The office is broken: Can conceptual “atom smashing” repair it?

This sudden interest in workplace experimentation is both welcome and needed, as much about how we work in the knowledge sector today is ossified into tradition and conventions, some of which are arbitrary and some of which are borrowed from different, older types of work. The proposals making waves at the moment, however, feel somehow insufficient

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Some will return to physically co-working with strangers, and some employers trapped in the past will force people to go to offices, but the illusion that the office was about work will be shattered forever, and companies that hold on to that legacy will be replaced by companies who embrace the antifragile nature of distributed organizations.

Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting—creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to call for an end to the “tyran

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