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It was no small wonder to Brafman too. General Dempsey told him that the Army was too rigid, too concerned with bureaucracy, too mired in paperwork, and too closed to new ideas. “How do we become more adaptive?” the General asked Brafman, as Brafman recounted in his book, The Chaos Imperative. Brafman’s answer: “You need to create a little chaos.” The answer surprised Dempsey. After all, isn’t chaos the enemy of organization?
It is, according to Brafman. Chaos does erode order and efficiency. But, in doing so, it loosens things up, opening doors for people with new and different ideas. Organizational structures and bureaucratic routines frustrate innovation. “When we take time to reflect, we often see that our organizations have grown so big, so regimented, that we’ve become mired in procedure, endless meetings, and top-down memos and directives. Meanwhile, the knowledge that could end up saving millions of dollars might very well reside in the least expected of places,” Brafman wrote.
Brafman recounts the stories of many individuals and businesses that eased up on structure and process to stimulate creative thinking. But note: they eased up on structure and process, but didn’t eliminate them. According to Brafman, organizations must create, contain, and harness the energy chaos unleashes, in much the same way a nuclear reactor creates, contains, and harnesses nuclear reactions. That’s what Cisco Systems’ Ron Ricci does by encouraging “employees to move around the company, to try out different jobs in different departments with different responsibilities. This lateral flow of employees invites in unusual suspects” (emphasis added).
Brafman’s ideas about how organizations stifle innovation mirror those of MacroCognition LLC senior scientist and author Gary Klein, who studies how we gain new insights into issues and problems and come up with new solutions. In Seeing What Others Don’t, Klein noted that “people working in organizations face pressure for predictability and perfection (reducing errors and deviations), which motivates managers to specify tasks and timetables as precisely as possible and to view insights as disruptive.” Maybe this explains why Kodak and Encyclopedia Britannica failed. According to Klein:
Two companies, two giants, each dominating its market, each fated to collapse very quickly. Neither lacked insight. What they lacked was willpower. Kodak invented the first digital camera. Encyclopedia Britannica produced one of the first multimedia encyclopedias on a CD-ROM. Both companies became trapped in business models that had previously worked so well. Kodak’s photographic print division resisted any shift to the lower-profit digital cameras, and EB’s sales force refused to put its product on a disk. Each company needed to make changes while its original business model was still profitable, before the collapse began, but they were unable to throw away what looked like a winning.
