The Allen Curve
The Allen Curve shows that distance doesn’t have to be large to quietly end a working relationship.
What Is It?
The Allen Curve is the finding that communication frequency between colleagues drops off exponentially as the physical distance between their workspaces increases. People sitting a few meters apart talk often. Past roughly fifty meters, or a different floor or building, communication frequency drops to close to zero, similar to how often people communicate with someone on a different continent.
MIT professor Thomas J. Allen documented the effect in the late 1970s while studying how distance between engineers’ offices affected the frequency of technical communication between them, publishing the finding in his book Managing the Flow of Technology.
Why Does It Matter?
Organizations routinely treat collaboration as a matter of tools, culture, or stated priorities, while overlooking a much more mechanical variable: where people physically sit, or which floor, building, or time zone they work from. Two teams told to “collaborate closely” who sit on different floors will collaborate less than two teams with no such instruction who happen to share a hallway. The architecture of the space, and now of remote and hybrid work, quietly does more to shape communication than most policies do.
This is why office redesigns, seating charts, and decisions about who’s colocated with whom are not administrative trivia. They’re one of the more reliable levers available for changing how much two groups actually talk.
What Changes Once You See It?
You stop assuming poor cross-team collaboration is mainly a culture or motivation problem.
You start checking the physical or virtual distance between groups before diagnosing anything more complicated.
You start treating seating, floor plans, and time zone overlap as design decisions with real consequences for how information moves.
Common Misunderstandings
- It is not only about physical offices. The same drop-off shows up with virtual distance: different time zones, different tools, or simply never appearing in each other’s daily workflow.
- It doesn’t mean physical proximity guarantees good collaboration. Proximity increases the frequency of contact; what happens in that contact still depends on trust and shared purpose.
- It is not a fixed, universal cutoff. The specific distances Allen measured were particular to the engineering offices he studied, but the exponential drop-off pattern has replicated widely.
- It doesn’t only affect people who dislike each other. The effect operates on colleagues who’d genuinely value collaborating, if proximity made it easy enough to happen.
Diagnostic Question
Are these two groups actually positioned, physically or virtually, in a way that makes frequent contact easy, or are we expecting collaboration from people separated by an invisible fifty meters?
Explore Further
Field Notes
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Origin
Thomas J. Allen documented the effect at MIT in the late 1970s and published it in Managing the Flow of Technology (1977).