first emerged, its goal was to “facilitate communication and idea flow.” This claim resonated with American businesses looking to embrace an aura of start-up unconventionality. Josh Tyrangiel, the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, for example, explained the lack of offices in Bloomberg’s headquarters as follows: “Open plan is pretty spectacular; it ensures that everyone is attuned to the broad mission, and… it encourages curiosity between people who work in different disciplines.” Jack Dorsey justified the open layout of the Square headquarters by explaining: “We encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity—and people walking by each other teaching new things.”

For the sake of discussion, let’s call this principle—that when you allow people to bump into each other smart collaborations and new ideas emerge—the theory of serendipitous creativity. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world’s largestoffice, we can reasonably conjecture, this theory helped drive his decision, just as it has driven many of the moves toward open workspaces elsewhere in Silicon Valley and beyond. (Other less-exalted factors, like saving money and increasing supervision, also play a role, but they’re not as sexy and are therefore less emphasized.)

This decision between promoting concentration and promoting serendipity seems to indicate that deep work (an individual endeavor) is incompatible with generating creative insights (a collaborative endeavor). This conclusion, however, is flawed. It’s based, I argue, on an incomplete understanding of the theory of serendipitous creativity.

Excerpted from page number 126 – 127 of “Deep Work” by Cal Newport.