An article in the McKinsey Quarterly describes the practice of ‘Knowledge brokering[i],’ wherein organizations gain product and process ideas from other organizations outside their competitive space. It seems this ‘open source’ (why obfuscate this term?) approach must meet certain parameters to be effective:

• Define the issue or problem at an appropriate level. If the challenge is too complex, outside sources will not have the context or experience to solve it. One of the methods to accomplish this task is to break the issue down into separate, discrete parts.
• Evaluate potential brokers. Concentrate on industries where the context free issue is prevalent and success depends on successfully dealing with it. The example given is where a bank suffering long customer lines approach a Disney theme park manager, a grocer, and a traffic expert.
• Engage the whole team to listen to the broker’s story, inspiring questions, new contexts, and breakthroughs.
• Develop a plan of action.

This consulting trend is at least partly inspired by another trend named ‘design thinking[ii],’ popularized by the folks at IDEO, another consultancy firm.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

The folks at McKinsey have done a good deal of work on the concept. After all, why re-invent the wheel? This article suggests that knowledge brokering, far from being an innovation strategy, is just good organizational structure.

On the contrary, the concept is more fundamentally understood if we view it as a systemic organizational approach rather than a new process to plaster over existing functions. And integrating key external relationships into team organization charts produces additional benefits than solving the latest challenge. It benefits from organizational support, and if one takes the proper stance, the relationships produce synergistic and emergent properties.

Begin with Actualization and Belonging

Maslow taught us the ingredients of an actualized individual. His Hierarchy of Needs is one of the most recognized psychological constructs outside the discipline. Any team or organization hoping to function at optimum levels must address that hierarchy or remain deficient in some aspect. Therefore all organization structures must actively design those components into their structures, or forever fight the deficiencies that ensue.

One of the pillars of actualization is ‘Belonging,’ which implies close ties to family and friends. In the organization’s case, those ties would be team members and intra-departmental contacts.

But belonging is much more than that.  Actualized individuals gain contacts and respect from a wide variety of constituents outside their immediate field of influence or expertise. Their contacts provide them with affirmation, ideas, direction and access. Sound familiar?

Implications for Brokering

Maslow’s definition of Belonging is the underlying premise of brokering in organizations. It implies that external connections are more fruitful if at least some of them are deep and lasting.

We all understand the importance of a wide swath of social networks in the development of our own personalities and careers. They not only provide us with self-interested access to opportunities, they provide us with balance, and hopefully mentors from a variety of life experiences and approaches. They imply the rich and fruitful product of diversity. They imply a symbiotic and synergistic relationship that is beneficial to all involved.

On a related note, some companies encourage a percentage of ‘personal’ or ‘undirected’ time to innovate and experiment and explore. We speculate that this practice is often just another aspect of encouraging a connection of non-work relationships and thoughts; another form of belonging at work. An issue does not have to be pressing or urgent for solutions to arise.

Like individuals, all teams and organizations (any group with a purpose) benefit from a well developed sense of belonging in a very broad range. It is an integral component of their structure just as it is integral to any individual’s actualization. And like any organizational component or functional expertise, it benefits from formal development and nurture by team and hierarchical support, viewed as an organizational extension of the team itself.

The Complexity Approach

Key components of scale free networks are connections to other nodes.

Likewise, complexity theory[iii] supportively stipulates that emergence or adaptability in any organism or system must by its nature include external nodes or vertices. It is this property that nurtures new associations and connections.

These connections often threaten the concept of context. Emergence is very often the product of tenuous and often previously unconnected strands of information. Therefore the ant many times forages in what seems to be unfruitful ground. And yet its exploration is directed. It stays out of the water. It returns to established, previously covered ground as well as venturing into new territory. And like any actualized individual, it communicates its discoveries and stories with its comrades, their collective information forming a cohesive whole which eventually bears fruit. This is assuredly the same ‘aha!’ moment for them as it is for extending teams.

As another example, the Internet is a scale free network (a complex system’s structure) of web pages, linked tenuously at best through links and semantically associated tags. Any dedicated web surfer knows that following those links is a major source of inspiration and therefore innovation. A website aptly named Stumbleupon gains its popularity based on this emergent phenomenon.

Implications for Brokering

Optimal organizational structures that exhibit emergent properties are cascading scale free networks that conform to power laws. It is mathematically impossible to develop an effective, emergent complex system within the confines of one’s own organization; the network nodes are already too closely connected.

The properties of emergence demand all teams and organizations formally cultivate external clusters of networked connections in order to facilitate emergent exchanges of ideas, culture, spirit, approaches and ‘breakthroughs.’

The implication is also that the connections are more persistent and involved than the Knowledge brokering article implies. This thought makes much intuitive sense but is also proved in available research.

Additional observations

Knowledge brokering highlights the synchronous similarity of both complexity and psychology to predict effective organizational structures.

The disciplines also imply that external relationships for teams and organizations have a broader benefit than meeting particular business challenges, although that is certainly one product of the connection. But seeing the relationship through this lens arguably limits the full advantage of the construct as more intimately defined elsewhere.  The full range of benefit of networked connections is only gained when context is challenged and the seeker takes on an exploratory stance.

This article implies a much deeper inspection of what those implications are and how to implement them. For more information, contact Jim Leis.

End Notes

[i] Corey Billington and Rhoda Davidson, “Using Knowledge Brokering to Improve Business Processes,” Consulting, McKinsey Quarterly, January 2010, https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Innovation/Using_knowledge_brokering_to_improve_business_processes_2512?gp=1.

[ii] Andrew Hargadon and Robert Sutton, “Building an Innovation Factory – Harvard Business Review,” Harvard Business Review 78, no. 3 (n.d.): 157-66, http://hbr.org/2000/05/building-an-innovation-factory/ar/1.

[iii] Jim Leis, “Complexity,” Leis Network, July 19, 2010, http://www.leisnetwork.com/science/complex-systems/complexity.