Congregate, communicate, innovate: Silicon Valley eschews tele-interaction

The New York Times ran an article today about the micro-clusters of technology-related businesses dotting the San Francisco Bay Area. Networking lies to the south, near San Jose. Product design centers around Palo Alto. And digital media resides further north, up in San Francisco.

That’s an incredible irony: the metropolis that helped launch the information superhighway – indeed, the area that’s named after the silicon in processor chips – still relies on the interstate highway to do business. Yaniv Bensadon, the founder of a tech support startup, put it best:

“For a consumer Internet company, this is where everything happens. It’s true that things can be done anywhere on the Internet, but at the end of the day it’s still a people business.”

In an era when we rely on technology to do everything from ordering take-out to diagnosing illnesses, it’s easy to forget how much people still matter. But they do. Humans have spent the last several hundred thousand years evolving into highly sophisticated social creatures. We have complex systems for creating and communicating meaning, most of which go far beyond the words we verbalize. Indeed, the vast majority of meaning lies not in what we say, but the way we say it: gestures, expression, tone, even body heat. And we haven’t yet evolved past that. True, we can now pepper emails with increasingly sophisticated emoticons. But communication mediated by technology is necessarily stymied, because technology simply can’t re-create the hundreds of nonverbal cues we rely on.

This lesson is easy enough to understand in the context of romantic relationships. Nobody enjoys a long-distance relationship, no matter how many free night-and-weekend minutes they have. But for some reason, that lesson becomes muddied when it comes to business relationships. When people are trying to do something complicated, like create a new product, they often forget the basics. Smart, multi-disciplinary teams follow best practices, nailing down the design specs, forecasting revenue, and developing clever go-to-market plans. But what kills most innovation isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s a lack of relationships. At the end of the day, innovation is an intensely social activity. And it’s those relationships – often more than the quality of the ideas themselves – that determine whether an idea ever sees the light of day.

Ironically, Silicon Valley’s oft-maligned engineers may understand the basic social principle of innovation far better than their more outgoing peers in other industries. It’s a good reminder to the rest of us: innovation isn’t a creativity problem. It’s a people problem.  And sometimes, the engineers are the coolest kids on the block.

Comments

[Joe Silber]

This is sooo true! Awesome article. Especially the part about how we engineers are the coolest! (I think.) Look, I had a little moment just now, when I had the impulse to put three 'o's in 'so', above, which must be some evidence of Lauren's point about the constraints of this texty medium. Keep on bloggin', Lauren, your writing is great!