Multinationals and businesses of all dimensions profess that they harness and nurture innovation, however I have seen with my own four eyes this concept being absent in the corporate laboratory which exists backstabbing, jealousy, hidden agendas, facades and collectively what management schools coin as ‘overt sabotage’. The array of political challenges and the sweeping embrace of conflicting operational priorities evidently portray that innovation energies can be lost in the moment of a single breath. The outbreak of ethnic rivalries, the persistence of non democratic political forces and the continued power of entrenched economic interests all reveal lasting legacies of the old order. Here, the old order is the ‘hard knocks way’ of doing things – thinking that what worked historically will catalyse a revolutionary set of epiphanies that will pragmatically guide the enterprise to success. This is incorrect and it will absolutely not as this premise is fundamentally flawed and it will instead bring destruction and dis-organisation within organisational systems. Constitutionally, through the death and births of organisations, the ecological perspective rooted on this school of thought neglects the possibility of organisational learning and fails to address the emergence of new organisational forms. It hinders organisational reflexivity “or the ability to redefine and recombine resources” to find the optimal allocation of resources where creative energies can surface and undergo decentralisation in which virtually every business unit and resource becomes engaged in innovation.
This was evident across many corporates I worked across wherein despite being in front-line functions, there was a blatant and inherent disregard for customer intelligence and channelling serendipitous data and insights in what was meant to be a ‘matrix styled organisation’ where at its core; its meant to absorb this energy and deploy it back into its product and service manufacturing process. The problem here is that the production relations at these companies were conventionally old school and sequential, with subsystems presumed being centrally controlled and designed and with boundary conditions set for the design of lower ranking components. This is a transgression on the precepts of innovation. Yes, its true that if everyone was involved in what is termed as ‘simultaneous engineering’ there would be a proliferation of multiple, sometimes competing, proposals for improving the overall design. Traditionally these would need to be evaluated and discerned and if decentralisation really rises there would be questions like “there’s one thing I can’t figure out. Who’s my boss”. Under these conditions of distributed authority, managers would still “report to” their superiors (as these people hold tacit knowledge that is developed over many years of experience) but explicitly becoming accountable to other work teams.
Circumstances of rapid technological change combined with the volatility of products and markets makes it palpable that no one best solution will prevail hence it is clear that success depends on learning by mutual monitoring and this is the nexus of heterachy. The firm needs to constantly re-invent itself and strive for emergent order whilst fostering a culture of openness, sharing and risk taking. This capacity for self-redefinition is grounded in the organisational heterogeneity that characterises heterarchies. These are complex adaptive systems because they interweave a multiplicity of organising principals. They have a flattened hierarchy because they are sites of competing and co-existing value systems. Distributed authority therefore does not only imply that units will be accountable to each other but also that each will be held to accountings in multiple registers. At the end of the day, if an enterprise is after success, it requires an extended organistinal reflexivity that sustains rather than stifling complexity. Emergent order always needs to be embraced and there can never be capitulation to the forces of overt sabotage that are rooted in Machiavellian like sentimentalities.
You can read a related post here which entertains a framework to sustain strategic innovations within an enterprise system that is already established and one which can extend resources to the emerging entity.