In working on a system to promote sharing among co-workers, Sir Tim Berners-Lee ended up inventing the World Wide Web. Twenty years later and we still have enterprises struggling along with walled-garden silos and command and control management. Skilled specialists pursue narrow interests independently from others in the organisation. Information and knowledge of potential value to “colleagues” is not shared. The dominant mental model for enterprises like that is a strident independence and win/loose culture determined to do things just by themselves. The game is all about competition. There is no room for collaboration and sharing. It is so last century.
Ironic isn’t it, especially when so much has been written about the social web. Not that there can be any doubting the power of the web to connect people, to express their views and share. In Wikipedia, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams provided many examples of firms have benefited from crowd-sourced innovative ideas.Clay Shirky has described the power of the social web to connect people and to do things together without the need for centralised organisation.
It’s nothing short of extraordinary really when so much innovation, creativity and resilience comes from openness and integrating web-based collaboration within the workplace. The amount of shareholder value eroding by the day must be staggering.
What’s going on? It’s a clash of culture: the open nature of the web causes friction when it rubs up against the command and control nature of the enterprise, largely to do with power. So the main problem is social. Perceived reputation, status and financial reward is wrapped up in authoritarian regimes.
There are limiting social factors though. Many people are reluctant to speak out. I’ve lost count of how many people have said to me “But I can’t think of anything to say”. There are those who prefer to be led rather than to lead. Given the rapid rise of social networking sites, many people lack experience in web literacy. The sheer scale of information on the web is over-whelming. Aggregation and curation tools and techniques such as tagging, creating lists, book-marking and filtering are mastered by just a few digital literati. So it’s important to leverage from those willing to express themselves and willing to share. They are the new creators of value…although there is one other, and that’s the generalist.
Last Friday I attended the Media 2010 seminar in Sydney, Australia. The event attracted a a lot of influential industry people – a very good sign. but back to the generalist, One of the presenters was Saneel Radia, SVP at Denuo, Chicago.

Seneel used a term I’ve not heard of before – intersectional innovation. It’s where a generalist works with specialists injecting alternative perspectives from which new insights and creative design can emerge. From an enterprise perspective, the trick is to “empower generalists via accountability”. I grasped the value immediately. As a generalist working in strategic foresight I am too familiar with the dead weight barriers to innovation from specialists. Resilience comes from questioning assumptions and established patterns of behaviour. There is a lower chance of that happening within teams of specialists whose knowledge of things outside their field is limited. The value from generalists comes when pointing to related developments that are changing the paradigm.
Seems like the term ‘intersectional innovation’ was coined by Frans Johansson back in 2004 when he published The Medici Effect. Frans blogs here. I’ve got to look into this!
Of course, it’s not all about openness and sharing. Intellectual property remains a driver of wealth. Apple did not develop the iPhone through open-source design. Google has its search engine secrets. Yet both Apple and Google create value from the open nature of the internet and the social web. There is life in the enterprise for sure!
In my view then, firms looking for resilience and new value need to blend social networks and generalists into the operations of their business.