Have You Organized for Happy Accidents?
What a dinosaur and the most innovative companies have in common
All organizations face a fundamental dilemma between what Jim March, a former Stanford University professor, called “the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties.” The punchline of his argument was that adaptive processes are likely to improve exploitation more rapidly than exploration.
Although this dynamic can be effective in the short run, it proves self-destructive in the long run. In essence, successful exploitation crowds out exploration, leaving organizations unable to adapt to changing environmental conditions.
March’s insights are part of a long line of research in which scholars have used evolution as a metaphor for understanding organizations and organizing. For instance, scholars have found that organizational populations, like other organisms, are susceptible to variation, selection, and retention. Likewise, we know that organizations face problems of resource scarcity and constraints.
But this leaves open a fundamental question: Where does novelty come from?
An alternative lexicon: Exaptation and serendipity
Two paleobiologists, Stephan Jay Gould, formerly a professor at Harvard, and Elisabeth Vrba, a professor at Yale, introduced the concept of exaptation as a mechanism for thinking about precisely this question. Whereas adaptation stresses fitness to meet contextual demands, exaptation highlights any feature that was not originally developed for its present role, but was subsequently co-opted for a now useful function.
For instance, Archaeopteryx marks a transition between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds. Dating from the Late Jurassic period, fossils indicate that Archaeopteryx was covered in feathers, and yet, judging from its skeletal features, was probably capable of only the simplest feats of flight. Although this combination may seem inexplicable at first, the explanation is quite simple: feathers, initially adapted for insulation, were subsequently co-opted for flight.
No, you can’t have my angina pills back
In an article titled “Serendipity Arrangements for Exapting Science-Based Innovations,” published in Academy of Management Perspectives, my co-authors and I explore these ideas in the context of organizational innovation. Although we are not the first to theorize about exaptation in the context of organizations, we push the idea in some new directions by drawing on our prior empirical research and linking to our work on the role of narratives and serendipity.
In our article, we discuss several well-known innovations resulting from organizational exaptation. For example, Viagra was originally intended as a treatment for angina. Although it performed poorly in this regard, patients refused to return the tablets because of unexpected side benefits. Likewise, a glue that did not glue was accidentally developed in a 3M lab in 1968, and spent more than a decade as a “solution looking for a problem” before Post-it Notes were commercialized in 1980.
Can you plan for accidental innovation?
While the word “accidental” implies a lack of planning, our work shows that organizations can proactively manage the serendipity that leads to accidental innovation. That is, certain organizational processes and practices both foster and harness happy accidents. Although you cannot schedule innovation, you certainly can organize for it—and against it.
Several threads pointed us in this direction. In an earlier paper, my co-authors and I had studied innovation practices at 3M, with a focus on the role of timing and temporality in innovation. In Greek, there are two different words for time: chronos and kairos. Building on this distinction, we observed and theorized how 3M’s practices—such as its famous 15% rule—“encouraged employees to cultivate events driven by serendipity and opportune moments (i.e., kairos), even as they paid attention to events driven by schedules and clock time (i.e., chronos).”
3M’s CEO appeared to recognize this difference: “Invention is, by its very nature, a disorderly process. You can’t put a Six Sigma process into that area and say, ‘Well, I’m getting behind on invention, so I’m going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday.’ That’s not how creativity works.”
Instead, interaction and exchange are critical to innovation. By comparison, the idea of the lone, heroic inventor is a myth. For instance, inventions commonly ascribed to Edison were not developed by a single person, but resulted from collective organizational processes. To be sure, information-sharing is a part of what takes place when people interact, but innovation requires more than the exchange of information.
In particular, our research stresses the importance of meaning-making in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. That is, information-sharing is necessary but insufficient to set in motion the kinds of exaptive and serendipitous processes that drive innovation. Rather, innovation is driven by interpretive flexibility in the meaning ascribed to information.
From this perspective, the key organizational capability is more than just openness. You need the capacity to tell a new story about what a particular piece—or more likely, chain—of information means, both now and into the future. Without this narrative capacity, information alone won't lead to innovation.
What organizational practices can be implemented to drive innovation?
From a strategic standpoint, executives and boards should be thinking about the key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow them to grasp the richness of the interactions fostered by their coordination processes. This is a cultural question, not a technical one. Organizations can implement processes and practices that allow people to bump into each other and to actively contribute to different cross-functional groups.
For example, an internal technology fair is a low-cost event with very high potential to foster innovation. Other examples include hackathons and entrepreneurial “boot camps” focused on identifying and developing business opportunities for proprietary technologies. Fostering cross-functional interaction (e.g., between researchers and engineers) through joint brainstorming sessions and forums is another way to drive innovation.
It is also important to provide opportunities for employees to engage more deeply with each other, share ideas, overcome obstacles, and develop new solutions beyond merely “bumping into each other” and sharing information. In innovative companies, people from different departments may work on prototypes together for weeks or even months at a time. An organizational structure that is flexible enough to enable employees to deviate from their regular teams and project schedules to fully explore innovative ideas can be fruitful in this regard. Here it is also interesting to think about how the shift to hybrid and remote work might both enable and constrain such potentialities.
Formal organizations and associated management practices are among humankind’s greatest innovations. However, they are also intrinsically contextualized activities. What works in one place and time may be disastrous in another place and time. Accordingly, great leaders facilitate and role-mode a mindset of contextual awareness and understanding.
Applied to the problem of innovation, ideas must be carefully translated from one context to another. The process is likely to entail both sensing and seizing the serendipitous moments already taking place within your organization, leaning into processes that surface them, and looking for ways amplify them further.
Taking stock of “serendipity arrangements,” as we call them, may also reveal opportunities to graft on new practices and processes. For instance, perhaps your organization already has a set of well-established practices around sharing innovations, such as fairs and hackathons, but seems to lack the organizational infrastructure to remember what it knows over time. If so, how can you foster an enhanced institutional memory? Alternatively, perhaps you are not capitalizing on what you know; ideas are being shared and stored, but commercialization is not happening.
Whatever the specific circumstances, our work suggests that great leaders foster highly innovative organizations by role-modeling and facilitating an exaptive mindset.
© 2023 Joel Gehman
Joel Gehman distills principles for today’s leaders from the latest academic research, some but not all touching upon his main research foci: “grand challenges” like climate change, and “remaking capitalism.” The author of more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and more than a dozen business school teaching case studies, he is Professor of Strategic Management & Public Policy, and the Lindner-Gambal Professor of Business Ethics at The George Washington University School of Business. Joel lives in Northern Virginia.
Further reading
Garud, R., Gehman, J., & Giuliani, A.P. 2016. Technological Exaptation: A Narrative Approach. Industrial and Corporate Change, 25: 149–166.
Garud, R., Gehman, J., & Giuliani, A.P. 2018. Serendipity Arrangements for Exapting Science-Based Innovations. Academy of Management Perspectives, 32: 125–140. .
Garud, R., Gehman, J., & Kumaraswamy, A. 2011. Complexity Arrangements for Sustained Innovation: Lessons from 3M Corporation. Organization Studies, 32: 737–767.
Gould, S.J. & Vrba, E.S. 1982. Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form. Paleobiology, 8: 4–15.
Merton, R.K. & Barber, E. 2004. The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.