So I’m reading The Culture Code (2018) by Daniel Coyle. One of its central theses is about “building safety” by creating a sense of belonging, mostly via physical cues like eye contact, active listening, and inclusive language.

Coyle then brought up the Allen Curve.

Thomas Allen’s 1977 book, Managing the Flow of Technology, has a graph that showed communication drastically improves when you decrease the distance between the communicators’ desks. Subsequent studies (e.g. at MIT in 2017) reaffirmed and extended it to cross-disciplinary collaboration: research groups that were physically closer on campus communicated better and more often.

This seems at odds with something I cited in my previous articles (see them for links), like Gartner showing that RTO mandates didn’t improve performance.

So on the one hand, Allen says communication gets better when you push people closer together; and on the other, Gartner says productivity isn’t improved by RTO mandates (where people are obviously closer together). So what gives?

My first thought was that the Allen Curve was created in a world where the cutting edge was rotary phones and VAX mainframes. The Gartner Research was done post-pandemic, in a world of Zoom and Slack.

But then I read more, and found more recent articles [https://www.reworked.co/digital-workplace/the-office-dilemma-data-driven-insights-into-hybrid-work-and-return-to-office-mandates/] that claimed the relationship between physical proximity and digital messaging frequency still holds.

I think the solution is related to Ding and Ma’s data (again see my previous articles for links), showing that “managers [use] RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees … for bad firm performance.”

In other words, bad leaders misuse the Allen Curve as a cudgel. Good leaders are careful about both the data and the conclusions you draw from it.

Furthermore, we’re comparing oranges to grapefruit. The Allen Curve is about communication, whereas the Gartner research is about productivity. Similar, yes; related, probably; and maybe even causally related. But I don’t know if they’re deterministic drivers of one another, and if so, how much.

I’d love your thoughts. Particularly if you’ve found studies that (a) identify a more direct causal relationship between communication and productivity, (b) relate the Allen curve to productivity on remote tech teams, and (c) focus on the significance of the relationships. For example, if improved communication via RTO leads to a 5% improvement in productivity and product quality, but working remotely leads to a 20% improvement in productivity at a loss of 5% of product quality, then… maybe we’d be comparing oranges to tangerines, at least.