Balancing Venturi and Laissez-Faire Management Styles: Insights from Fluid Mechanical Analogs

Abstract

Mobilizing distributed Organizational Intelligence involves managerial efforts whereby the generation of new tacit knowledge requires dissemination of newly codified externalized knowledge. The managerial role in the early stage of knowledge creation is to support and stimulate the process of knowledge generation and to aid the diffusion of knowledge across organizational boundaries. In contrast, the subsequent 'harvesting' and goal-oriented application of knowledge requires convergence of human actors (H) as carriers of distributed intelligence (DI). Optimization of the organizational performance and improved workflow efficiency is best effectuated by applying insights from fluid mechanical analogs. Several such analogs are introduced here and these provide insight that helps to funnel tacit and explicit knowledge into tangible asset value. Three sets of managerial lessons are inferred from the analogs: (1) Social bonding between professionals needs to be stimulated because professionals with strong social bonds (S) can sustain effective workflows under relatively high pressures, while weak social bonds lead to turbulence and disruption; (2) Effective vision sharing is essential for goal-oriented and accelerated knowledge development in DI systems, and; (3) Managerial pressure may not overheat the critical limit that can be handled by resilient and strongly bonded DI networks, as this would result in disruptive turbulence even in experienced neural networks