Charles Handy proposed that the office of the future will be more like a club, where membership is restricted to employees and guests, and there are no private spaces, just areas for reading, eating and meeting with others. Creating Good Places Spaces within the workplace created for conversation cannot serve the functions of the third place described by Oldenburg because they are not a complete departure from work and are not open to the wider society. However, clearly a need exists to accommodate more trust building, information sharing and informal encounters at work. Although many organizations still measure learning by recording attendance at structured training programs, a major recent study found that 70 percent of workplace learning is actually happening via informal interactions on the job. Informal learning, however, depends on real or perceived accessibility to others.
People usually get knowledge from their organizational neighbors.
The knowledge market depends on trust, and individuals generally trust the people they know. Localness adds to market inefficiency because it causes people to make do with less than optimal knowledge while a much better product goes unsold and unused. The distance between buyer and seller prevents a transaction from taking place. This phenomenon has also been observed in corporate workspace experiments, such as the two-year pilot study at Scottish Enterprise headquarters in Glasgow, Scotland. However, when the physical space better accommodated random interactions, they tended to become more frequent among people who already knew each other.