Architects of collective imaginaries
What does beliefs and innovations have in common?
Being Architects of collective imaginaries is what defines us, whether we help building our everyday experience or adapt it to our needs and slowly contribute to reshape the reality we live in. Some of us, regular users, might be enjoying those experiences (moments of interactions with reality, be it economic, physical, social, scientific, biological…) as they were initially designed. And some of us (which in innovation are called lead users) might take action to challenge them as they don’t fit to our needs or goals anymore.
In this article we explore how projects, as vector of mutation for organizations and ecosystems, can be carried out by entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs as systems of beliefs.
Imagineries as vectors of collaborations
Have you read Sapiens ? For those who have read it, this could be the common start of what will come next in this article: admitting that as a human specie, we deliberately collaborate around a given and shared belief, a.k.a a human imaginary with functionalities that can be described and serve as a model to interact with each others, the world and our goals.
And for those who have not read Sapiens, Share this “belief” for a moment. Being it the imaginaries of Gods, as supreme human beings, with given traits of characters, Nations, as organized systems with given functionalities to socially and economically perform, Money and currencies as shared properties of trust medium and interactions facilitations…. all those imaginaries have in common to be adopted by the “Market”. Not necessarily an optimum, but the shared specific functionalities provided by solutions to a specific ecosystem of stakeholders at a given time. Think of Churches and believers, policies and citizens behaviors, trade communities and underlying sets of rituals or processes that bound such ecosystem of stakeholders…
Those imaginaries, once adopted, carry and make possible all the interactions and actions of the set of stakeholders; those who (and which) collectively thought it made enough sense to use it within their own beliefs as models to understand and interact together (as the author of being wrong, at the margin of error, Katrin Schulz, would put it).
That’s how it all got started, entangled systems of “dominant design” beliefs, “fit” enough for their contexts, to be adopted and built upon, to create the fabric of our current environment.
And it might not be such a different mechanism that makes a belief identified, adopted or acted upon, compared to having an innovation adopted…
The paradigm of Collective imaginaries or “dominant designs”…
This notion (see definition here) was underlighted within the engineering field. You could extend this notion to beliefs, which, as any object, as Herbert Simons would say, has a rational intention to express a given functionality in a given environment.
In other words, the one that would best fit (adopted in the sense of biological evolution or rational design in regard to context and goals), the right expression of a specific or several of the dominant design functionality(ies).
“ the distance between rationality and behavior is bridged by the concept of “decision”. A choice is a selection of one, among numerous possible behavior alternatives, to be carried out. Every behavior involves a selection of this kind, be it conscious or not. A decision is a process through which this selection is performed. Rationality is a criterion used in the decision that is theoretically grounded on the presupposition that the agents are intendedly rational. In other words, the agents value rationality as a criterion of choice and it is in this sense, and by this route, that rationality is taken as an explaining principle”.
As one’s build or deconstruct existing and new collective imaginaries, one’s build and regenerate collaborations among stakeholders, be it society, markets, organizations, communities and individuals, all being subsets of collective imaginaries architects. Interacting with the given collective imaginaries that a first set of architects would have built or transformed, a new set of collective imaginary architects arises: users that will have in common to be active agents and play with those suggested imaginaries to build, adopt and mutate beliefs as they interact with their own context and reality (with more or less rationality).
This, as an eternal refinement of functions, for better accuracy. Be it for self serving, mutually beneficial Prisoner’s Dilemma like interactions or altruistic ones, or non-rational behaviors. That’s where the dominant design might get out of control (see this article in FR illustrating how existing technologies and their initially adopted dominant designs could express in other contexts).
Intrapreneurs and Entrepreneurs, Archetypes of collective imaginary Architects
Like Herbert Simons, our crew We design Tomorrow is passionate about organization and their ecosystem design to foster deep techs with meaningful and sustainable value. Most of those technologies will imply and require incredible change in the collective imaginary of entire industries.
Diving into management science, the concept of “ambidextry of organisations” from Midler, I was seduced by the fact that they could both organize for business as usual and breakthrough design adopting both properties. But this means the organizations need to equally believing in it. After collaborating with numerous scholars while developing our methodology ECOS and diving in various methodologies ( RCOV from IAE lille, CK theory from CGS Les Mines), we could clearly observe that projects are vector for organizations and their ecosystems mutations. Wether they are incremental innovations, regenerating existing ecosystem and organisations or breakthrough innovations, wich will require to forget part of the collective imaginary of the organization, its ecosystem, it’s solutions and processes for which it was organized… (known definition as Hatchuel, inventor of CK would put it).
And who carries project(s)? The ones “building the unknown” or destabilizing collective imaginaries are nowadays grouped into intrapreunarial or entrepreunarial categories of change makers, currently defined by their organization VS Startup/spinoff belonging, with a similar «posture» and facing remarkable & shared challenges. Both Entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs have to navigate uncertainty with the most efficient learning path, building the minimum set of internal and external stakeholders for development, adoption and value demonstration, driven by knowledge and value creation goals. This forms what we called the Minimum Viable Ecosystem of the project.
As beliefs are acquired — either because they fit into existing set of beliefs (incremental innovation) or are too strong and replace an existing belief (breakthrough innovation) — building versions of the collective imaginary of one’s innovative solution, not a fixed belief, is key to allow a dynamic selection of the right ecosystem at each step of the innovation deployment. This only, can guarantee that functionalities are aligned with this environment of contexts and or stakeholders and rightly foreseen and tested. In other words refining a shared system of belief, where stakeholders have a common understanding on how solution(s) are or (will be) designed, delivered, experienced and their associated value brought and generated for this set of stakeholders.
Cudos to them for building our current system of beliefs. Those architects of collective imaginaries both built and deconstructed imaginaries upon which we constructed in our turn the beliefs that shape our interactions and behaviors as society today. And that is what every innovation project mean in the end, shaping part’s of tomorrow’s society (Design for a real world,Victor Papanek, was a great precursor book on such role).
Collective imaginaries architects as ultimate knowledge managers
Simons first refered to Humans as “category experts” only capable of learning through category lists and mindset”. Later in the late nineties, management science experts such as CK practitioners reinforced this category notion by stressing how collective imaginaries fixate us as well as given knowledge on a topic, and how it would need to be defixated for creativity and breakthrough solutions. Schulz recently named those collective imaginaries and each of our own versions, our beliefs, as the intricated knowledge and capacity to act and interact with the world and others (we have to believe a bed will be solid enough to lay on it). In innovation, some are shared beliefs amongst most stabilised objects and not yet aligned or misaligned beliefs about the unknown objects.
If we adopt this perspective, Innovation is ultimately the capability to build or refine beliefs, models that helps us interact with reality and stakeholders, according to context and goals. One would argue that successfully building new collective imaginaries cannot be separated from the need to stabilize an intermediary and common collective imaginary with it’s associated ecosystem of stakeholders at each step of an innovation deployment.
Buy-in and cohesion of stakeholders will only be acquired through building shared beliefs and collective imaginary of breakthrough innovation for which sometimes some degrees of products, processes, technology on which it will rely, do not exist yet.
This requires more than ever empathy to build a strong understanding of the stakeholders game and interactions, as well as the ability to explore new beliefs and really go beyond one’s established collective imaginaries as industries and given ecosystems.
