An excerpt:
In other words, we are getting better at making new groups work as colleagues and old groups work as strangers. The traditional trade off is disappearing. Being permanently co-premised (as members of a corporation) need not cost you the difference on which creativity depends. Being suddenly co-premised (like the Sterling Rice meeting) need not cost you the sharedness that creativity demands.
Creativity and complexity theory
In the Merchant of Venice (1.3.75), Shakespeare talks about two people being “compremised, brought together and given a common purpose. If we remove a letter, and Shakespeare will indulge us this, this is a very useful little word to describe the assemblies out of which ideas come.
The Sterling Rice meeting in Colorado this week (see last 3 entries) brought together a team of interesting people and they were for 3 days “copremised. They shared an idea, an objective, and a premise.
It impresses me that we can bring together perfect strangers and make them almost instaneously capable of mutual clarity and new ideas, how easily, in short, that we can copremise people. Sterling Rice brought together 8 people and within 30 minutes they were working together as if colleagues of long standing.
It was not just strangers who were so assembled, but strangers from diverse and potentially incompatible backgrounds. In the Sterling Rice case, there was a chef, a website founder, an anthropologist, a university president, a marketing expert, a former US senator, a business school professor, a nutritionalist, and a science writer. What might have been a tower of babel proved a highly efficient opportunity for communication. Apparently, we live in a “velcro world” in which people can be snapped together for one purpose, then dissassembled and snapped together for another. We can now co-premise at the drop of a hat.
Apparently, it works the other way round. We can take a group of people who work together in a corporation and give them some of the characteristics of a group of strangers. Increasingly, the corporation endures and encourages a messiness and variousness as the great well of creativity. (See Appendix I below for a glimpse of the new order of the organization according to Beunza and Stark.)
In other words, we are getting better at making new groups work as colleagues and old groups work as strangers. The traditional trade off is disappearing. Being permanently co-premised (as members of a corporation) need not cost you the difference on which creativity depends. Being suddenly co-premised (like the Sterling Rice meeting) need not cost you the sharedness that creativity demands.
It is as if two social forms, the ad hoc group and the permanent organization, are moving towards one another. The motive is the same: to make the group more creative and responsive. The ad hoc group that begins with the advantage of agility, variety, and difference is learning to take on the properties that make mutual coherence and creativity possible. The permanent group that begins with the advantage of mutual coherence is beginning to take on the properties of variety and messiness on which creativity depends.
The anthropological question is of course “why?” The answer must have something to do with the fact that as our culture and economy speed up and become more dynamic we are called upon to find the opportunity of dynamic response whereever we can: both in the corporation and the ad hoc group.
Appendix I: the new order of the corporation
Heres what Beunza and Stark say about the new order of the organization.
Mid-20th century, there was general consensus about the ideal attributes of the modern organization: it had a clear chain of command, with strategy and decisions made by the organizational leadership; instructions were disseminated and information gathered up and down the hierarchical ladder of authority; design preceded execution with the latter carried out with the time-management precision of a Taylorist organizational machine.
By the end of the century, the main precepts of the ideal organizational model would be fundamentally rewritten. The primacy of relations of hierarchical dependence within the the organization and the relations of market independence between organizations become secondary to relations of interdependence among networks of organizations and among units with organizations.
[B]usinesses, universities, museums, hospitals and no profit and public sector agencies face the imperative of organizational innovation as they confront conditions of radical uncertainty. To cope with these uncertainties, [they] are flattening their hierarchies, distributing their intelligence, promoting collaborative structures and increasing lateral coordination for flexibility.
Beunza, Daniel and David Stark. 2003. The Organization of Responsiveness: Innovation and Recovery in the Trading Rooms of Lower Manhattan. Paper 2003-10-059. The Santa Fe Institute, p. 152.