Despite the cold scrambled egg breakfasts and ubiquitous power point presentations in my monthly networking groups, I try to stay alert to new ideas and intriguing new terms, like this one: “Integrated Marginality”. I googled it and found studies done decades ago on disenfranchised groups marginalized by race, language, socioeconomic barriers. These studies were largely published in order to reduce the marginality of these groups, and to promote their cultural integration. Fair enough. But were there more recent references?
Googling “corporate marginality” spawned a whole different application- along with an intriguing study on the correlation between marginality and innovation. J. Andrei Villarroel, and Filipa Reis conducted their 2010 research within a large global corporation – Innocentric. The company was trying to implement a common online crowdsourcing platform for innovation across its multiple business units. The study was confined to two distinct marginal types: site marginality – those working at a distance from the corporate epicenter (let’s call our example here “Joyce” – she’s Director of Operations in, say….Davenport, MO), and rank marginality; applied to lower rungs of the corporate ladder (meet “Hank” – a customer service rep within the corporate epicenter). Traditionally, within the culture of Innocentric, Joyce and Hank would not have been asked for design input, as that kind of expertise would have been considered the wheelhouse of IT alone. But because they had agreed to site the study, Innocentric was required to access input from…Hank and Joyce.
With Joyce’s grasp of the requirements of her site operations, designers could make sure that the new platform was accessible across multiple sites, without requiring much adjustment in individual locations. Over time, this ease of communication with regional sites provided the central location with information on a variety of customers and plant processes that proved critical to ongoing operations for the entire company.
In accessing input from Hank, the ultimate design benefitted from the direct hands on experience Hank had with customers, regardless of the fact that Hank’s expertise is not in software development. And because Hank and his team were not benefitting directly from interaction from the corporate hierarchy, they did not expend as much of their professional focus trying to please their superiors, and could contribute novel ideas and innovations based on actual ground level experience with customers. This is an important distinction that runs counter to the top-down communications often implemented in so many traditionally structured companies.
Innocentric saw the light. As a result of input from these two marginalized groups, they developed a successful channel to continue soliciting input from all levels of the company culture for future innovations and more effective customer service.
It’s not always easy to access ideas from the margins, which is why it needs to be intentionally cultivated. First, trust has to be in place – trust that input is genuinely solicited and will be utilized, and trust that this is not a strategy to flush out and punish the outliers. If you are aligned with the traditional hierarchy, but functioning within a corporation that requires innovation (and who doesn’t need that?) you’ll want to begin creating a culture of trust in your departments. One means of achieving this is to introduce something new to everyone, so that higher ups and lower downs are all starting on the same page, and can experience some authentic interactivity. I’ll suggest a highly interactive real time game structure that can get everyone engaged and contributing, particularly on issues with managing corporate change. Shift POV can help begin this process.
Don’t leave Hank and Joyce out of your company’s future. Your next innovation may depend on them.