Otra vez la respuesta la encuentro en We Think, de Charles Leadbeater… lo dejo en sus manos, no se puede expresar mejor:

In the right conditions these open and participative forms of work can provide better answers to the basic questions that all large organisations face: how to motivate staff to come up with new ideas, and coordinate what they do with as little hierarchy as possible. One can see more elements of this open thinking in the way some large corporations are changing their physical surroundings: their offices.
Organisations revolve around offices. Usually they are designed to help managers coordinate work but as a result they also usually fail to motivate people and can stand in the way of innovation.Offices, in my experience, are good for power politics, flirting and gossip.They are dreadful places for intellectual curiosity. Creativity comes from being
immersed in ideas, getting lost in your thoughts.Yet offices provide a constant round of distractions and trivia, the urgent chasing out the interesting. Creativity comes from diversity: exposure to different points of view and experiences.Office cultures tend to make everyone conform to the corporate code,making them seem alike even when they are not. In most offices people rarely move outside their own departments, let alone outside the organisation as a whole. Innovation often comes from creative interaction with customers, yet offices are a good place to hide from the outside world and from consumers in particular.

Offices encourage territorialism – different departments on different floors – so it is difficult for people to cross boundaries to borrow and share ideas.Office bureaucracies make people dysfunctional and irrational:most of the conversations I overhear in the lifts of large organisations are either about internal turf wars people are fighting or what they did when they escaped from work. Lateral and sideways thinking is virtually impossible in the standard office environment. People often have their best ideas in idle,marginal moments: after exercise,while walking, on the way from taking the children to school, in the shower. Long work schedules drive out those marginal moments. Innovation thrives on conversation.
Days that are scheduled down to the last minute drive out conversation,managers frown on conversation as no more than idle chatter.Yet as we will see conversation is at the root of innovation.

El ejemplo de Ideo: 

The most open and creative office I have worked in belongs to Ideo, the design and innovation firm. For several months I squatted at a desk in Ideo’s London office, joining project meetings and discussions,while my own home office was being built.There was a constant flow of people, especially customers, into the building.They came straight into the workspace. Everyone could see them. Ideas,materials and images were constantly posted on the walls so that people could see work in progress. People felt at home.The décor was unflashy.There was nothing self-conscious about it. It was designed to feel comfortable and efficient. Unlike many advertising companies and large corporations Ideo did not have to display modern art to show everyone it was creative. People moved
around the whole time, bumping into one another, colliding and conversing.There were simple spaces where people could congregate: a large table around which people ate lunch. In some areas the atmosphere was as studious as a library. But it was also highly gregarious and at times raucous and playful. People were allowed to be idle: someone
taking a nap on a sofa was assumed to be resting, not skiving off.The underlying ethos was of self-organisation and self-discipline. Idea’s office encourages people to generate ideas by mixing and melding. Ideo is much vaunted in academic studies of innovation and design but it too has its problems: a culture that can become inward looking; people who have become tired and conservative;ways of thinking that have turned into routines. But at its core Ideo’s places of work allow people to be creative together, in a highly self-disciplined environment.

Conclusión…la oficina debe fomentar la conversación 

Of course it is ridiculous to imagine most places of work will be like this in future, even in the developed world.Call centres and retail outlets will be experience and service factories: highly regimented, delivering a commodity service, fast and to high standards of quality.Yet as more organisations come to recognise they need to innovate and motivate staff, as well as coordinate their work, so more of the will have to explore recipes like those of Ideo and Linux.Not all these experiments will be an outstanding success. Big companies tend to think that if they bring in modern art, paint walls bright colours, put out some bean bags and most crucial of all – put in a table football table – they will become buzzy, creative places to work.
But even these clumsy attempts at reform confirm the general drift: offices will have to become spaces for creative conversation.The task of the modern office, as Malcolm Gladwell put it in a NewYorker article, is to invite social interaction that makes it easy for strangers to talk to one another.Offices need a social milieu like that in a bustling city neighbourhood,where much of the life takes place on sidewalks and in cafes.Those spaces need to be at the heart of modern offices not in the margins.Do not design the office around the executive offices but around places where people congregate,mingle and talk: cafes, open workspaces, libraries.Workspaces should be designed to promote collaboration, self-organisation and interaction: think barefoot and beach.
More and more large organisations will feel the gravitational pull of these open and participative ways of working. Many will cherry pick elements of the recipe: self-organisation, self-scheduling, peer review of performance, open plan, café style places of work. Some large organisations, as a result,will be more humane, productive and profitable.
But it will prove difficult to take the cherry picking too far: open source styles of work depend on similarly open approaches to leadership and ownership.Open source communities encourage freedom of speech and association; decision making is transparent; ideas are held in shared ownership.Not many large companies are prepared for all that this entails.