I recently read an interesting post about where innovation occurs in organisations. I have to say the post by Bo Harald is fascinating in that it addresses the critical issue of the formal lines of authority versus the informal communication lines.
I have nothing against formal communication and organisational charts, but I also believe there proliferation of distributed tools and myriad operation models should prompt large organisations even more to revise traditional communication lines.
Harald mentions in his post the discovery by social cartography pioneer Valdis Krebs that innovation happens in intersections of the organisation. The kind where ideas meet that are not visible in the formal organisation charts. This means people there are excellent individuals (the best positioned) to revise how things are done or could be done and drive innovation.
Interestingly enough, he supports that the messiness of the social interaction patterns of an organisation is often correlated to the innovation capacity it exercises.
Just to ratify the probability of the assertion, I read a very interesting study about using social graphs to uncloak terrorist networks by Krebs which also raised my interest on the issue. In any case, it’s application to the social graph of my current organisation is, for the moment, what most interests me. Now trying to think how to apply, adapt, learn… ;-)
In the image the social graph of the 2001 September 11th folks from Valdis Krebs study
Tags: Bo Harald, formal communication, informal, innovation, social cartography, social graphs, social networks, terrorism, Valdis Krebs
