How do we promote diversity and inclusion from the comfort of our homes? How do we recreate those important hallway moments within a virtual environment? How do we continue to consider the consequences of what we’re building? We begin to answer these questions and more in this episode of The New Stack Makers, where we interview Emily Webber, independent agile delivery and digital transformation consultant, coach and trainer, and author of the book Building Successful Communities of Practice.

Webber, like everyone The New Stack is interviewing as of late, was calling in via Zoom from her home office. Usually, she’d be working between her clients’ offices in London and in India. Even for someone who has built part of her brand on remote meet-ups, nothing about this is business as usual.

Webber is based in London, where, in normal times, it’s completely common to see people eating lunch at their desks or even while walking back to work from the takeaway shop. But at her client in India, they all take breaks and share meals together in the canteen. There she’s not only experienced a huge leveling up in terms of cuisine, but she’s witnessed the innovation that comes from those chance encounters around the hallway, cafeteria, and water cooler.

Webber has borrowed Etsy’s John Goulah’s term “assisted serendipity” and applied it to our temporarily remote-first world. This can be using a Slack app like Donut or Shuffl to facilitate random coffee pairings. Or host remote coffees or happy hours. It may be assisted, but it is an efficient way of crossing cross-departmental silos, as well as to fight isolation during these trying times.