Why I rarely explain what I'm explaining

"So when innovation fails or isn't happening, does that mean these gaps are being mis-managed? I think so, and to understand that better I think it's important to look at the characteristics of the gaps themselves. Thinking about these gaps reminded me of David Weinberger’s essay The Unspoken of Groups, based on his talk at last April’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, which I recently read. In the essay Weinberger says: “In general, making explicit does violence to what is being made explicit. … Making things explicit isn’t like unearthing an archaeological find that’s just been sitting there, waiting to be dug up. Making explicit often – usually – means disambiguating and reducing complexity.”

So when managers try to foster innovation by merging small worlds, by trying to make existing weak ties into strong ties (think heavy-handed knowledge-management initiatives) the effort often fails. Why? Because bridging gaps allows people to recast existing ideas in different ways – practicing inventive recombination. But when you merge small groups together, the very act of merging can do violence to the differences that created the very gaps you're trying to take advantage of. In the process the ideas that could come from bridging the gaps actually disappear rather than remain available for inventive recombination.

In order to create innovativion, we don't need to merge or erase the gaps between groups of people and their ideas — we need to bridge them in a way that preserves the ambiguity that created the gaps in the first place."

via IdeaFlow

posted by Prometheus 6 at 8/20/2003 06:44:36 AM |