Leonardo and Any Ideas for Collaboration?

I am currently reading the biography of Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. What I really find interesting about Leonardo is how much he collaborated with others and how much he sought out knowledge from others to bolster his own knowledge gained through astute observation. We tend to think of Leonardo as this divinely inspired genius who just had this innate talent for learning everything and being a master at anything he tried. He certainly was a genius, and he had incredible God-given talents. However, he sought out knowledge, he sought to quench an inexhaustible curiosity by studying the works of others, directly interviewing craftsmen and other artists, and through direct collaboration with other people many of whom knew quite a bit more than he in their respective fields. Apparently Leonardo wasn't all that great at math, especially algebra and trigonometry. (Granted Europeans generally didn't know much about trigonometry in Leonardo's time.) He failed to teach himself Latin. Duolingo wasn't widely available then either. He did, however, possess a gift for greatly raising the bar when building upon the works of others.

I was really struck by the story of the Vitruvian Man drawing. You know the one: muscular naked guy circumscribed by a circle and boxed in by a perfect square demonstrating the proportions of the human body. A little aside: it's likely that Leonardo was his own model for this, and muscular naked guy is a beardless, fit Leonardo. Or at least a close likeness. Vitruvius was a first century Roman general and architect who in describing how to build buildings said that the Romans should use human proportions as ratios for how wide and tall and deep things should be. Then he laid out what those proportions should be. Things like a man's armspan is the same as his height and his foot is exactly one-sixth of his height. Leonardo and his amigos began talking about this when they were coming up with diagrams for a church, and they all took a swing at drawing Vitruvian man. Leonardo's made the others look like grade schoolers' by comparison. It was the collaboration that struck me, though. One of his other compadres put the circle offset from the square, which is something Leonardo then copied. Isaacson also wrote the biography of Steve Jobs and said that collaboration was the reason that Jobs had open areas built into the offices at Apple.

I thought about that in relation to the virtual workspace we are in now. One thing I really missed about going into the office during the pandemic was the conversation that was had outside of meetings. I missed overhearing a couple colleagues talking about some proposed solution and either being able to contribute myself or just listen in to follow some new train of thought. I missed ad hoc whiteboarding in the hallways of proposed solutions. Reading about Leonardo and how he learned and evolved his ideas with input from so many different people reminded me of this excellent keynote given by Jessica Kerr on symmathesy. Interestingly it was also focused on Florentines, just about a century after Leonardo was doing his thing.

What are we doing or what can be done to bring great minds (or even good or average minds) together to collaborate like this in today's age of working remotely from home? Why do we get enraged that Elon Musk wants his workforce back in the office? My money says Steve Jobs would have done the same thing. Don't get me wrong! I am a big proponent of working from the beach! How do we get that same collaboration without requiring everyone to be in office, though?