Kurtz and Snowden contribute to the insights and interdependence between organizational learning and networks, with this article called Bramble bushes in a thicket (2007).
A nice explanation of naturalistic approach (emphasizing the inherent un-knowability where people seek to understand a sufficiency of the present) and idealistic approach (privileging expert knowledge, where leaders set out an ideal future state). Details in this clarifying slidedeck stating:
Two of the most important elements of the naturalistic sense-making approach are: narrative and networks.
Especially the paragraph about Inter-organizational networks and productive conflict offers insights I correlate with. Here’s two quotes:
Inter-organisational networks help organisations improve productive conflict within their boundaries in two ways: first, by increasing the productive conflict experienced by groups and individuals of the organisation who are in contact with the outside network, and second, by making each internal group’s norms for conflict management more visible in comparison. It does not seem that much work has been done specifically on the types and natures of conflict in inter-organisational networks to date. Certainly there has been discussion of how conflicts of interest can arise between partners in business ventures, but there has not been strong attention to how inter- and intra-group conflict plays out in inter-organisational learning networks.
Holmquist (2003) makes the case that learning in intra-organisational and inter-organisational networks is intermingled and that conflict is a critical ingredient in this intermingling: “The explorative character of much interorganizational learning does not occur by itself; it occurs as a result of a confrontation and a combination of single organizations’ experiences.” He also makes the point that because inter-organisational networks typically have a less centralised structure than the organisations themselves, employees who participate in such networks are exposed to “conflicts and instability as a result of the lack of formal authority”, which can increase productive conflict within their own organisation. All of these signs point to the utility of inter-organisational networks as a source of not only new knowledge but also of productive conflict that improves the organisation’s ability to reinvent itself from within.
I love this metaphore of the bramble (desire-difficulty / cooperation-competition):
Organizations (and the individuals that make them up) are much like “bramble bushes in a thicket”, and the nature of their many interacting and co-evolving identities is self-similar as well as deeply contextual and ambiguous.
