Chris Meyer on Recombinant Strategy

I always enjoy my conversations with BIF board member and research advisor Chris Meyer. Chris is the CEO of Monitor Networks and a great thinker in the field design-thinking. His work since 1995 has revolved around recombinant thinking and figuring out ways that diverse groups can collaborate around a single issue.

Chris talks a lot about what design strategists can learn from complexity theory, molecular biology and the cross-pollination of disciplines. During our latest conversation, he took me down the path of "directed evolution."

Evolution, Chris says, can teach us a great deal about managing the accelerating rate of change in our world. This rate of change makes it difficult to stay innovative, especially because processes that worked in the past are becoming less and less effective. So if you accept that weaving together multiple voices from very different disciplines will yield innovative outcomes, what’s the process for directing this evolutuion?

I wish I had a podcast of our call but instead, I'll direct you to the ITT Institute of Design where Chris gave an interview on the power of recombinant strategy.

From the interview:

Strategy as I learned it in business school was very much like engineering: making incremental improvements in what already exists. Well, if nothing's changing, probabilities favor that kind of strategy. But in a rapidly changing environment, it's not very good because your innovations won't fall very far from the tree.

So, we need what [complexity theorist] Stuart Kauffman would call "non-linear searches of high-dimensional solution spaces", or what designers would call "a charrette". The idea is that if you have a problem, and if you challenge a diverse group of people with different perspectives to solve it, then you will find solutions that are very far apart in this "high-dimensional solution space" – you don't even know how to talk about them using the same framework. Then you go through essentially a biological process of recombination of all these different features, to get to a solution you like.

As brainy as "searching for solutions in non-linear high-dimensional spaces" sounds, in essence, this is what our BIF community is doing through our experience labs. Non-linear thinking does not come easy to most people. For me, it’s an acquired ability and that’s due to my exposure to other points of view through BIF. I firmly believe though that the diversity of experience encountered here will lead to the understanding of the new practices involved in institutionalizing innovation.

Related Links
Chris Meyer shared a story at our inaugural summit in 2004. You can watch it here.
Listen to a podcast of Chris with BusinessWeek's management editor Jena McGregor where he talks about the power of networks to spark innovation.

Posted January 24, 2008 12:20 PM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink