If you know the history of Enterra Solutions, you know that I started it in the wake of 9/11 when a friend of mine told me that the government needed a way to “connect the dots,” meaning a way to tie disparate information into an actionable picture. As I looked at the problem, I realized that that macro-need was mirrored on a micro-level within businesses. Most businesses have intentionally set up vertical organizations. By that I mean they have separate siloed departments that deal with specific, specialized functions. As I have argued repeatedly, however, today’s paradigm requires horizontal sharing of information across department boundaries. “
The social cognitive skill Steve DeAngelis is describing in promoting horizontal collaboration within an organization is generally referred to in educational literature as Facilitation – I first heard it used in that way many years ago by education reform guru Dr. John Samara as part of his Curry-Samara model of integrating curriculum design and teaching methodology. Facilitation is not simply running a meeting or moderating a panel, though those actions may very well take place, but by acting as an intellectual catalyst for a group without dominating it or controlling it in a hierarchical sense.
It’s a rare skill but one that people who are already horizontal thinkers are best suited to master and, as Steve suggested, a role they often get paid very big bucks to fill. Articulating a vision of possibilities, motivating interest, enabling creativity and maintaining collective focus all the while not getting in the way is what facilitation comprises. It represents the acme of teaching and organizational leadership.
Steve continues:
“By no means does that denigrate the importance vertical thinking (which furthers knowledge), vertical organizations or industries (which promote efficiency), or vertical action (which responds to vertical scenarios), but it does underscore the fact that within and between organizations more (not less) horizontal interaction needs to take place. Every organization needs a horizontal thinker who can make sense of these relationships and help establish a proper balance between them. Why?
…Tom Kelly in his best-seller The Art of Innovation calls these kind of people “crossdressers.” Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak (In Good Company) call them “boundary-spanners.” Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) calls them “connectors.” You get the idea. These people recognize patterns and then make connections that others don’t generally see. They give us “wow” moments…Much of what Enterra is pursuing involves this latter type of thinking — helping take complex problems, finding the patterns, understanding the rules, and then automating those rules in horizontal processes to make organizations more resilient. It is the marriage of pattern recognition and solution simplification.”
When an organization establishes an ongoing facilitation relationship between itself and a horizontal thinking ” catalyst” in an information-rich, dynamic, environment and that relationship is successful at generating insights and new applications, then the organization has entered a state that I term “ Mediciexity“. Mediciexity is the enjoyment of an institutional renaissance moment as a result of the positive, constructive, nonzero sum interactions of social complexity. In mediciexity there is a patron present (the organization or a
” Lorenzo” figure in it) sponsoring the process; an agent, ( or agents, several are better) to act as a catalyst and a complex system of people, information and technology with which to interact. Mediciexity could be viewed as the creative, adaptive, ” growth” element in organizational resilience.
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