Last week, I listened to the Presidential Address of Boston University President, Melissa Gilliam, and her “North Star vision” for the university I have been teaching at for the last 18+ years. Her main thrust was about “convergent research,” a concept based on blurring boundaries between campuses and fields of study.
This is not a new concept — examples of “crossing boundaries” leading to great new innovations and insights are plentiful. But it is powerful and somehow still challenging to achieve, as organizational structures tend to put disciplines into silos. It takes work to cross those barriers.
For example, long ago, I had a conversation with Dr. Tyler Jacks, the Founding Director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. What struck me most was that he designed the physical layout of the facility so that the engineers and scientists were more likely to interact with one another, due to seemingly mundane things like office placement and cafeteria location.
His view was that since scientists were mostly focused on continuing to research more deeply, and engineers were impatient to design practical applications, by increasing their interactions, it would lead to a balance between those competing tendencies. The approach led to an impressive list of advances.
Great Minds Don’t Necessarily Think Alike
Outside perspectives — offered by people who are unaware of “how we’ve always done it” — often lead to important insights. By not seeking these dissimilar points of view, organizations can miss both threats and opportunities that might otherwise become fairly obvious.
For example, executives at Blackberry no doubt hastened the company’s demise by not allowing employees to use the then-new iPhone. Instead of working to understand the iPhone’s emerging popularity, they stuck with their old assumptions about what was important to customers. In the end, they missed the market shift.
How do you make sure you capture the potential of convergent thinking for your organization?
#1. Be open to a range of perspectives.
Organizations seeking outside help — whether for strategy, marketing, or other issues — often consider extensive experience within their space a prerequisite. On the surface, it’s not illogical. After all, aren’t “experts” those who have seen and done it all within a given field or industry?
The answer, of course, is yes, however the usefulness of that expertise depends on the problem at hand. If you are trying to optimize a manufacturing operation, for example, it certainly applies. But if you are trying to differentiate yourself from competitors, an “outsider” approach is more likely to result in new and innovative insights.
Consider what happened when Ford Motor Company, near bankruptcy, brought in Alan Mulally (a non “car guy”) in 2008. He didn’t know how things were always done in the industry, allowing him to oversee significant changes in internal culture and process. Starting in 2010, the company had some of its most successful years. (They are, of course, challenged again now — but that is a different matter and under different leadership.)
#2. Consume information outside your specialization or industry.
With the proliferation of “personalization” tools available today (many of them turned on by default), it is easy to only see things specifically relevant to you and your industry. That can be very helpful, but it also results in the loss of serendipity and the opportunity to pick up insights from other, unexpected places.
Because my consulting career had me working in a lot of different industries — from retail to polyurethane foam manufacturing — I tend to follow news on a wide range of topics. That broad mix has always been helpful. In one project, we were able to apply insights from the industrial gas industry to the completely unrelated field of replacement windshields!
#3. Seek opportunities for collaboration.
Though partnerships and similarly cooperative arrangements can be challenging to coordinate, they often allow for expanded capacity and greater insight than going it alone.
This especially applies to nonprofits, as there are many that address similar issues. Some of these organizations could be both more efficient and more impactful if they collaborated with others.
One terrific example of this that I have been involved in is the National Brain Tumor Society’s “Defeat GBM” collaborative, something that engaged several leading research institutions in a joint effort, resulting in more effective discovery than any single nonprofit could have done on its own.
Reflections
We have long known that many great innovations have come from the intersection of two or more seemingly unrelated fields. Still, deliberately designing this kind of convergence into our everyday work is challenging. It requires curiosity, humility, and structures that encourage people to step outside their usual lanes.
Organizations that make this a habit, put themselves in a better position to see change coming, spot new possibilities sooner, and turn diverse ideas into meaningful progress.
