Digital propinquity: how to engineer serendipity and build connection in remote teams
We cannot teleport physical proximity, but we can replicate its psychological effects in remote teams. This has everything to do with propinquity.
If the physical world provided connection by accident, the digital world requires connection by design.
The most critical loss in the shift to remote work is “propinquity,” a fancy word for physical nearness.
In the 1950s, psychologists discovered that the single best predictor of whether two people would become friends was how close their apartments were to each other.
In the professional world, this is the “hallway track” at a conference.
It is inefficient, but it is highly effective because it facilitates passive, frequent interactions.
You bump into someone at the coffee station.
You exchange a nod.
You accumulate data points about them that transform a transactional contact into a human relationship.
In a remote setting, propinquity does not happen by accident.
There is no digital equivalent of bumping into a donor at the water cooler unless someone deliberately builds it.
This requires a pivot to “Digital Propinquity.”
At The Geneva Learning Foundation, A Swiss non-profit that works globally, we have found that a sense of nearness can be cultivated digitally if we align the right factors.
In our work with health professionals globally, we utilize a concept called “structured serendipity”.
For example, one simple and surprisingly effective method we use is the “Randomized Coffee Trial”, or just “remote coffee”.
In this model, participants opt-in to be randomly paired with a stranger from the network for a short conversation based on a non-work prompt.
This mechanism builds “weak ties,” the casual connections that sociologists know are essential for innovation.
We have also found that we can change how we facilitate dialogue and connections between people and organizations online.
Traditional remote management is often rooted in a culture of surveillance.
It focuses on reporting and asks “Have you done the work?”.
This erodes trust, turning connection into suspicion.
Instead, we implement what we call “digital accompaniment”.
Derived from physical-world experiences of working side-by-side with a shared purpose, this model uses technology to provide sustained, high-touch presence.
The use of technology results in losing some of the signals we are most familiar with, grounded in our experience of the physical world.
We also gain new signals from defying distance to include those who might otherwise never meet.
The challenge is learning to listen to these signals, and how to respond to them.
That is core to our model for facilitation.
We use digital channels that are already part of people’s lives to ask: “How are you navigating this challenge?”.
This initiates and then sustains dialogue on local challenges.
Challenges in very different locations turn out to be remarkably similar.
This approach prioritizes psychological proximity over supervision, no matter how supportive the latter may be intended to be.
By establishing what we call Accompaniment Pods mediated by Foundation-supported facilitators, such networks can provide the psychological closeness usually found in face-to-face mentorship.
The facilitator acts as a sensor for the network, for example to detect early signs of distress before a participant disengages.
By treating the digital space as a distinct social architecture with its own ‘physics’, we have been able to reconstruct a new kind of intimacy or kinship that distance negates.
A new peer learning programme for those leading change across distance
Distance is no longer a barrier to partnership. It is the condition for a new kind of “augmented reality” where collaboration can be more inclusive and effective than in the physical world. The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Certificate peer learning programme in Artificial Intelligence includes a tactical primer to master the essentials of digital, remote work and partnering with both humans and machines as co-workers. The primer serves as the stepping stone to a broader strategic transformation, where you will learn to build communities of action that scale expertise and deliver results faster. By rejecting the “digital dualism” that treats online interaction as a deficit, you will turn the necessity of working apart into a decisive organizational advantage. Get The Geneva Learning Foundation’s AI framework now. You will then receive the invitation to join the primer on the essentials of partnering and work in the Age of AI.
References
- Allen, T.J. (1977) Managing the Flow of Technology: Technology Transfer and the Dissemination of Technological Information within the R&D Organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Festinger, L., Schachter, S. and Back, K. (1950) Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Granovetter, M.S. (1973) ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), pp. 1360–1380. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/225469
- Korzenny, F. (1978) ‘A Theory of Electronic Propinquity: Mediated Communication in Organizations’, Communication Research, 5(1), pp. 3–24. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/009365027800500101
- Sadki, R., 2023. Digital bridges cannot cross analog gates. https://doi.org/10.59350/srvap-txc24
- Soto, M., 2013. Institutionalising Serendipity via Productive Coffee Breaks. Nesta. URL https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/institutionalising-serendipity-productive-coffee-breaks (accessed 2.8.18).
- Watkins, K.E., Sadki, R., Kim, K., Suh, B., 2019. Changing Learning Paradigms in a Global Health Agency, in: Evidence-Based Initiatives for Organizational Change and Development. IGI Global, pp. 693–703. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-6155-2.ch050
About the image
Near, Without Touch © The Geneva Learning Foundation 2025. This installation arranges a series of carved forms in deliberate proximity, each distinct yet subtly responsive to the others. The surfaces twist and lean as if drawn together by an unseen force, suggesting closeness that is sensed rather than physically realized. Made from the same living material but shaped along different trajectories, the figures evoke how connection can emerge through alignment, attention, and shared orientation rather than direct contact. The work reflects on proximity as something that can be engineered and cultivated, reminding us that nearness is not only a matter of distance, but of how carefully space is shaped to allow encounters to happen.
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