The organizational triangle

As part of our 1990s effort to understand how people in our research department contributed to progress, we identified a number of traits that people exhibited. While we may have started with the idea of identifying the good and the bad, we soon switched to the good and the complementary good.

For example, problem solving was good, but what was the opposite or complement? We soon decided that problem identifying was the opposite.

A second type of effort in our research group was capability-driven. Chemists sought opportunities to use their chemistry knowledge. We realized that the complement to this was needs-driven. Needs-driven people are motivated by what people need rather than what they can do.

The final dimension that we identified reflected that fact that many of our colleagues were very oriented to logical and fact-based thinking, while others were more intuitive in their approaches.

This helped us understand that most people expressed themselves through a combination of these three dimensions and that some of the conflicts that we had could be explained by observing that the conflicts often reflected the view from opposite ends of a dimension. Fact-based people struggled with intuition. Problem solvers struggled with people who wanted to clarify the question, and so on. But we realized that organizationally, we needed a blend of these dimensions to succeed and we might benefit from assessing people’s behavior along these dimensions and putting them into positions that benefited from their preferences. It was not our opinion that these were fixed characteristics of a person, but closer to preferences in the sense that Myers-Briggs expresses preferences.

We then began to think about whether organizations could be characterized this way, as if they were individuals, and if so, how might we characterize the corners. Our decision was to assign the label “marketeer” to organizations dedicated to problem identifying. Capability-driven organizations were technical specialists. Intuitive companies would be creative generalists. We then thought about this in terms of what companies seemed to occupy which corners of the triangle. For example, we decided that Procter & Gamble was a marketeer, Dupont was a technical specialist, and 3M was a creative generalist. Of course, this was a massive over-simplification, but it made the point that success could be found my embracing one of these dimensions as a dominant theme.

Maybe this is interesting, but so what? Innovation requires bring a capability together with a need, combining facts and intuition, identifying then solving problems. Because most people occupy one side of the dimension, success may depend on finding someone at the other end of the dimension to help deliver that sort of perspective. Any important innovation will require input from all 6 perspectives and that means having a culture that enables all six perspectives to co-exist and to collaborate. Many organizations essentially divide people by these dimensions into “functions” and then permit barriers to reinforce the “special” nature of each function. In fact, each function is special and necessary, but will have limited impact without working with their complementary colleagues. Departments must find their complementary departments, and perhaps entire businesses need to find their complements to successfully innovate.