A couple of books have been circulating around the office for the past few weeks. Both subject matters are directly related to our objective to continually promote and support a culture of innovation and creativity. The first book, Open Leadership by Charlene Li (Kindle|Print), discusses how to be a leader in a time where everyone is endlessly connected and where opinions and biases can make or break a business. The other book, Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson (Kindle|Print), presents a brief history of innovation through amusing anecdotes and provides a set of tools that help spot and nurture good ideas.
The two books might seem to cover unrelated subjects at a first glance, yet they are connected with common themes; Most notably, the concepts of The Adjacent Possible and Liquid Networks. These two themes have also been covered by Malcolm Gladwell in both Blink (Kindle|Print) and Outliers (Kindle|Print). Just about any business book that talks about innovation and creativity covers these two themes to a certain extent.
Steven Johnson writes that, "what the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen." At the heart of the Adjacent Possible theory is that good ideas (or anything for that matter) will come to exist and thrive if and only if all the elements needed for its survival already exist and the proper connections between them are made.
That's what Charlene Li does for us in her Open Leadership book. She identifies the elements needed and the connections required to accomplish open leadership. She provides the parts and we're responsible for building the machine. The same is true for "thin-slicing" that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Blink. Our ability to make quick decisions based on very limited information is a direct result of many years of cerebral and emotional growth that couldn't have been possible had the right elements not been available or the proper connections not been made. Come to think of it, the Adjacent Possible is the basis of every evolution be it natural or man-made.
The other theme is Liquid Networks, which references environments that promote what Steven Johnson calls, "information spillover." He uses MIT's Building 20 and Microsoft's Building 99 as examples of fluidity in the office space. Charlene Li's call for open leadership inherently promotes liquid networks. In Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, the environments in which his subjects thrived were all liquid networks.
At Edmunds, we realize that there are a finite set of permutations of space, talent, and process that once implemented could create a fertile environment where extraordinary ideas become a reality. We have been exploring the "edges of possibility" for a while now and I'd like to think that we've made considerable progress. We have adopted Agile rather successfully for over three years now and we're currently experimenting with Design Thinking and seating arrangements to promote "information spillover" and hone our skills of identifying the parts needed to make our ideas adjacent possible.
This very blog and our soon-to-be-released APIs, products and tools are also part of our effort to expand our circle of influence for a broader information spillover. We believe that the community will identify and build new parts that will make bigger and grander ideas enter the realm of adjacent possible.
Above all, we believe highly in our talent and we are always looking for passionate individuals to join our ranks.
Exciting times do lie ahead :-)
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