[BearfootCoder]

I've been working in IT for 30 odd years, 24 entirely office based, 6 some combination of hybrid and home, and in my view the argument that innovation and creativity are uniquely fostered by interactions in the office is seriously over-stated.

This is obviously just annecdata, but in my working life I can think of literally zero ideas which emerged from just happening to run into someone in the canteen or one of the corridors. Most work conversations are vacuous, time-wasting bullshit. Fun if you've nothing better to do, and nice for greasing the social wheels, but rarely a source of brilliant transformation.

In a depressingly large number of work spaces, creativity and innovation are rarely relevant to your job description anyway. You're not there to transform the business. You're there to churn through whatever piece of nonsense has been handed down from on high, and since in quite a significant number of cases the work you've been given will make zero practical difference to the overall well-being of the company it doesn't really matter if you do it well or badly.

Even if that weren't the case, what is it that is supposed to make serendipitous encounters inherently better than structured idea development? Are we really supposed to believe that just happening to encounter the person who holds the missing puzzle piece of what you're working on are exactly the moment you need it is the best way of generating transformative ideas? I'm not saying that such random encounters don't happen and can't be significant. But one reason these things turn into corporate legends is because they are rare and outlandish. "I said something in a taxi or a bar and someone else said something that turned into $$$" is a story, whereas, "I was stuck so I laid out the problem in a Slack channel or took it to on online brainstorming session and a couple of my co-workers helped me fix it" isn't. But that's because the first case is a weird freaky miracle, and the second is just an ordinary, effective way of running a business.