Early in my career, I worked for a company run by two ex-military officers. When they attended a distant meeting, they would take separate flights, because surely the company would not survive if they were both hurt in a crash. They never got injured in a plane, but they did get sick at the same time (the company survived). Shared offices turned out more dangerous than shared aeroplanes.

There’s a risk to placing your most valuable people within sneezing distance of each other.

You probably know and talk of your team’s “bus number”, but sickness strikes far more often than buses. We’ve all seen co-located teams drop one by one, and you’ve probably wished a sick colleague had stayed home rather than share his germs with you.

The biggest risk to humanity in the next 50 years is an influenza outbreak, according to Vaclav Smil in Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years. Influenza doesn’t spread through IRC.

If we’re to build resilient companies, we need to think about what actually takes us away from our work, and structure our environment to mitigate that.

How many people can you afford to lose to sickness? For how long?