如何以隨創對付意外【蘇筠】

Author: Millie Yun Su- Assistant Professor (Education) in Singapore Management University.  Research topics: innovation management, qualitative research, knowledge boundaries.

Literature Review: Expecting the unexpected? How SWAT Officers and Film Crews Handle Surprises (Bechky and Okhuysen, 2011)

Summary of the paper: How do organizations deal with surprises? Surprises can be positive or negative events that disrupt the standard progression of work.  By looking at two cases, film production crew and SWAT team, Bechky and Okhuysen found that organizations create and possess social and cognitive resources that enable bricolage in surprising situations. The implication is that socio-cognitive resources are embedded in organizational processes that enable members to adjust their roles, routines, and work, for dealing with surprises. 

What is socio-cognitive resources and why is it important?

Social and cognitive resources (socio-cognitive in short) are important for organizations to deal with surprises.  Socio-cognitive resources refer to shared task knowledge and common expectation for workflow.  Shared task knowledge is about knowing how to perform the other person’s tasks.  For example, when a camera operator didn’t arrive for work, other crew members who have some knowledge about camera operation ended up substituting work for the absent camera operator.  In the SWAT team example, when police found more suspects than expected, the lead officers changed their primary roles from covering the location to covering suspects.  Having knowledge about various tasks enable people to shift roles at times of surprises.   

The other socio-cognitive resource is common expectation for workflow, which refers to a shared understanding for how the work will progress subsequently. Film crewmembers had a common expectation for how many shots they wanted to complete in a day. When the day was coming to an end, crewmembers would modify the sequence of shots to pick up the speed of shooting.  In a mission of arresting suspects, as the SWAT team was going to blow up a door and found that the door was already open, they switched to “stealth entry” mode.  People having common expectation of what subsequent events should take place can adjust their rhythm and routines accordingly.      

Socio-cognitive resources are essentially developed from people’s regular, day-to-day interaction. However, one question is whether socio-cognitive resources can be created and accumulated the same way in virtual or cross-functional teams? The cases examined are team members interacting intensively in their work. However, people across different networks, functional departments, or even geographical regions have different goals, routines, language, and workflows.  They also have interpretative barriers preventing people to understand each other’s work.  Given the differences across teams and networks, whether or not and how they develop socio-cognitive resources could be a question for future research. 

What does socio-cognitive resources tell us about bricolage? 

While many existing studies of bricolage have looked at bricolage with physical resources, Bechky and Okhuysen’s study proposed that socio-cognitive resources are also used in bricolage process.  They identified three practices of organizational bricolage, such as role shifting, re-organizing routines, and reordering work.  Moreover, the authors elaborated on what kind of organizational processes create socio-cognitive resources. 

One organizational process is having meetings and plans to discuss how to go about the mission for the day.  For example, film production crew developed schedules to keep track of the production process, sequencing and time for each shoot. Film crew would take downtime to meet on ad hoc basis to discuss script, rehearse, running through scenes, and discuss how to improve the execution on the day of shooting.  For SWAT team, police officers held meetings to go through sketches of home, suspect photographs, surveillance videos, and location maps that help them to understand the mission.

The more people hold knowledge of certain tasks, the easier it is for team members to shift roles and thus enable the team to deal with surprises easier.  Therefore, both cases adopt a rotation process for people to learn about each other’s tasks.  For example, a lead officer in a SWAT team said, everyone in the SWAT team “is supposed to know everybody else’s job.”  Officers have to learn to teach others about what they learn in cross-training sessions.  In the film production setting, production assistants worked on tasks that gave them access to different departments, from lighting, to sounds to costumes. Having cross-functional learning expose people to have general knowledge about a variety of tasks, so that they can easily shift roles and adjust routines to keep up with sudden changes of the work.

Common knowledge about an opportunity enables bricolage across networks

One unaddressed issue from this study is, how do organizations recombine heterogeneous forms of resources for bricolage across different organizations?  Organizations have heterogeneous forms of resources, from material and physical, to cultural (i.e., norms and codes), organizational (i.e., process, practice) and to socio-cognitive (i.e., knowledge, collective understanding).  How do organizations recombine heterogeneous forms of resources?  Moreover, how do people across different networks and organizations conduct bricolage? 

Perhaps, it may be the shared understanding of opportunities that enable people to participate in bricolage across networks and organizations.  People across different networks have a common belief that an opportunity can be materialized, so they bring their best efforts.  In the Danish wind turbine industry, it is because actors from different domains (i.e., engineers, researchers, producers, and users) kept on enacting opportunities to learn and advance the wind turbine technology, so that they could simultaneously contribute to the bricolage effort (Garud and Karnoe, 2003).  In our study of Advantech's case, what enables them to make-do with heterogeneous resource is their shared understanding of opportunities (i.e., exploiting Kontron’s weak spots).  Therefore, the local distributors offer local knowledge and networks, and Advantech offer engineering knowledge and organizational process, to materialize an opportunity. This could be another possible direction to think about bricolage. 

References

Bechky, Beth A., and Gerardo A. Okhuysen. "Expecting the unexpected? How SWAT officers and film crews handle surprises." Academy of Management Journal 54.2 (2011): 239-261.

Garud, Raghu, and Peter Karnøe. "Bricolage versus breakthrough: distributed and embedded agency in technology entrepreneurship." Research Policy 32.2 (2003): 277-300.