On the broader issue of the post, it seems to me that there is a difference between individuals being cognitively flexible, tapping wildly varying sources of cultural insight, on the one hand, and failing to achieve closure as a collectivity, on the other. That need for collective closure (so that people’s actions add up to something productive instead of a mess), and the difficulty of getting closure in a big, complex organization is exactly why big companies often feel so sluggish and inertial–like “wading waist-deep through water” as one acquired entrepreneur put it.

Successful integration is also, however, why “ordinary people can do extraordinary things” (to paraphrase Wal*Mart) and why a well-calibrated organization can vastly outstrip the capabilities of any individual or loosely-organized band (think UPS or Federal Express). The leverage gained by specialization and the division of labor when the parts can be properly integrated is an awesome thing.

Organizations are both dumber than individuals and super-powered compared to individuals. When you get in one of those ridiculous failure loops with a company (e.g. circular phone referrals when you have a problem) the stupidity aspect is obvious. It’s less obvious (but just as real) when a company’s products lose cultural relevance while management blithely goes along doing more of what it tried to do the day before, ignoring the obvious signs of drift or refusing to deal with them. This latter stupidity is, I think, partly what Grant’s calls for diverse thinking are meant to address. It’s hard to disagree, but it’s also hard not to wonder if much of the stickiness in companies isn’t an inherent feature of the need for alignment.

CEOs pushing change agendas in large companies frequently note that it takes a long time to get actual cultural and behavioral shifts throughout the organization. Some of this lag is put down to recalcitrant human nature, but I think a large part of it is that change threatens the integrity of processes that are essential to the firm’s current profit stream. Mess around with those processes the wrong way and things can go to hell FAST. Some of the inherent conservatism of corporate cultures (and the possible reflection of that conservatism in business schools) may be an evolutionary outcome–those firms that court too much internal inconsistency fail to survive for very long.

I think the challenge for firms is to recognize that integration and consistency are means to an end, not ultimate ends in themselves, and should not be allowed to stifle the cultural and cognitive flexibility of individuals. There are two kinds of separation that permit the fluid thinking and assumption-jumping Grant calls for:

First, there is the separation of conceptualization from execution. Even if only one integrated pattern is actually in operation at any one time, lots of “virtual” alternative concepts and patterns can and should be whizzing around and between the heads of management. Carrying around an ensemble of alternative strategies, brand identities, etc., constantly checking one’s cultural premises to see if one of those alternatives would be better than the current one, trying to see how your company looks from the perspective of non-buyers, etc. should make a firm more agile (and possibly anticipatory in cannibalizing itself rather than being prey for someone else).

Second is parallelism. Lots of things can be done side by side without appreciable interaction, allowing seemingly contradictory creative insights to be put to use. A simple idea is to have separate brands, with wildly different cultural valences, to penetrate different market segments. My comment on the previous post noted a more tactical parallelism in GEICO’s advertising campaign. One could get more strategic by thinking about business units with totally different technologies or business models housed within the same organization. The burning question with all such setups is what justifies all of them being in the same firm at all? There has to be some common tie, some shared resource, or else parallelism describes a firm that should be broken up.

One last point: Assumption-jumping and context shifting is a pretty rare individual ability. Most people frankly suck at transferring an idea from one domain to another in a creative way. Maybe teams of brainstormers can do better. But I bet there is no substitute for an organization cultivating and retaiining those individuals with this somewhat rare capacity. My guess is that most large firms are pretty bad at this, too.

But all of that takes courage, and courage requires en-courage-ment starting at the earliest age and continuing throughout our lives. Encouragement isn’t a leadership competency I see nurtured very often.