Here is an excerpt from an article written by John Weeks and Anne-Laure Fayard for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Here’s a puzzle: Technology connects us more completely than ever before (we can call, text, email, and Skype practically anyone anywhere, and we do) and yet the face-to-face conference business is robust, we’re flying more miles than ever to interact with others, the brightest minds still converge on innovation hubs like Silicon Valley, and collaborative spaces in firms are increasingly popular.

How can this be?

Dire predictions that pervasive (and often invasive) communications technologies would bring the end of the “human moment” and the death of communities were wrong. The faulty assumption underlying the hype is that there is a limit to how much people want to connect. If anything, these technologies have revealed that our desire to connect is far from exhausted. Demand is not fixed. Our appetite isn’t sated. And so, as new opportunities to connect emerge, the amount of interaction grows.
These technologies exert this effect, we think, not because they replace existing means of interaction, but because they provide novel environments for interaction. In our research on the factors that influence interaction in both real and virtual spaces, we explore the crucial roles of proximity, privacy, and permission. Proximity describes the likelihood of encountering others in a space; privacy includes being able to not only limit who can “overhear” your conversation, but being able to control who has access to you; and permission describes the sense of being allowed to communicate, and in what ways, in a space. Environments that balance the proximity, privacy, and permission well invite interaction. (For more, see our article “Who Moved My Cube” in the July/August 2011 Harvard Business Review.)

By creating novel types and combinations of proximity, privacy, and permission, new technologies stimulate new types of interaction. We use email to send messages at night to the people we work with during the day, and to contact during the day the people we live with at night. These technologies increase people’s proximity when they are physically distant, and provide permission to interact with colleagues at times that, in predigital days, they couldn’t have. Give us a mobile phone and we will send texts when we are in meetings to people in the same meeting. “Boring meeting!” Texting affords privacy in a setting where speaking out loud would be ill advised. Exchanging instant messages with a friend at work may be permitted (or goes undetected) in contexts where spending time on a personal phone call is not.

The architect Christopher Alexander in his 1977 book A Pattern Language wrote “The simple social intercourse created when people rub shoulders in public is one of the most essential kinds of social glue in society.” At the time, Alexander was writing about physical space. But his observation equally applies to digital interactions — and to an emerging world in which our social interactions are neither totally physical nor totally virtual but an increasingly seamless blend.

This blurring of the physical and virtual creates a new challenge for business. Managers who want people across an organization to share knowledge and spark ideas need to think creatively about how to integrate virtual and physical spaces so that the myriad interactions that take place within them add up to more than the sum of their parts. Don’t view virtual communication as a substitute for face-to-face encounters, and don’t think that co-locating people makes virtual communications less relevant. Experiment with the mix of communications channels in your organization. Fine-tune the balance of proximity, privacy, and permission so that people don’t just interact more, they interact more fully.

To read the complete article, please click here.

To read more blog posts by Weeks and Fayard, please click here.

John Weeks is professor of leadership and organizational behavior at IMD in Lausanne. Anne-Laure Fayard is an assistant professor of management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.