I’ll Be the Terror Bird and You Can Be the Ostrich

10 August 2007 at 9:28 pm spostrel Leave a comment

| Steven Postrel |

In the July 2007 AMR, there is an interesting article by Matthew Cronin and Laurie Weingart that looks at “representational gaps” between differentiated specialists working together on problems like product development. They employ a Carnegie School approach and postulate that these gaps will tend to hinder joint problem solving. Different specialties conceptualize goals and constraints differently, they may have trouble communicating, and so on.

Obviously, these ideas overlap heavily (although, not surprisingly, with less than perfect coherence) with the kinds of things I’ve been working on for a while. What’s fascinating to me is that this looks like a case of parallel evolution. The authors come out of organization psychology and cite many, many articles from the Journal of Applied Psychology (and similar outlets) which I had neither read nor heard of before. (I’ll start looking at some of them now.) Clearly, disciplinary barriers have induced me to miss out on some things that might advance my research program.

On the other hand, the article contains not a single reference to any of the last thirty years of research in technology management and strategy on this exact topic of interdisciplinary collaboration. Of Tom Allen on technical communication or Eric von Hippel on sticky knowledge or Gabriel Szulanski on best-practice transfer or (cough, cough) Hoopes and Postrel on glitches or (cough, hack, wheeze) Postrel on islands of shared knowledge, there is no trace. Clearly, disciplinary barriers have caused the authors to miss out on some things that could advance their research program.

So two sets of scholars, two traditions, looking at the same phenomenon but not paying much attention to one another, are coming to very similar conclusions about what the real issues are. In evolutionary biology this kind of thing is apparently pretty well-known, with morphologically similar organisms evolving independently of one another due to similar selection pressures in separate but similar environments.

If I remember correctly, flightless birds with long legs and great running ability may have popped up independently at different times and places. There were “terror birds” in South America in the Cenezoic, kind of scaled-up scary-as-hell carnivorous ostriches, that I think evolved independently of today’s ostriches. Since tech management and strategy papers are mostly earlier than the org psych citations in the article, I call dibs on us being the terror birds in this metaphor. I’d rather be extinct than have somebody looking to turn me into a pair of boots.