What’s striking about these technical results on asynchrony versus synchrony is how much they diverge from the conclusions of the business thinkers tackling these same issues in the workplace. As we’ve learned, managers in office settings fixated on eliminating the overhead of synchronous communication—the annoyance of phone tag or taking the elevator to a different floor to chat with someone in person. They believed that eliminating this overhead using tools like email would make collaboration more efficient. Computer scientists, meanwhile, came to the opposite conclusion. Investigating
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