A recent new friend of mine introduced me to Stowe Boyd , and I am looking forward to making his acquaintance. :-)
Stowe had posted about innovation in organisations. from a Fast Company article, To build innovation break down your networks
Stowe says
social networks are a form of emergent knowledge, and since innovation requires us to forget things, that means that we have to break our networks to innovate
Chris Trimble who wrote the FC piece articulates
while enriching existing networks accelerates idea generation, breaking existing networks is often required to convert vision to reality. Breaking networks takes a deliberate effort, because networks are made up of relationships between people, and relationships are sticky.
He then says
Breaking networks is the only way to prepare an organization to take innovation efforts beyond mere ideas. You can train an individual about what an innovation is and why it demands different behavior, but you can’t retrain an organization simply by training the individuals within it. The individuals may acquire knowledge, but organizations are more powerful than individuals, and organizations reinforce the past.
Finally the bit that caught my interest was the difference between networks of communication and networks of trust.
A colleague of mine, Zia Khan, a leading thinker on informal networks in organizations, pointed out to me that there are vast differences between communication networks and trust networks. Communication networks are the kind that are useful at the front-end of the innovation process because they enable the sharing of ideas. The back-end of the innovation process depends on trust networks, which require much heavier investments in time, energy, and goodwill.
In many ways it reminded me of a project we worked on last year, which was the relaunch of a state broadcaster in the Nordics. Having looked at the channel and then looking at the organisation, my view was that unless we got the organisation to collaborate in a different way, we would not be successful with the mission.
Also I believed that the passion that we would put into the project had to be adopted by all levels of the organisation, and so every member of TV2 would become part of that innovation process, and thereby developing ownership over the process and the end result. Our role in may ways was to fuel the desire and passion in people to want to own this new way of working and that everybody within the channel had an important role to play.
We were successful, and I was very proud of the small team that worked with me on that project.
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