Numbe of words: 275<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly. As Maria Konnikova reports in The New Yorker<\/em> , when this concept first emerged, its goal was to \u201cfacilitate communication and idea flow.\u201d This claim resonated with American businesses looking to embrace an aura of start-up unconventionality. Josh Tyrangiel, the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek<\/em>, for example, explained the lack of offices in Bloomberg\u2019s headquarters as follows: \u201cOpen plan is pretty spectacular; it ensures that everyone is attuned to the broad mission, and\u2026 it encourages curiosity between people who work in different disciplines.\u201d Jack Dorsey justified the open layout of the Square headquarters by explaining: \u201cWe encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity\u2014and people walking by each other teaching new things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the sake of discussion, let\u2019s call this principle\u2014that when you allow people to bump into each other smart collaborations and new ideas emerge\u2014the theory of<\/em> serendipitous creativity<\/em>. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world\u2019s 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\u2019re not as sexy and are therefore less emphasized.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s based, I argue, on an incomplete understanding of the theory of serendipitous creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n