Shared Secrets – Entry #12: Sharing Intent
This is the twelfth in the series on managing collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series
There are three seemingly unsolvable problems with collaborative business innovation. The first problem involves needing to know in advance whether another party truly has the insights, resources and capabilities to fill the gaps in your intentions. The second is needing to know before even sharing your identity whether the other party is likely to take the knowledge of your intentions and use it against you. The third, and by far the most difficult, is understanding beforehand how the other party’s intentions will change given knowledge of your own.
Companies deal with these problems mainly through informal means. As the case of Cirque Du Soleil illustrates, some industries handle informal methods of collaborative business innovation better than others. Guy Laliberte was innovating in an entertainment industry that has a long tradition of free-agents cobbling themselves together in novel ways for finite projects. He was able to select the different competencies he needed from the pool of free talent and quickly get them on the same team. Informal conversations with industry friends to explore his emerging intentions could be conducted mainly with independent individuals with no sense of divided loyalty between their friendship and an employer. The presence of free-agency in industries like entertainment is a key factor in sharing intentions across boundaries and forming innovative businesses quickly.
Affymetrix has effectively used its Board to forge relationships with companies far from its core business, such as Hewlett Packard. These relationships over time have helped them overcome gaps in their strategic intention to become ‘the Intel of biochips.’ Others have effectively used consultants not only to identify new intentions but also execute them.
Because the Hong Kong Octopus team (see previous entry) had consultants with external insights, capabilities and resources already working on the smart-card project, they were able to identify, explore and execute their intentions without having to tip their hand to the other obvious source of know-how – competing Hong Kong banks.
The trouble with using consultants for the purpose of exploring emerging intentions between legally separate entities is that they are expensive to retain solely for this reason. Also, the general practice of consulting firms is to avoid inadvertently passing knowledge between clients for fear of creating a conflict of interest. It happens, but in many cases it is not supposed to happen. There is no question that retained consultants, law firms, and merchant bankers are a major conduit for the private sharing of intent between organizations. But it still relies heavily on serendipity, unspoken agreements, and personal trust relationships. It would be unlikely to see the following line on a consulting firm’s brochure: “We provide you with access to the internal secrets of our other clients.”
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this makes my head hurt a little but the ingenue in me believes human nature is governed by a trust imperative – we want to trust. seems this in the only answer to the first problem. boundaries, which again we naturally adopt, say you can go here but not here – possible solution for the second problem. and the third has to be addressed with a system of redress and accountability for when boundaries and trust fail. open systems seem to make good use of these principles. perhaps it’s time we examine them a bit more closely and see how we can fold them into our business models.
Hey Gary! Yeah, open systems are good for more and more of this stuff. But still only when your intentions are ones that can be shared openly. If my intention is to take this shovel and clobber you over the head with it, I’m probably well advised not to put that intention on Twitter.
In these cases, I need to find the people who can help me clobber you over the head without tipping my hand to the people who would not want me to do that.
The world is finding a lot more win-win’s in many domains, but my line of inquiry is around that case where an innovation leads to disruptions that will wreck someone else’s business. Best not to let them know about your budding intentions when they are still young enough to be crushed.
Hence the need to find ways of finding positive connections without running naked through the streets.