Situation
Helen is the Chief Executive of a technology based company that has grown rapidly around four separate product groups. Although each product group is growing profitably, Helen is concerned that the company is missing out on product and technology opportunities that could arise from integrating the experience, expertise and technologies across the product groups. The company has a relatively informal and entrepreneurial culture and structure and Helen does not want to risk disrupting this by imposing interactions between the four product groups through a formal structure or process. Her preference is to find a solution that could grow organically as the benefits are demonstrated.
What are the types of things that Helen might be able to do?
Helen looked at the history of each of the product groups and at how people communicate and interact within each group. She found that each group strongly defines its identity in terms of its product grouping and that in two of the four groups interactions are focused on a small sub-group of product experts who are essentially gatekeepers for innovation and creativity in the product group. In essence, Helen found that the company comprises four relatively independent clusters each of which is well connected internally but with few external connections. Core communications in two of the groups is particularly concentrated.
Helen also noticed that common linkages between the groups that could potentially be leveraged to stimulate and facilitate interactions between the group. All the groups use a shared Industrial Design team to assist them develop the packaging and user interface for their products. However, this team is very introverted and separate team members tend to liaise with each of the product groups.
Helen also knew that over the past two years, as part of its rapid expansion, the company has employed fifteen young engineers across all four product groups. These engineers are less indoctrinated in the history and culture of each of the product groups and many of them interact informally and regularly at lunch and other social occasions.
Helen saw an opportunity to use the Industrial Design team as a non-threatening bridge between the product groups. As part of their professional development, she put one of the more extroverted, generalist and design oriented young engineers into the Industrial Design in a broad liaison role. On the surface, the engineer’s role was to assist communication between the product engineers, in all four groups, and the industrial designers. But Helen’s core objective was to use the young engineer to foster connections between the product groups by asking the engineer to invite other younger engineers from across all product groups into design sessions and design review meetings.
Helen also put in place several more formal, but relatively non-threatening, initiatives primarily aimed at building connections between the four product groups (clusters):
- An induction program for all new engineers that saw them spend between two and three months in each of the product groups before settling into their specialist group.
- A voluntary mentoring initiative in which young engineers were linked with a more experienced engineer from another product group.
- A technical ‘think tank’ that was tasked to identify new product opportunities for the company as whole, with no specific reference to any individual product group. The think tank included a mix of senior and young engineers from across all product groups.
Helen paid particular attention to the results of each these changes. Whenever she saw a positive result, no matter how small, she made a point of commending those involved and highlighting it to others.
Comment
The clustering of the product groups is an example of what is know as ‘small world’ network. Each ‘small world’ has dense internal connections and relatively few external connections. Improving the connectivity across the small world network does not require the establishment of many new connections. It only requires the development of a relatively few critical connections that link each of the small worlds. The challenge is to find, motivate and cultivate these linking connections. Not all the initiatives introduced by Helen need be successful as long as a critical number of linking connections are developed.
Follow Us!