Dec 16, 2020
Start Change and Innovation in Isolation
This post will introduce the membrane scaffold typology and how it can be used in change initiatives or in innovation in larger contexts.
It all started at the Global Scrum Gathering 2018 in Minneapolis, where this picture was drawn in the cafeteria during a conversation together with Woody Zuill.
The conversation circled around change initiatives in larger contexts and how the current system in place inhibits change due to misfit with the current paradigm. The point was that the current system is hostile to new thinking and will start to intervene and pick apart anything that doesn’t fit with the current paradigm. The conclusion was that it’s better to isolate the change initiative outside the current system or within robust boundaries where the environment is safe without hostile interaction with parts of the larger system.
About six months later I attended a Cognitive Edge webinar on scaffolding where a number of scaffolding typologies were discussed. The concept felt interesting and useful and after that I started to connect some dots with my conversation with Woody. You can read more about scaffolding here on Sonja Blignaut’s blog and there’s more out there if you search Dave Snowdens blog or the web.
This resulted in some thoughts on another typology that I call a membrane scaffold. It relies on robustness to create something resilient and here’s a metaphor from human biology to describe the essence of this typology.
During the pregnancy, the human fetus starts to develop within the uterus inside the amniotic sac surrounded by amniotic fluid. This creates a healthy environment for the fetus to grow resilient and prepare for a life outside. The amniotic sac acts as a robust membrane which encapsulates the fetus from the outside toxic environment. Through the umbilical cord, exchange of nutrients supports long term development. If the membrane breaks before the baby is resilient enough for a life in the larger system, it cannot survive. But if all goes well and when the baby is resilient enough, the membrane breaks and the scaffold is there by removed to enable life outside the isolated environment. At that point other support structures take over for further development and the previous scaffold is no longer needed. Another example would be a chicken egg but without the umbilical cord, with the egg shell as a robust membrane isolating the environment.
If you think about it, most living things needs some sort of skin or exterior shell to differentiate the identity from everything else, the inside from the outside.
If you cut open an orange peel and expose the inside to the outer world, it will be infested with mold, insects and bacteria etc. They will dissolve the orange into the larger ecosystem and its identity will be lost over time.
If you want something new to survive within a certain context, you might want to isolate it first with a robust membrane or shell, and ensure it’s resilient enough to survive in the larger ecosystem before the membrane scaffold is removed. Otherwise you are likely to see new ideas dissolve into nothingness, or copied, dissected and distorted by surrounding entities beyond recognition and repair.
This also links to Dave Snowden’s Apex Predator Theory as timing and disruption in the ecosystem also affects the level of influence of new ideas.
Happy to hear others thoughts on this.
