'Corridor conversations'

In the middle of a chat about all things organizational, a client once told me that the Company’s CEO had said to him and other senior colleagues, “We’ve got to stop the corridor conversations.”  Leaving aside the naivety of the CEO’s comment, in the pre-COVID days when the possibility of in-person exchanges was ever-present, his remark also betrayed a basic lack of understanding of how organization works. In particular, it failed to recognise the fundamental role that informal conversations such as these play in determining the overall nature and quality of people’s individual and collective perspectives, practices and performance.  Ironically, of course, informal conversations would have been just as much a part of the CEO’s own practice as they were of everyone else's.