How Proximity Drives Behavior

Borrowed

"The key to getting people to change their behavior, in other words, to care about their neighbor in distress, sometimes lies with the smallest details of their immediate situation. The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem."

From "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell [Book]

Learned

On a whim, we moved our vinyl record player into the sitting area of our kitchen a few weeks back. It had been out for years, sitting on the credenza next to our TV, so whenever we were nearby we were usually on the couch watching something, not putting on a record. Once we moved it, we listened to more records in a couple of days than we had in years. I even went out and bought more.

Now, around breakfast or dinner, I'll drop the needle down on record (never gets old) and think about how glad I am we made the change. Then... I think about what it says about how we move toward the things we want. It's not just about intention, motivation, or discipline. None of those changed here. I didn't want to listen to our vinyl collection any more this month than last, and we didn't go out of our way to make it happen. We just moved the record player somewhere more conducive to listening, and the rest took care of itself.

I wondered whether anyone had put language to this idea that proximity drives action, and the closest I found was the Allen Curve.

In the late 1970s, an MIT professor named Thomas Allen set out to measure how the distance between engineers' offices affected how often they actually communicated. What he found was a steep, almost exponential drop. The closer people sat, the more they talked, and once they were more than about fifty meters apart, the communication nearly stopped altogether. He plotted it, and that line became the Allen Curve.

What I find fascinating is what happened when Allen revisited the question in 2007. You'd think email, online chat, and video calls would have flattened the curve, since anyone could now reach anyone instantly. Instead, digital communication followed the same shape. We message the people we're physically close to more often, not less. The tools didn't free us from distance. They inherited it.

I think about this a lot with a distributed team like ours. As much as I'm all for minimizing meetings where I can, the closeness never happens on its own the way it did in an office, so we have to build it on purpose. All of this is pretty timely as we prepare to evolve our weekly meeting structure for leadership, account management, and project management, and it means adding meetings, not removing.

This shift is aimed at creating more intentional meetings with clear owners and audiences, which includes designated meetings for everything from project financials to delivery status. Some of this is already in place, but missing the structure to drive the desired behavior. What's underlying the change is a move to better track project health, be proactive on account growth and retention, and evolve how AMs and PMs work together. These are meetings on the surface, but we believe that bringing people closer to the right information and to one another is the best way to get there. No RACI chart or report will do it on its own.

The information side is where the tools come in. AI has made it possible to build things we never could before, and fast. Dashboards that visualize the business, tools that surface what's happening across every account, answers we used to dig for now one prompt away. I'm keenly aware of this with Agency Pulse, the internal tool I built to pull our revenue, accounts, pipeline, and project health into one place. The most useful resource I've ever built is just the record player in the corner collecting dust if there's no reason to be near it. The intention is there, the access is there, but without a reason to open it each week, it will just sit.

So the order matters. First the information has to be accessible. Then there has to be a cadence that puts people in front of it. That second part often gets missed, which is why I cringe a little when someone wants to document something to close a gap. Capturing the information is the easy half. Without a plan to use it and keep it alive, well, you know what happens.

& Thought

What in my life and work could move a little closer?