You could say that they re gossiping, but you could also say that they re informing others of vital news. They re spreading information about the person s expertise, reliability and trustworthiness. This is significant stuff. So when you see people chatting with one another, and you overhear them talking about some other person, they re really exchanging news, news about people s reliability. This is important especially as organizations become more virtual, more volatile, and there s less space, and they don t meet so often.
People work in odd places.
A lot of firms have bought a lot of nonsense about virtuality. Let me give you an example. There s Steve Denning here, and there s another guy who works for me, Dave Snowden. They do storytelling workshops together. I had to convince each of them that the other person was trustworthy.