Somewhere between privacy and transparency, there’s a perfect office. Will we ever find it? Maybe you’re the one behind headphones, building a bubble inside the noise. Or the colleague firing Slack messages to the person two seats away. Or maybe you’re the manager to whom visibility is proof that work is happening. This bunch sits in the open office, a floor plan drawn for free-flowing ideas, flat hierarchies, and productivity on tap. And how’s that working out? Not great, according to data. In a Harvard field study of two anonymized Fortune 500 firms that moved from partitions to fully open