Office makes decisions faster … Really?

Just two days ago I wrote about the Dell CEO who did an RTO to improve speed (among other things) because decisions in the office could be made so much faster…

That might be the case – in some edge cases. Just this week I had to think about this false narrative of fast decisions in the office because we had a very similar experience:

In one of our projects, we were stuck for a while because of a certain decision (details don’t matter here. Let’s call it a typical big-company problem). I was thinking for a while why exactly this missing decision was blocking us, when a colleague noticed my green MS Teams status. She called me and asked, “Why exactly can’t we proceed without this decision? I don’t understand.”

We quickly discussed it and got another colleague from the project from another city on the call as his status was also green. A quick discussion later, we thought it MIGHT be an issue concerning another department. – I checked the status of a colleague there, pulled her into the call and alas: the supposed blocker IS a blocker for the whole project – but we could simply continue until we really needed the decision. But that time wasn’t now and we were pretty sure that we WOULD get it along the way!

Project unblocked; we could proceed.

Now imagine for a second the same situation in the office – at the magical problem-solving-coffee-machine:

Yes, I might have met my colleague there for the initial discussion – but would we REALLY have picked up the phone, opened a call with the colleague in the other city PLUS (while the call was ongoing) made the trip to the other colleague (I don’t even know where her office is!) to discuss?

Seriously, have you ever seen this happen in your life? I certainly not. More likely we would have come back from the coffee machine and … what? Started a call with the colleagues? Write an eMail? Or just procrastinate because we couldn’t solve it and the momentum was gone.

I am 100% convinced that being fully remote was the quickest way to solve this issue. And those situations are WAYS more normal in office life than the decisions that can be solved at a coffee-machine.