Innovation and Co-Evolving Relationships

For the past two decades, I have been investigating the fundamental interplay of a number of individual and group associated behavioral factors and how they relate to the expansion or contraction of the innovative capacity of an organization or a social network.

I began by first taking a more thorough look at anthropology and paleontology. What I discovered was that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had gotten along quite well for 99 percent of the roughly 200,000 year existence of our species without the use of any rigid hierarchical social structures.

Subsequently I delved into sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and then examined many of the latest findings in molecular biology, social neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems. In general, what has become quite clear is that biological entities, including humans, cannot and should not be overly controlled. They are emergent and constantly evolving complex adaptive systems.

For innovation to thrive, people need to be immersed in flexible social environments. Consequently, it shouldn’t come as a great surprise that traditional management concepts seldom work any longer, especially when it comes to knowledge workers. This is mainly due to the continued use of cause-and-affect theoretical constructs. But people are not machines. They are organic self-organizing entities.

If we want to expand the innovative capacities of our organizations, we need to pay closer attention to human nature. Reinventing traditional methodologies will not help us advance any further. The new science of the brain and DNA is helping to rewrite not only the origins but also the innate behavior of humans. That’s where management attention should also be.

Knowledge workers, as opposed to Industrial Age employees, are an investment rather than an expense because they carry their own means of production (their smarts) with them. They need to be treated as partners not as hired hands. As partners, knowledge workers are more likely to share their tacit knowledge (knowledge grounded in personal experience and innate predispositions) with the people around them.
Tacit knowledge is a dynamic resource that is indispensible in the innovation process. People are seldom aware of exactly what unrelated knowledge they possess until confronted with a problem or opportunity. Therefore, for tacit knowledge to properly emerge, people must first be surrounded by a supportive environment.
We need to develop organizations that continually nurture the collaborative best from all members because tacit knowledge cannot be “managed out” of people. It must be allowed to emerge within mutually beneficial relationships. The more people are given a voice and implicit control in managing a venture, the more the informal networks (which are present in every entity) will begin to function more in the open in support of organizational goals.
Under the right conditions, the informal components will begin to overlap more and more with the formal elements of an organization. This overlapping spot represents the area where the formal and informal systems of an organization have reached “a meeting of the minds” over the fundamental goals and processes of an organization.

I have labeled this place of common agreement the “organizational sweet spot.” It is a natural outgrowth of day-to-day interactions or self-organization by the people representing both management and the informal networks of a given venture. The larger the overlapping area is, the more engaged and productive people are within an organization.

When traditional approaches fail to bring success, more pragmatic approaches need to be created. Multiple perspectives consistently lead to more insightful solutions than by simply putting new faces on old, failed concepts. Ultimately, it’s all about knowing how to confront the unavoidable realm of “social emergence” and supporting the expansion of organizational sweet spots.