The creative, knowledge economy is based – at least in part – upon the abilities of individuals and teams to leverage their collective information and ideas into new innovations.
But, how do ideas and information get shared? Does information flow along traditional corporate hierarchical and team division lines? Apparently not, according to research reviewed and summarized by Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail last week:
From his summary:
Organizational network analysis charts resemble a spider’s web, with endless crisscrossing strands that show who collaborates with whom….Often, the most important individuals are lower down in the organization, known to colleagues for their knowledge or the speed with which they respond to queries, while formal bosses prove to be bottlenecks, unreachable or not considered of much use in everyday work…
The most valuable knowledge workers, therefore, need to know who has information that they need – and, they themselves need to be a source of key information for others (which could simply be, who knows what).
The most successful senior managers would also know how to leverage this internal network of problem-solving and innovation-creating ability. This might mean knowing how to divide staff into teams such that there is not too much duplication of internal knowledge networks among team members.
Many workplace design firms now also try to design space to encourage organizational networking and internal idea sharing. This is one reason private, assigned offices are becoming less common in some industries as four walls and a door can discourage interaction.
How does information and knowledge flow where you work?
June 15th, 2009 at 10:50 am
It starts with an open office environment. No one in my department has an office and no one ever will. We like to be able to see each other and interact uninhibited. This allows the free flow of ideas. There have been countless times where an overheard dialog about a problem solved it quickly because someone else had resolved the same issue.
We also empower our staff to get their job done how they see fit. Management’s sole job is to make the staff successful. Anything we can do to remove barriers, we do. It that kind of environment, no one is afraid to ask a question or mess up. Making mistakes is part of creating innovative products. By making and learning from mistakes, we make better products.
Wiki type infrastructure is also a must. We use Trac to collect our tribal knowledge so that we don’t make the same mistakes twice.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I”m not surprised it flows in a bottom-up spontaneous order network and that bottlenecks occur near the top. This is what those of us who understand systems have known for a while. Unfortunately, nobody seems to listen to us, and top-down approaches dominate.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Jarie — thanks for sharing your company’s approach. Seeing managers as the enablers is probably a key breakthrough companies need to make in the knowledge era.
Indeed, its when managers are not “enabling” but constricting that you likely get Troy’s observation of the frustrations that can exist.
June 17th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Badly
June 17th, 2009 at 3:16 am
And there is also the “invisible college” of expertise outside the corporation, which does not appear on the organization chart. For specialists within a corporation this can be the most valuable source of collective information. Specialists tend to have a “don’t ask the boss, don’t tell the boss” perspective on supposed company secrets, because otherwise they cannot obtain the information they need from their “invisible college”.