The Art & Science of Network Weaving
In September 2012, Jon Kingsbury and I sent out an all-staff email to our Nesta colleagues inviting them to participate in an initiative we called Randomised Coffee Trials (RCTs) to encourage staff to speak and connect with co-workers outside their daily routines.
We never expected RCTs to be anything more than a pet project internal to Nesta, otherwise we might have chosen a more intuitive name. To our surprise, over the past three years it has been highlighted in Harvard Business Review[1] and led to initiatives at the National Health Service[2], the United Nations Development Program[3] and the International Federation for the Red Cross and Red Crescent[4] among many other organisations[5].