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Watering Hole

By Peter Lloyd

Animals of all sorts gather at what we call their "watering holes." Humans in offices do the same around the water cooler or coffee maker.

After all, we human animals don't change into inorganic machines at the office. We require water, coffee, and food to operate.

Of course, it's more than water we give and take at the cooler. This is where information is exchanged freely and informally. Try as hard as we may to improve the way we run meetings, some of our most important exchanges will always take place around the water cooler.

Today's water cooler is no longer confined to the office, however. Free and informal exchange now goes on all over the world. On the Internet, over the phone in voice and text, and within every kind of online community.

Some time ago, Julian Orr, a Xerox business anthropologist, inspired what you could call a digital watering hole among Xerox service technicians. Noticing that important tips and insights were commonly shared at the lunch tables and parts department--not only in formal training sessions--Orr gave all US technicians radios and cell phones for sharing these tips.

This inspired a French Xerox division to create the digital, online version of Orr's idea on the Minitel electronic telephone directory service. In the first two years, 20% of French technicians had submitted tips and 7,000 were accessing the database each month. The subsequent increase in productivity made the French division one of Xerox's most profitable. A similar system began rolling out in the US soon after.

Today we have crowdsourcing, in which work usually performed in-house or farmed out to contractors is given to the online world at large. Sites like IdeaConnection have upgraded crowdsourcing by offering companies the opportunity to apply the creativity and experience of experts the world over to solve their problems.

It seems every thing we do, Mother Nature has already been doing, usually better. It makes sense, it seems to me, to look for solutions to our problems right under our noses in the world around us. Especially now the whole world is practically at our fingertips.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.