Columnist Rachel Beckett is a Stroud-based writer and thinker who is concerned about making the world a better place.

An author, publisher and mother, Rachel will be sharing her thoughts with readers every month.

I HAD planned to tell a story of hope in relation to the Borough Market tragedy.

But that was – how many tragedies ago?

Tragedy is the new normal, it seems, fuelled by an age of 24-hour news and fanned by the flames of social media.

It’s time for a new grassroots approach.

And so I’m going to write about open-plan offices instead.

Why open-plan offices?

Well they seem to me symptomatic of the misguided belief that people need to be manipulated into productivity and cooperation, rather than relying on instinct and intuition.

As a very open person, I find the open-plan office only slightly less intimidating than the examination hall – a place where I would avoid having a conversation if I possibly could.

I once worked for Lister Petter in Dursley, which, after over 150 years, had learned something about teamwork.

Its sad recent demise was the result of executive decisions higher up, but at grassroots level there was a real pride in the company, with some staff being second or even third-generation employees.

Even though (or perhaps because) our workspaces were small rooms in a Tudor priory – and various different workshops and production lines – open, friendly relationships flourished.

Groupings were small and non-threatening, and we knew where to find other people when we needed them.

If I needed production engineers I could find them in the engine test workshop.

If I wanted the marketing team I went to the appropriate room where five or six people were amenable to a few friendly words.

And in my own office there were half a dozen development engineers and me as technical author – just the right number for a tea round.

I would venture to suggest that any ‘team’ too big for a tea round is not conducive to openness and trust.

It is on small teams that big ones are built.

Vast open-plan floors do not provide spaces where working relationships can be nurtured.

In my current office there is so little scope for communication that when I need to talk to colleagues we often end up sitting on the landing floor outside!

Yet that is likely to be the most important (perhaps the only) conversation I have all day.

There is, somehow, a link with recent tragedies that have afflicted our country.

Because without small-scale trust and friendship we have to resort to larger, more ideological groupings: ‘She’s a Remainer’, ‘I’m a Muslim’, ‘We are the working class’.

And then these groups – formed through cultural bias, not through a laugh over a cup of tea – mistrust one another, and you create a space for extremism and bigotry to take root.

The relationships that we build in our everyday lives are surely the only way to strengthen and even transform our society.

These cannot be forced – they have to evolve.

And when they do, we might start to build what the writer Charles Eisenstein calls ‘the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible’.