How Ideas Rise from Chaos
MANY DAY-TO-DAY workplace activities are characterized by ‘hierarchical structure’. For example, the lean-manufacturing system categorizes all components involved into clearly-defined categories, so that workers can easily distinguish between items and use the correct components on manufacturing lines.
In many cases, information is also highly structured in the workplace. Since employees are clustered around jobs and roles, both explicit information (as compiled in a job manual) and implicit information (which is implied or understood by the worker) are categorized by job function.
Without disputing the recognized benefits of hierarchical structure, I recently conducted research with Rotman PhD Candidate Yeun Joon Kim to determine if such structure might also come with a high cost: reduced creativity.
For our work, we defined creativity as ‘combinations of information that are both and ’. We used the term broadly, per the definition of ‘declarative information’, which includes ‘chunks’ of information such as objects, symbols and facts that possess distinguishable attributes. For example, a contains at least three pieces of declarative information: a seat, legs and a back — each of which refers to a specific part with unique attributes that are distinguishable from the others. In this sense, in the realm of
