17. Rubbish Snakes

Choosing to walk in cold temperatures to avoid encounters with some of the world’s most venomous snakes paid off. I only saw one of them on the entire walk and we seemed equally frightened of each other. I am sure that if snakes could scream, it would have yelled as loudly as I did.

Sad for the environment but luckily for me, I saw plenty more of snake-like rubbish in the form of sinuous belts, cables, or other rubbish than real snakes, Fig. 17.1. The rural roads were mostly clean, but I quickly discovered how I could tell when I was approaching a town: the amount of litter ballooned. To pass time I imagined the smoking habits of the local population from the discarded cigarette packets or their aversion to sleep by the number of half-crushed cans of energy drinks.

Those cans reminded me of ‘z-sups’. Similar to energy drinks, these are sleep suppressing pills depicted in the comic Power Nap [34] that allow people to work up to 20 hours a day doing meaningless things. Ironically people in the comic work such long hours so that they are able to afford the pills – the circle of life. The main character is allergic to z-sups and needs to sleep, which is seen as a disability.

Back to my roadside analyses, I imagine the local population growth based on the results of pregnancy testing kits strewn along the verges – most were negative. If gender reveal parties had been a fad back then, I would also have been able to further my demographic study by analysing the colour of discarded confetti.

But when it comes to leftovers in the workplace, what can we potentially learn? A lot. Not so much from looking at the contents of rubbish bins, but by looking at the digital by-product of operations in organisations, a concept which Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch refers to as ‘digital exhaust’ [35]. Big tech companies like Microsoft are investing heavily into this way of understanding organisations.

I had the opportunity to co-design a research project [36] where we measured a more analogous type of leftover: noise, as a by-product of face-to-face interactions. The idea was to overlap noise measurements with social network data to discover a way to use noise as a proxy for knowledge transfer in open plan settings. We called our project The Sound of Collaboration.

One of the acoustic engineers involved in the research explained the difference between a noise and a sound in a way which is hard to forget: “a noise is an unpleasant sound.” Perhaps we could turn noise in the workplace into sound if we are able to assign it a value of knowledge transfer.

Of course, information travels within an organisation silently through emails, but as already emphasised by others [37], the interactions that underpin collaboration, as opposed to a mere exchange of information, benefit from gestures and non-verbal communication. These synchronous, unstructured interactions are better supported by face-to-face interactions, which are often noisy. Hence the following signpost: