The tension between efficiency, innovation, and adaptability

 If organisations are emergent can they be managed? This is the question I discussed in a previous post, stimulated by an article, The Dialogic Mindset: Leading Emergent Change in a Complex World by Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak. They make the following claims.

To be sustainably successful, organizations have to manage learning as well as performing. This is one of the core paradoxes of management and organization theory: how to create organizations that can be simultaneously innovative and efficient; that is, how to best organize in order to learn and perform at the same time? 

The most efficient forms of organizing, like assemblyline manufacturing, are also the least able to adapt and change. Our business models for succeeding in complex, uncertain environments, like popular music or pharmaceuticals, are highly inefficient and spend lots of money on innovation hoping for one monster hit to pay it all back. Learning and performing are paradoxically related because when someone is focused on performing well, they usually are not learning anything, and vice versa.

This tension is represented in the diagram below. 

I think a good metaphor for the desired combination of efficiency, innovation, and adaptability is a jet ski. This is nicely shown in this cool video (taken about 100 km south of Brisbane). 

My choice of metaphor was inspired by discussions with a colleague who has taken a  Prince2 Agile Project Management course. To illustrate the need for a combination of efficiency and agility they use the metaphor of a jet fighter. I do not like military metaphors, because of their association with violence and the corrupt military-industrial complex. I work with people in the Majority World and such a metaphor may have a negative association. For example, a recent article in The Economist expressed concern that Nigeria is falling apart, partly due to internal insurgencies. It contains the observation

Money could come from cutting wasteful spending by the armed forces on jet fighters, which are not much use for guarding schools. 

So the challenge for real leaders (not managers) is to foster an organisational culture that balances efficiency, adaptability, and innovation.