According to Haas and Ham, it’s knowledge flows that are most critical for breakthroughs. Since all individuals are prone to information overload, when facing a task they tend to be “cognitive misers”, relying on shortcuts to determine which information is useful in that context. Because of that, work groups will be most likely to give their attention primarily to information that seems very relevant to the task at hand – that is, knowledge that is part of the “core” domain. But knowledge flows allow information from peripheral domains to seep in. Why? “Information that is available in an individual’s short-term memory” – that is, knowledge flows – “is more cognitively accessible, and thus more likely to receive attention, than information that is stored in that individual’s long-term memory” – or knowledge stocks.
There are other dynamics that come into play as well. When more than one member of a work group engages in a peripheral domain, that domain is more likely to play a role in breakthroughs. However, the authors note, there is a trade-off: Paying increased attention to one region of peripheral knowledge shrinks attention to other domains that just might inform the core task in a useful way. If attention spans had no limit, it wouldn’t matter.
But attention has limits for individuals and a group. Such limits impose opportunity costs, when attention to one domain sacrifices attention elsewhere. “In a sense, peripheral domains are in competition with each other for the attention of work group members: more attention for one means less attention for others,” they write.
Cooking or archery?
The problem, according to Haas, is that the likelihood that any one peripheral domain will pay off in terms of innovation is very low. There’s no way to know in advance whether musing about medical devices, cooking or archery will inform a groundbreaking sports shoe design. With that in mind, the authors note: “It is reasonable to expect that work groups are more likely to encounter a valuable source for idea transplantation or perspective shifting if they pay attention to a broader range of peripheral domains.”
For that reason, Haas and Ham write, attention capacity becomes a critical factor. Attention capacity has two elements: time that each member of the work group can allocate to the task, and the amount of time that the group as a whole has to complete the task. In many organisations, members of work teams often have more than one assignment that impinges on each other. The authors suggest that an individual’s attention capacity for a task – and therefore the ability to focus on more than one peripheral knowledge domain – is higher if he or she is assigned to spend, say, 80% of total work time on the assignment instead of 20%. Moreover, workers’ attention capacity is greater when the duration of a task is six months instead of six weeks.
The authors conclude that if work group members have more attention available to devote to the task or project, “the advantages of … attention to a particular peripheral domain will be more likely to outweigh the disadvantages arising from distracting attention from other domains.”
Incubation theory, according to Haas and Ham, supports the idea of taking breaks and engaging in outside activities while working on projects requiring innovative thought, and they note that their research helps to support that. They add that their ideas about peripheral knowledge would be most applicable “in contexts in which it is reasonable to expect that breakthrough innovation can be driven by ideas from seemingly irrelevant domains, such as creative industries, product design or entrepreneurship” – as opposed to fields that have “rigid problem-solving paths”, such as mathematics.
Should managers then encourage workers to engage in outside projects and hobbies and share their seemingly irrelevant experiences with their teams when working on a project? The answer is tricky. “This prescription has its own risks,” Haas and Ham write, “since the resulting likely increase in attention to peripheral domains will simultaneously reduce attention to core domains. At the extreme, work group members might spend all their limited attention focusing on domains that are not only seemingly irrelevant but actually irrelevant to their task, severely impeding their performance on that task.
“There is no easy managerial intervention here,” they conclude. “Nevertheless, our hope is that our theoretical analysis has revealed insights into the knotty nature of these challenges that can offer managers a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs they face in striving to achieve their innovation aspirations, as well as helping to further organisational scholarship on the complexities of breakthrough innovation.”
At this early stage, says Haas, “all you can say is that you want people to be aware of peripheral ideas and that you should encourage groups to express ideas from outside the core task – while keeping a watchful eye on the attention capacity of the work group.”
