More on Synthesis Institute origins

My conversation with Joe MacPherson (described in yesterday's post) discussed the context of Joe's research into "bridges" and why he'd done that research. As he related it, SRI management had found a slight decrease in their success rate for projects at a time when they'd expected a steady increase in successes. Nobody could figure out why, so they asked Joe to quietly look into it. After a few weeks, he came back and (in short) described how some assigned specialists (i.e., those later called "bridges") had unilaterally "jumped the fence" and found everyone else's work more interesting, asking other specialists basic questions, et cetera. Both project managers (because the bridges didn't stick to their knitting) and other specialists (because the bridges wasted their time answering uninteresting questions) frequently found the bridges annoying. Joe had determined, as I hinted in yesterday's post, that existence of one or more bridges on a project was a near-guarantee of success (and vice-versa).

The SRI managers asked Joe what he thought was going on; he said (I paraphrase) that in effect the bridges were the yeast that caused the dough to rise. The SRI managers asked Joe why their success rate had decreased (remember, this was his original assignment), and he said it looked like the project managers had gotten better organized and started black-balling bridges (because they were annoying). If you can imagine a conversation between a project manager (Jake) for an about-to-start project and another project manager (Mary):

Jake: "Mary, I have a couple of candidates for the Biology component of my new project, Ted and Nancy. I've never worked before with either; do you know either of them?"

Mary: "I've worked with both of them. Ted's a good solid guy; not as creative as some but gets his work done dependably. Nancy's a lot smarter and more creative, but she doesn't always get her work done because she gets distracted by what other people on the project are doing; in fact, I've gotten a few very-discrete complaints from some people that she wastes their time with basic questions."

Jake: "Thanks, I'll see if Ted's available."

More on my conversation with Joe tomorrow - stay tuned!