John L Jerz Website II Copyright (c) 2014

Minding and Mining the Periphery (Brown, 2004)

Home
Current Interest
Page Title

John Seely Brown

In: Long Range Planning 37 (2004) 143-151

p.144 Where action was once based on knowledge ('don't know; won't try'), it is now based on observation and experimentation ('don't know; now link, lurk, and try').

p.144 Understanding the periphery is often a difficult process.

p.145 The periphery can also be a source of threats, and we ignore it at our peril.

p.145 Managers need to move from managing continuity to managing discontinuity. These discontinuities are like 'ripples in the pond'. These ripples, if we pay attention to them, can help us see and understand the periphery more clearly, but we first have to be aware of the water (i.e., the context or background) of the pond itself and be able to see the changes and differences.

p.146 Existing models, including institutional and social practices, affect our ability to see things in a new or fresh ways.

If information is thought of as a ripple in the pond or 'the difference that makes a difference', the mental models and social practices of individuals, organisations and cultures are the pond across which these changes move... New information is like a pebble thrown into this pond that ripples across the water. We end up interpreting new information in terms of our existing mental models and context.

p.146 Given the importance of the periphery and the challenge of learning about it, how do organisations become better at listening to and learning from the periphery?

p.147-148 Even without going outside their own corporation, managers can find ways to listen to the periphery... The key is to create a social fabric that encourages disparate points of view and that affords creative abrasion between them... We can also link and learn from the knowledge of diverse employees who live on the customer-facing periphery of the enterprise.

p.148 Storytelling... can be extremely valuable in building and sharing knowledge throughout the organisation.

p.149 Adaptive filtering can help companies better understand the needs of the periphery.

p.149 One of the basic challenges for organisations is to utilise these tools for probing the periphery without making them a distraction from the business at hand.

p.150 It is on the periphery that the next phenomenon... might already be in its early stages of development. Managers need to pay close attention to avoid being caught by surprise.