New ways of working: reconciling the dilemma of individual creativity versus organisational control
Transition: from more of the same to something different
“Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current patterns of thought.” Albert Einstein
WHEN RICHARD FEYNMAN, a physicist, was asked what approach he used when trying to solve a particularly intractable problem, he recalled the methods that some of his forebears had used. He mentioned how Michael Faraday, a natural philosopher, formulated a model in his head, how James Maxwell, a physicist and mathematician, put equations together to formalise this model, how Paul Dirac, a theoretical physicist, got his answers by guessing an equation, how relativity theorists got their ideas by looking at principles of symmetry, and how Werner Heisenberg, another theoretical physicist, discovered his quantum mechanics by “thinking about only those things you can measure”.
However, reflected Feynman, when the problem is fundamentally new, the tried and tested methods are no longer equal to the task:
All that stuff is tried. When we’re going against a problem we do all that. That’s very useful. That’s what we learnt in the physics classes, but the new problem, where we’re stuck, we’re stuck because all those methods don’t work. So when we get stuck in a certain place, it’s a place where history will not repeat herself. That’s what makes it even more exciting. Whatever we’re going to look at – the method … the trick … the way it’s going to look – it’s going to be very different from anything we’ve seen before. Therefore the history of the idea – of how things actually happened – is an accident. The only thing in physics is the experiment. History is fundamentally irrelevant.
(From an interview, published on the Feynman website, entitled “Take the world from another point of view”.)
In business, we are at a point where the methods of traditional management have lost their efficacy. “We’re stuck because all those methods don’t work.” The pace of environmental change is, perhaps for the first time in history, faster than our pace of learning. We urgently need to discover new tools for dealing with this higher level of complexity. The new web-based technologies are encouraging the growth of social networks and thematic communities around the world and contain the seeds of entirely new ways of engaging people, organising work and creating value. Over 4 billion people are now connected through wireless devices. Computers are no longer a luxury in much of the world. Information is virtually free. Soon, almost anyone in the world will be able to participate in global conversations on topics of their own choosing with people with similar interests and agendas.
The tools of collaborative creativity made available by the world wide web are creating a situation in which the individual rather than the task is becoming the focus of collective work. In the near future, companies may no longer be able to rely on imposed employment contracts and internal organisational structures to get work done. They will need to reach out to extended networks of gifted freelancers and find creative ways of engaging their talents if they are to remain competitive. On their own, companies will simply not have access to sufficient talent to innovate and survive. The critical competence of organisations will become their ability to earn their membership of highly creative networks critical to their own success – by contributing at least as much value to these communities as they receive. Skills of co-ordination and co-operation will become paramount. The performance bottleneck for many companies will not be their capacity to raise funds but their ability to join, build and sustain collaborative communities.