Why Face-to-Face Still Matters

Jon Reades (with Martin Crookston)

Today I’m going to be talking about my (relatively) recent book with Martin Crookston published by Bristol University Press.

Martin is a consulting strategic planner and sat with Richard Rogers and Peter Hall on Labour’s Urban Taskforce, so a lot of the credit goes to him for digesting what was originally a PhD’s worth of content — also connected to Peter Hall, who was my supervisor, along with Mike — and doing many of the interviews that back up our findings.

This is not a talk directly about complexity, although I think if you were to approach what I’m talking about in terms of multiplex networks: transport, markets, firms, and individuals, then you’ll se how it connects to the wider picture that Mike has put together for you this week.

Are digital networks a complement to,
or substitute for, face-to-face?

We think that the future of cities boils down to just one question.

To which we think the answer is yes. Yes it’s a complement. And yes it’s a substitute.

Cities have been – and are set to remain – the places where it’s easiest both to meet face-to-face and to make use of the latest and greatest in digital platforms. They are the easiest places to think that place and face-to-face doesn’t matter any more.

‘Layered’ Structure

• Moving ‘stuff’ around
• Making markets
• Doing deals
• Talking shop
• Face-to-face now
• What, then, for 21st-Century places?

But to make that claim, we wanted to first look back through history at how infrastructures, markets, firms, and people work. And how previous technological changes have impacted cities and businesses. Things like containerised shipping. The telegraph. The railroad. Low-cost flights. The mobile phone network.

In doing that we developed a ‘layered’ structure in which infrastructures create potential, markets create risks, firms seek out opportunities, and people make things happen.

To test these ideas we then went out and interviewed nearly 50 people about their work, their meetings and conference calls, and their working lives.

Just one small thing…

However, as the detective Columbo always says at the end of the show… there’s just one small thing. In December of 2019 we had a neat and tidy little book that broadly followed the structure I just set out and we sent our precious little baby off for review.

And then Covid happened. Covid was what finance and tech people would call a ‘stress test’: was this when we were going to find out that all our ideas stopped working?

So we went back to our interviewees and asked them. Again.

               This Time it’s Different…Or Not

Historically speaking, cities have experienced pandemics, economic upheaval, social unrest, even war, and bounced back before. So we think a better question to ask is why: assuming that we get and keep Covid-19 under control, why should it be different this time?

Moving Stuff Around

Our first chapter is about how infrastructure networks – road, rail, sea, air, phone, and data – can be understood to overlay and inter-penetrate one another so that it’s not about geographical distance, but network distance.

In light of the way that digital networks have reached into every sector of the economy and society, it’s quite reasonable to think that the long-promised ‘death of distance’ is finally here. But the way these networks are laid out – their topology – creates a kind of ‘surface’ of potential upon which locational choices rely.

We draw on examples ranging from prehistoric Orkney’s Skara Brae to the arrival of rail, which seemed so fast compared to what came before that early observers worried that the engine driver and passengers would pass out!

In the 1830s all of that changed. Or, I should say, could have changed because, for the first time, data could be transmitted. And what did the telegraph change? The answer is ‘a lot’ and ‘very little’. To make sense of this we looked at the interactions between:

• cost
• speed
• bandwidth
• connectivity
• convenience

One of the nice things about taking the long view is that you start to see the similarities and worry a little less about the differences because they often turn out to be superficial in quite interesting ways.

What’s the bandwidth of an A380?

When we look at moving ‘stuff’ around, whether it’s people, packets, or goods it’s never just about the money. Though it’s also about the money. Some people will pay a lot more money to try to get faster, more, more connected, more accessible interconnections with transport and digital networks.

London has a hidden Internet provider called Sohonet that only connects about 25 cities including London, New York, LA, Auckland, Vancouver… It exists to offer speed, bandwidth, and connectivity that you simply can’t buy on the open Internet.

But here’s why digital networks aren’t everything. A 2016 estimate is that a human being can ‘store’ something like 1 PB of ‘data’, in which case we’re looking at a notional capacity of 500 PB – and the understanding needed to interpret and apply it – able to get to anywhere on the planet in less than 24 hours.

Even if you thought just a fraction of that knowledge was relevant, treated as a communications platform the bandwidth of a fully laden A380 is truly breathtaking!

(In)Flexibility

But the needs of an A380 in terms of supporting infrastructure, so they are much less flexible than a small plane. You all remember, I hope, when this one ship held up £10 billion worth of goods every day. That’s because more than 200 other equally large ships — representing 12% of global trade — became stuck in the canal as well.

So every business relies on moving products, people and data around, but because their reliance on these different elements differs, not every business needs every network, and not every business needs the same mix. To bring this all back down to the mundane: does Internet or mobile phone access usually factor into your decision about the best place to live or go to school?

This is the paradox of flexibility. The more flexible your requirements the less location factors into your thinking. Firms with the least flexibility will have the most reliance on central places where many different types and qualities of network overlap.

Making Markets

Obviously, if it were just about infrastructure overlap then couldn’t we just build more somewhere else? Somewhere a little less… hectic than a big city? To make sense of why people still want to deal with Heathrow it helps to understand that there two more things that central places provide:

1. Better ways of dealing with risk and uncertainty
2. And easier ways of searching and signalling (by people and firms)

And this is where people come into it.You wouldn’t travel halfway across the borough to buy a pint of milk, but for the best artists, financial advisors, and programmers it’s a whole different story.

These are sectors where it’s not just about data but about judgement and confidence. Where people matter because the market is opaque. To mitigate the risks of the art market you rely on relationships to access information and send signals to the market about who’s hot and who’s not. Developing and maintaining those relationships requires regular proximity and F2F interaction so that’s one benefit to cities (they’re easy to reach) but it is also the place to be if you’ve got the rare networking or artistic skills (or the money) to participate in this market in the first place.

Doing Deals

To make sense of markets, look at the transactions:

• Are they standardised or one-offs?
• What are the search costs?
• Does confidence make or break a deal?
• Does ICT shift the boundaries of these?

Where you get volume you can get economies of scale that don’t rely on ‘being there’. Amazon doesn’t need to be on your doorstep because they sell things in bulk that are ‘searchable’: a ladder, a computer, a book.

But where transactions are one-offs, whether it’s property deals, high-finance, or high-art. We tend to call art and financial contracts experience goods, but the best example of this is a university education: it’s only after you’ve paid your tuition fees and gone to your three or four years of classes that you will have any idea if your degree is ‘worth’ anything to you. So for experience we rely on things like reputation to give us confidence that we’re making the right decision. And location can be a short-cut to reputation.

What the past two years have shown is that you can do a lot online. And that it works better than many of us – well, certainly, me – expected. But it’s also obvious to everyone now that an online-only education is, at best, a second best experience. The students who don’t come to my lectures in the normal course of things are getting something else out of their time at university and that is what this year’s students are missing.

Talking Shop

Here is the office of Silicon Valley firm that is very much of the ‘old school’. The information surface is very different from what we associate (naïvely) with Google or Twitter: it’s not that face-to-face meetings and gossip don’t happen in Reading, it’s that they’re tightly controlled by the owner of the space such that the interactions are all internal…

In contrast, in other industries (or even other parts of this industry) it’s about ‘buzz’: being talked about, gauging what your competitors are up to over coffee, cultivating connections. If one person tells you their script writer or software developer saved the project you might file that away, but if you hear it from several different people then that is buzz. The kind of background noise that helps us to know who’s in and who’s out. Hot. Or not.

Face-to-Face Now

So that’s a bit of the theory, though certainly not all it. And all of these ideas can, to some extent, be found in the economic geography literature going back more than 100 years. And there’s been nothing here about Covid, so how do we know if all these ideas are still relevant to people today? Simples. We went out and asked them!

Real people talking about real jobs:

• Nearly 50 interviews in wide range of industries
• Not a statistically-robust sample
• Range of roles and knowledge-intensive sectors

There was an Agent for the Bank of England, a Producer for Love Island, an Advertising Exec and a Senior Academic, the London-assistant to a World Famous Artist and a Googler. It’s a cross-section of early 21st Century London: highly-skilled, knowledge-intensive work whether you’re in the Arts or Tech, Legal or Consultancy.

We Asked:

• What types and patterns of interactions?
• What importance attached to those interactions?
• Balance of internal and external to the organisation?
• Frequency and nature of their contacts?
• How much their social and work lives interpenetrated?

What We Learned

Digital in all cases, physical to varying degrees in others.

• Need varies by industry, career stage, and relationship stage.
• Differential importance of knowledge, trust / confidence, and judgement
• All more or less amenable to replacement by ICT

The simple answer: they don’t ‘do lunch’ much any more but they meet up more than ever!

The legendarily boozy City lunches of yesteryear are well and truly dead, partly because of changing habits and partly because of changing regulations. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t meeting any more, just that they’re using their time differently and attaching more important to the start and end of the business day.

The rise in local coffee shops and co-working spaces has been a boon to semi-nomadic workers wanting somewhere to catch-up on email while on the go, but it’s also a good way to signal intimacy or informality – getting away from the hectic office for a deeper dive.

Private Investment

“face-to-face is mission-critical at the beginning, I struggle to see how you could do it any other way. Forming a judgement about someone, do they know what they’re doing, is there reality behind the pitch… can only be done face to face…”

People rely on face-to-face to gauge their vendors, clients, and competitors. One of our other interviewees used the term “seeing the whites of their eyes” and it’s the bandwidth of face-to-face that works here: you’re not just listening to what they’re saying, you’re looking at who says it, how they say it, and also how they deliver it. Another interviewee stressed the value of the contextual conversation: “Listen, I had to be harsh back there but the reality is…”

Advertising

“I spend a lot of time in informal meetings — it’s an industry of persuasion: building confidence, getting people ready to back an idea, or to work late for you…”

So this is face-to-face as performance that reinforces motivation and confidence. Keeping up the relationship by strategically using face-to-face to ensure that you’re on the same page.

Property

“You can’t rely on emails — people don’t read them unless the word ‘bonus’ is in the heading!”

Internal face-to-face meetings are still really common because they send a signal about what’s important to the senior managers, to the firm, and they make the staff sit up and try to pay some attention. Building a company culture through shared references and frames.

Law

“They like to come here. We have better biscuits.”

And a different kind of signal – about power and status – in business relationships.

What, Then, For 21st Century Places?

• Continuing trend towards greater importance of network hubs
• Rise in proportion of activity relying on judgement & confidence
• Specialisation of the CBDs in these activities
• Continued vital role of F2F

What cities offer is not irreplaceable, but hard to replace, given high value firms place on access, visibility, personal touch.

In World Cities we expect different patterns of occupation, interaction but their essential function remains:

• Less emphasis on large floorplates and serried ranks of offices or cubicles
• Some types of employment and back-office space much more vulnerable
• Discovery of flexibility to support WFH / remote working will affect local demand patterns

In non-World Cities we don’t see radical changes, but opportunities to move ‘up the food chain’ while businesses are less focussed on location:

• Freestanding market towns offer quality of life/relative affordability.
• Medium-sized towns in the traditional industrial heartlands are unlikely to see massive transformation.
• The regional hinterland of the World Cities could gain or lose.
• Special case of University Towns, as particular form of advanced service centre

What is to be done?

• ICT will mix themes of change and continuity:
• No magic digital bullet , where peripheral towns suddenly attract dozens of firms, never before considered them
• Need for careful understanding of scale, location & interrelationships
• Build a basis for effective public policy at urban and regional level

 

Final Thought!

“… ‘Being there’ is still at the core of the urban experience. Even in a world of instant digital access and unparalleled connectivity, central places matter, and face-to-face contact is what they do for a living. That is their story, and it will be their future.”

COVID-19 ran a full-strength test of what an e-only work world could be like and most of didn’t like it all that much. We see it cementing and accelerating existing trends, not creating fundamentally new ones.

As we put it in the book: The pandemic is the petrol, not the fire. But it’s only by looking backward we can see overall continuity across multiple seeming ‘revolutions’.

Cities are still the place to be when you deal in uncertainties:

• Their offer of proximity, of the ‘buzz’, and of confidence is vital
• They will continue to grow, but with a much more mixed picture in terms of jobs, sectors and space.
• Indeed, success is far from guaranteed if they cannot resolve problems of housing and living conditions

Thank you!

@jreades / @jreades@mapstodon.space / jreades

Why Face-to-Face Still Matters is available from Bristol University Press for £19.99 (Or less if buying direct!).