“Knowledge flows naturally flourish on the edge. Why? Because, by definition, participants on these edges are wrestling with how to match unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and all the uncertainty that implies. Edge participants therefore focus on ways to innovate and create value by connecting unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and then scaling these opportunities as rapidly as possible. In the process, they create significant new knowledge. But there is a problem – this knowledge is not easily accessible.” -John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
In a time of disruptive disequilibrium brought on by the tension, turbulence and acceleration of change, we find many of our organizations and organizational leaders striving to exert an overall sense of steadiness and equilibrium, a sense of safety and stability; instead of provoking positive disobedience and candor, we look for obedience, agreement and acceptance; instead of stretching into the uncomfortable, we look to the insulated cocoon of the careful and comfortable.
In many ways, the organizational plea is one to be protected and immune from these changes forces that push in and threaten to disturb our current and past ways of thinking and doing…
Unfortunately, too many of today’s leaders see this as their work, their task; to create a haven of safety and security from those turbulent change forces that threaten to disrupt our organizational equilibrium. But what they fail to understand is that this mindset. of what they see as their work, is really just pandering to the plight and peril of the stasis and status quo, and will end up being the biggest risk of all.
For it is the risk of irrelevance, not the threat of these change forces, that we need to be much more aware of, especially in today’s change world.
To fend off these changes forces we find ourselves becoming more and more wary of “next” practices, so we bury ourselves in “best” practices of the past. We look to insulate ourselves from the disruptive nature of these new ideas by moving farther and farther back from our organizational edges, where these new ideas and knowledge are often igniting flames of creative destruction that threaten “our way” of doing things.
So, we choose stability over adaptation, control over agility, compliance over creativity, and implementation over innovation.
We look to amplify the known…
We find solace and safety in incrementalism. Engaging linear and predictable processes and structures give us this sense that we’re slowing down the pace of change that clamors at the gates of our organizational borders. So we find ways to protect and guard our organizational boundaries, keeping them closed tight to fend off any new ideas, new thinking, or new knowledge that may possibly disrupt “our way” of doing things. We look to invoke authority and command and control strategies to harness and subdue the budding emergence of the “new.”
Instead of designing our organizations for adaptability, we choose to design them for permanence, in a world dominated by accelerated obsolescence. And when we do, we find that we are designing our organizations and systems for future irrelevance…
But we can no longer avoid or choose to insulate ourselves from the edges and the emergence of the “new.”
Or as Hagel, Brown and Davison share in The Power of Pull, “As clockspeed increases, companies must continually refresh the sources of their success: their knowledge stocks. This means precipitating and participating in a broader range of knowledge flows, which in turn requires finding people, particularly people on the edge, interacting with them, and building reciprocal relationships with them over time. Edge players are more likely to introduce us to new insights and to help us more rapidly develop new knowledge stocks.”
Creating organizational idea flow and tapping into the “edges” not only leads to engaging us in new ways thinking and doing, it tends to move us beyond today’s “best” practices to tomorrow’s “next” practices. In effect, creating organizational relevance for the future and of next steps…
Understanding the profound persistence and resilience needed to not only engage the “new” but to lead from the “edge” will allow today’s leaders to push through the lack of understanding and acceptance that new learning, new ideas new knowledge, and new ways of operating provokes in the status quo.
But just remember, as Richard Pascale shares from his work Surfing the Edge of Chaos, “Species are inherently drawn toward the seeming oasis of stability and equilibrium – and the further they drift toward this destination, the less likely they are to adapt successfully when change is necessary.”
It is at the “edges” not only where new ideas, new thinking and new knowledge are discovered and formed, but where we learn to overcome the “genetic” drift that often entrenches our organizations in stasis, status quo, and eventual irrelevance for the future.
Most organizations tend to push creativity and innovation to the outer edges, creative and innovative leaders not only tap into those edges, they find ways to fold them back into the core.
DCulberhouse 