I want to follow up on my Monday post about meditating on the Manifesto by digging into the 6th Principle:

“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.“

Context matters here.

When this was drafted in 2001, reliable real-time video conferencing was not widely available. Large companies were also promoting offshore development to reduce costs, and it was common for 50–200 page requirements documents to be emailed to engineering teams 12 hours out of sync, with the hope that the document would carry the intent.

Principle #6 was softly nudging back on this common practice. It was elevating the quality improvements and time efficiencies that happen when two humans can actually talk to each other face to face.

In practice, many organizations interpreted this principle to mean teams must be colocated to be Agile.

My take is a little different.

I believe it was at the 2010 Global Agile Alliance Conference that I saw Alistair Cockburn present on his research. The point, as I remember it, was that spontaneous osmotic communication starts to decay in a half-life mirroring the length of a school bus. (Why a school bus? Because he didn’t want to argue over imperial vs. metric conversions with a global audience. We all know the approximate length of a school bus.) 

In lay terms, for every school bus of distance, it becomes 50% less likely that you will overcome friction, get out of your chair, pick up the phone, send the message, or walk over to engage a coworker with a thought or question. Think about what this means for open floor plans, cubicles, offices, and even the placement of doors between offices (side-by-side vs. opposing sides). 

When the Agile movement started sweeping through Philadelphia around 2006, I saw teams get clustered into shared rooms, walls knocked down, and communication skyrocketed.

But is “co-location” still necessary in this 2026, post-COVID, globally distributed economy when most teams now have dedicated chat channels and always-ready video rooms available to them?

My last team cluster was split between the US and Brazil; close enough in time zone that we could get online and talk face to face whenever we needed. Our team culture was such that someone could ask a quick question in chat, and everyone related would shift into the Zoom room for conversation. This was even part of our working agreement.

We also did standups on Zoom individually, so there was no advantage to 3 people huddled in a conference room while the other 7 were joining solo.

That felt pretty close to co-located. It was face to face, and when structured properly, it created meaningful conversation with very little friction.

In that setup, the school bus metaphor evolved. With one-click access to video conversation, physical distance was no longer the main constraint. Everyone was effectively less than a school bus apart. The real constraint became overlapping time availability.

That is the difference between following the perceived rule and understanding the intent.

Over the years, I’ve become a fan of distributed teams. But I’m still wary of distribution that crosses too many time zones, because at some point the friction comes back. And when the friction comes back, Principle #6 starts guiding us again.