“Water Cooler” refers to that well-known symbol of a place in organizations where people meet and interact informally, often across formal organizational lines and workplace cliques. Often there is an actual water cooler… and a coffee machine, lunch table, etc, hosting the symbolic space.

At the water cooler and its many analogues, people run into colleagues, exchange perspectives and information, form bonds, gossip, and are reminded generally of things peripheral to their work that day.

The ‘water cooler’ is just one example of where and how this vitally important workplace interaction takes place. It is one situation where these crucial patterns of informal, social-interactional work occur. These patterns occur regularly throughout every workplace in a variety of settings, some closer, some farther from everyday work.

These patterns of informal exchange take place even in the center of core work practices themselves, though usually in more subtle forms, which are typically overlooked because they are so ubiquitous.

The “logic” in “Water Cooler Logic” refers to the newer, social scientific understandings of the importance of the social and informal aspects of work and learning, and how these understandings may be leveraged. Important theoretical and action research work investigating the social construction and use of knowledge, the formation of “communities of practice” as micro-cultures, situational learning, activity theory, the complexity sciences, new theoretical and practical insights into ethnography, and others, provide the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of Water Cooler Logic.

WCL is one of the few intervention processes that actively applies and continues to develop these concepts and theories. However, WCL always uses these perspectives in low-key, unobtrusive, flexible and practical ways — ways learned in the course of real work in real settings over a number of years.