Humongo Summer Tour: Creating virtual collisions to foster communication

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Creating virtual collisions to foster communication

One of the first things that you notice when you walk into Crispin, Porter + Bogusky in Miami are these giant monitors in a central open space. It's not really a lobby, but more like a quad. The space gets pedestrian traffic from around the agency, and is also the central part of what feels like a massive set of comfy bleachers. People are invited to hang to meet, chat, or chill.

Upon closer inspection, the monitors serve as live windows to other CP+B offices. You can see right into the Boulder, Colorado office, and say hi to anyone walking by. Boulder has similar monitors on their side, and can communicate back. Sure, you've seen this in a Cisco commercial before. But have you ever seen it implemented within an agency?

The end result is a virtual lobby that ties their offices together across the globe. Connecting high traffic areas within agencies produces "collisions" of people from across the firm. Collisions provide opportunities to say hi to a coworker across the country, ask about a project that's midstream, or meet someone that you've spent hours on the phone with. Collisions provide creativity.

Video conferencing technology has been with us for what seems like ages, but this is the first installation that we've seen that's successfully connecting multiple offices together in an informal way.

We chatted with Eric and Mason at CP+B, and learned about their rationale for multiple offices: attracting talent from across the globe. Now they've managed to connect these offices unlike any other multi-office agency empire that we've ever seen, giving us a sweet peek at all of their outposts while on our visit to Miami.

See our interview with Eric & Mason at CP+B on the Humongo Nation Miami wrap up video.

Labels: miami