‘Propinquity’ and The Great Digital Transformation of 2020

If I’ve learnt anything about the modern digital world and the ways we’re engineering it (totally mean software engineering and technology…), it is that everything is about teamwork and relationships. Everything in life, really, boils down to relationships between people.

The psychology of how human beings form and maintain relationships is a large and complex topic but one aspect keeps coming to mind, now more than ever: propinquity.

Propinquity. It’s a great word, isn’t it? A curiosity to fiddle with and roll around in your mind as if it was a Werther’s Original. A smooth, hefty, tasty marble of a word. I like saying it, feeling it. Propinquity. Try it.

“Are you high?”, I fore-feel you might think. What, indeed, am I on about?

Fair questions, both. Two things. One, propinquity — the psychological effect of physical proximity between people — and two, the recent and extreme fast-tracking of the global digital transformation. The former a key ingredient to the development of high performing teams and the latter a side effect of the necessity of social distancing which forced the world along a steep technology adoption curve, kicking and screaming, well before it would have chosen to.

Propinquity, and what it means in the context of business relationships and teamwork, is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while.

The Great Digital Transformation of 2020 and the “still not quite normal” and “probably never will be again” state of the world has transformed “propinquity” into a topic I believe is now imperative to think about.

Dictionary:

propinquity /prəˈpɪŋkwɪti/, noun, the state of being close to someone or something; proximity.

From Wikipedia:

In social psychology, propinquity (/prəˈpɪŋkwɪtiː/; from Latin propinquitas, “nearness”) is one of the main factors leading to interpersonal attraction.

It refers to the physical or psychological proximity between people. Propinquity can mean physical proximity, a kinship between people, or a similarity in nature between things (“like-attracts-like”).

Unlike most of normal life, living in tech prior to The Great Digital Transformation of 2020 (henceforth and forthwith GDT2020) certainly involved some amount of distributed teams and large amounts of time spent in meetings on video conferencing.

The first properly distributed team I worked with was at Fiserv where my immediate divisional peer group was spread across Auckland, Portland OR and Atlanta GA with the wider business across the whole continental US, Europe, Asia Pacific and India. Most meetings were via video conferencing, often at an awkward and inconvenient time for some poor soul. Next, at Vector Group, the company was spread across New Zealand and Australia. Working in Shared Services meant that many meetings were with distributed attendees over video conferencing but a more compact timezone distribution meant fewer painful timings. At Mobi2Go we have offices in Wellington, Melbourne and Toronto with team members in Europe and Asia and customers in 50 countries. All of our meetings are over video conferencing by default and have been for a long time. Some meetings are at 2am. I’ll just leave that there.

Some years ago, my own personality… quirks… and life choices (the choice of a somewhat remote residential area in particular) caused me to seriously start thinking about propinquity. Given my arguably suboptimal choice of living location, being able to work from home regularly to avoid a long, three plus hours a day commute, would have had many benefits. And yet, I couldn’t make myself do it (that’d be the quirk right there). I didn’t fully understand why that was at the time but it got the thought-ball rolling.

Countless (you have no idea) meetings over subsequent years with mixed co-located and remote team members allowed me to observe some interesting dynamics. Instances where one team member was remote while the rest of the team were in the same location have been particularly interesting, creating some insights by contextualising my own feelings about being the remote person in a group with a more objective outsider’s view of the effect on others.

Then came The Great Digital Transformation of 2020 which fast tracked the adoption of technology through vast swathes of corporate culture, where such newfangled contrivances as “video conferencing” and “working from not-physically-in-an-office between some very specific hours” heretofore were impossible to even conceive of, let alone implement. The inherent risks of adopting work practises because they are fashionable instead of effective aside, the GDT2020 changed the whole working world and moved all meetings that could possibly be done online, online via VC. It did the same for social interaction of all kinds — Zoom is now everywhere, and a verb.

This dramatic shift created another set of interesting dynamics. One, in particular, when compared to pre-GDT2020, was that it effectively leveled the psychological playing field of mixed co-located/remote teams by forcing everybody to work alone from home using exactly the same communication tools, having to use the same online meeting processes and wiping out any face-to-face interaction.

Now, in the somewhat bizarre epoch post the GDT2020 life (in New Zealand and Australia, at this time) seems to be settling into a mixture of co-location at an office and work-from-home: some individuals in teams working some portion of time in an office and the rest at home. This might not sound like a problem and even if it does, it might not necessarily strike one as the problem to solve and in many instances it may not actually be a problem to solve. Teams made up primarily of single contributors doing largely independent work with digital tools come to mind as an example where there may be no problem and the mixed model might work well.

There is, however, an unavoidable fact of human psychology which is: propinquity. People more easily, efficiently and inevitably form relationships with other people who they are in close physical proximity with on a regular basis. Some unavoidable facts of video conferencing and other remote communication technologies is that they are much lower (person to person) bandwidth than face to face communication and cut out entire spectrums of non-verbal communication cues. Putting aside other personality quirks like FOMO, being remote creates a constant overhead of having to actively manage and engineer communication to compensate, mostly imperfectly, for the lost ambient signals, informal chit chat and various serendipitous encounters that are pervasive, yet mostly unnoticed, when people are co-located, that lead to bonding and relationships.

A number of situations come to mind where challenges are likely to develop in the mixed model: teams where frequent communication or collaborative problem solving is an advantage or situations where decisions or courses of action might need to change quickly based on complex reasoning. Instances where requirements for feedback or input or collaboration is unpredictable or sporadic. Navigating complex political situations will be more challenging, especially where there is asymmetry within teams between the number of members co-locating and working remotely. Cohesive team formation and bonding is much more difficult in a mixed model.

Similarly to our wholesale cultural adoption of social media without properly considering the societal implications, we have now been strongly encouraged to sweepingly adopt remote and mixed model remote/co-located working as a solution to the pandemic but also without properly working through the long term implications of this. Like social media, it’s a slow burn to understanding the impact despite the lightning speed of adoption.

The danger in the way and pace that this shift is unfolding is that the immediate advantages of remote work can obscure the disadvantages to a degree where they are not considered in longer term planning.

People, being people, will tend to take the most expedient route, consciously or not. If, for example, talking to the person across from you gets results immediately and effectively, that is the path of least resistance and it will be taken over the alternatives. Taking the most expedient route will reinforce it while atrophying other routes. Propinquity. Relationships will form and strengthen between the colocated and inevitably disadvantage those who are not, irrespective of choice or inherent fairness.

The new model of remote work also inverts the advantage: not all people are the same and remote work will suit introverts much better than extroverts — what’s good for one person is not necessarily good for all people. The activity that disrupts an introvert trying to focus when co-located is what fuels the extrovert and the shift toward remote work has certainly had a dampening effect there.

In the short term there will be a tendency to believe that individual choices of work location should be respected and accepted and everything else should be adapted around these choices. Perhaps they should be but we should understand that there are always tradeoffs to be made and these tradeoffs will be complex and not so obvious.

This mixed-model work arrangement and the reality of propinquity will become, or perhaps already is, the central challenge to developing high performing teams.

How much personal interaction gives a team an advantage over those who have little or none? How is momentum, inspiration and camaraderie sustained both at distance and in person simultaneously and how is that mediated by digital communication tools? Do the advantages of not having to co-locate and interact outweigh the advantages of co-location? How many of the anonymising, depersonalising traits of social media will emerge in workplace tools and mixed-model relationships?

I suspect that there is going to be great regrouping at some point in this ongoing diaspora, when organisations begin to understand that propinquity is a fundamental component of high-performing teams. And those that acknowledge, assess and plan for the slow-burn impact of this deficiency already know that high-performing teams are the bedrock of business success.