Believers in Conway's Law would say that spending time at other groups' water coolers may not have tangible immediate payoff; but it may well enlarge the feasible design space.
On a somewhat related point:
Excerpts from How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
Figure 1: The OGAS Project was developed by scientists in 1960s Kiev that also formed a group that pretended to be an independent country called “Cybertonia”: on the left of this passport is a map of its capital city, Cybergrad. On the right is their mascot and supreme leader: a saxophone-playing robot.
Chapter 5 chronicles the slow undoing of the OGAS between 1970 and 1989. Neither formally approved nor fully rejected, the OGAS Project found itself ... stalemated in a morass of bureaucratic barriers, mutinous ministries, and institutional infighting among a state that imagined itself as centralized but under civilian administration proved to be anything but. ... This chapter frames how hidden social networks unraveled computer networks.
(emphasis added)