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The Importance of Diversity to Innovation

“OK, next question,” said the interviewer across the conference table from me. She’s an HR executive and I’m participating in her survey of business leaders. “How important is innovation to your company’s success?”

We’re a service business. We don’t develop a product. We develop custom solutions to unique customer challenges. We don’t have a research and development team, but we can’t survive without innovation.

To me innovation means adding my idea to your idea to get a third idea. My idea comes from my experience; your idea comes from your experience. The more divergent your experience is from mine, the stronger the new idea produced when we combine our thinking. If our ideas come out of different cognitive “gene pools” the combination has a better chance of thriving and of moving understanding forward in a new way.

I’ve seen that happen over the years as we’ve grown our business: the greatest advances in our creativity have happened not when I talk to people who have been with me for a long time, but when I talk to people who are new to the group, who have joined us from other companies and can tell me about a different way of seeing the world and solving problems.

Within companies there are distinct cognitive and experiential gene pools. There are zones of homogeneity. We call them teams or departments.

In Enterprise 2.0 parlance, we call them silos.

If Enterprise 2.0 Starts In A Silo, Can It Ever Get Out?

There is sometimes a debate among those of us who spend our time discussing Enterprise 2.0: is Enterprise 2.0 breaking down the silos in organizations or is it just reinventing the silo?

The theory of Enterprise 2.0 is that it breaks apart the silos, that it flattens the organization and opens up access to information across teams and without regard for organizational hierarchy. Transparency is the gold standard of the Enterprise 2.0 model.

In reality, though, I don’t see that happening widely yet. I think there’s too much ingrained worry among business leaders that such openness will lead to a loss of authority. Business leaders want to control information, hence silos.

In my experience Enterprise 2.0 makes its entry into business organizations first as a new method for interacting and sharing within existing silos which tend to stay intact. The production of social work spaces for use by the marketing team or the business development team, for example. And within those social work spaces, I see the use of wikis for the freeform production of content, shared document environments with RSS to signal the arrival of new content and the use of blogs and discussion boards that allow unregulated authorship.

But connecting one socially functioning silo to another socially functioning silo so that the walls of both fall down and the activities of once separate groups combine, that seems a harder challenge.

If I remodel the interior of your silo so that you can share information with your professional next of kin, can track their activities and can combine your ideas with theirs in collaborative work, I know that has a positive impact on the company. Problems do get solved faster. But I’m not sure they get solved better. 

Better solutions come from different input.

Act Fast. But Not Without a Strategy.

Dion Hinchcliffe tells us that the model of the fully realized Enterprise 2.0 environment can be summed up with the mnemonic FLATNESSES.

• F – freeform
• L – links
• A – authorship
• T – tagging
• N – network oriented
• E – extensions
• S – search
• S – social
• E – emergence
• S – signals

With that in mind, it seems that the most difficult element of FLATNESSES to achieve company-wide is the first: Freeform.

You can create a freeform interior to your silo, but what benefit does that deliver the company long term? Does the FLATNESSES model applied within silos act as a training ground, a kiddie pool of new paradigms where the organization can come to terms with it and get used to it? Does it make the organization more accepting of the idea of company-wide Freeform and social interaction if it begins within the familiar confines of the silos? Or does simply socializing the silo make the status quo comfortable and solidify the company in a model that is ultimately limiting?

“Think big. Start small. Act fast.” So goes the mantra of Enterprise 2.0 implementation. In my observation that’s still an idealized vision. There are companies starting small. There are companies acting fast. There are companies doing both together. But if they fail to start small and act fast within the context of also thinking big about where they’re going with this, why they’re doing it, what they want it to look like in one year, three years, five years, and what success is, then I think they’re on a path toward diminishing returns.

I think it’s a failure of imagination that leads to implementation without strategy. AIIM recently conducted a survey that found that the majority of SharePoint implementations go forward without a strategy. People don’t know what’s possible with SharePoint so they don’t plan for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing is happening with Enterprise 2.0: companies don’t know what is possible. You can’t plan for what you can’t envision. Therefore, Enterprise 2.0 springs up in ad hoc ways without any strategically determined triggers for when or how to tie the islands of Enterprise 2.0 together into a single land mass. And so those disparate cultures that could augment, enhance and empower each other never find each other.