Late one night a little more than ten years ago, I heard voices coming from my teenage daughter’s bedroom just as my wife and I were preparing to go to bed. Male voices.

Like any father, I went to investigate (holding my breath).

Opening the door, my daughter was sitting alone at her desk (release that breath) with her laptop. The voices continued. 

“Are you still up? What are you working on?” said the [often] confused father.

Like any responsible set of teenagers, the voices stopped as soon as there was a recognized parental voice in the vicinity.

“Working on AP Latin,” came the reply. “We have a group project to translate a text, so we set up a Skype meeting for all of us and also a Google doc so we could all work together on the translation and correct each other’s work.”

The next morning, I asked my daughter where they had gotten the idea to do this. She said, “I’m not sure. We’re all really busy and we were having a hard time figuring out when we could get together for this group project. And you know how I hate group projects. We just figured it out.”

Now the context for these short conversations, likely long forgotten by my daughter (now a pediatric oncology nurse in New York City; make sure to thank a healthcare worker today) and why they stuck with me, was this. In November 2009, Andrew McAfee had released Enterprise 2.0, setting the stage for innumerable high level corporate and association conversations about whether (really?) and how to integrate “social” technologies into work processes. 

Many of these early Enterprise 2.0 projects were extraordinarily complex, expensive, and top-down efforts, with lots of agonizing and politicizing about technologies. They got loaded up with all sorts of corporate weight that ultimately kept many projects from even getting off the ground.

And so we all entered the heyday of shadow IT, powered by frustrated users who needed just enough technology to get something done, armed with their experiences from the consumer marketplace. We just figured it out.

As we think lots of deep thoughts about remote and distance working, I think many folks (myself included) are missing what ultimately will be the main byproduct of the Coronavirus -- an era of serendipitous innovation the likes of which we’ve never seen. Suddenly remote workers working at organizations that previously put up all sorts of obstacles to remote work -- “How do we know they are actually working? Won’t they just use this as an excuse for childcare?  Shouldn’t we limit this only to senior people? Don’t we need a management committee to set up policies?” -- have been placed into a bubbling cauldron of improvisation. And are just figuring it out.

Hints of what all this serendipitous innovation means are all around us. Some of the most notable ones are in the music world.

Shelbie Rassler, a senior composition major at the Berklee College of Music, posted this simple message on her Facebook page:

...your job is to just take a video of yourself singing (literally pick any part/the whole song/just 10 seconds/riff to the gods/up to you!!), playing your instrument along to the track, choreograph a dance to the music, anything your heart desires, and I'll cut everything up create an arrangement from what y'all send me, and share it with you all because WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LOVE SWEET LOVE Y'ALL LETS MAKE IT HAPPEN.

The result?

A group of Nashville studio musicians all recorded It Is Well With My Soul on their cell phones, and resulting collaboration is spectacular:

U.S. Navy trombonist Matt Neff both arranged and performed all of the parts in a quartet version of How Great is Thy Faithfulness:

Just within our own increasingly familiar social distancing four walls, we had an impromptu virtual 60th birthday party on Zoom for a friend when the real one wound up being a casualty of social distancing. My pre-school teacher wife has organized one hour lessons with our grandson. Our church is using Zoom to plan remote Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday services.

The same dynamic is now going on in the workplace. People everywhere are just figuring it out, often without the benefit of a whole lot of guidance from their own companies. Because they have to.

We’re going to learn a lot in the next few months about remote working. Some of it will be exactly what poobahs and consultants and analysts like me hypothesize. But I have a feeling that the really important lessons will be ones we don’t anticipate. Serendipitous rather than planned innovation.

Because we just needed to figure it out.