Productive Friction: You Can Do More on LinkedIn Than Collect Links

Seeing and seizing new business opportunities requires a networked brain trust—one that is proactive.

In their new book, The Only Sustainable Edge, John Hagel and John Seeley Brown, make the case for productive friction. In essence they say the interesting and profitable business opportunities increasingly lie outside anyone's own expertise and require a mashup of intellectual capital. In other words, businesses and entrepreneurs need to find others who are at the fringe of their own knowledge and engage in conversation to figure out where potential synergies lie.

Think of it this way, you can't keep sharpening the same saw. Because of change, the challenges that create opportunities can seldom be seen from your current perspective. Nor can they be seized with the tools designed for past problems. Of course, the old problems are not completely gone and the old expertise is not completely obsolete. But, these tools and expertise need to be put in a new context—the context of today's challenges. That is, if one is interested in thriving not just coping.

If this sounds daunting and somewhat stressful, it is. However, it beats the stress and consequences of not facing the present and the immediate future. Hagel and Brown call it productive friction because it requires both or all parties to confront each other to find out what in the other and in their own practices are out of date (friction). And, it involves the discovery of a new perspective, one that could not be seen from either of the old view alone.

The new perspective has the potential of unleashing second-order effects. When Daimler and Olds invented the automobile some would say that they made the horse and buggy obsolete. But that was just the first-order effect. A second-order effect occurred because the new form of transportation enabled the development of suburbs and suburban lifestyle. Before this happened pizza parlors that delivered didn't make sense, neither did shopping malls or lawn mowers.

Here's how the networked brain trust comes into play. Social networking sites are marvelous at managing and foster a lot of weak-tie connections. Take someone on LinkedIn. If they have 80 direct connections, they probably represents people they know and already influence on each other. But, the number of potential connections through ones direct contacts could be well over 1,000,000. In this new pool lie many candidates for productive friction and the spawning of new insights and opportunities.

However, they are only candidate until someone makes a move. Yet, most people don't take action. The majority of LinkedIn users passively collect connections and hope something happens. LinkedIn and other aspects of Web 2.0 can be thought of as sites to log into, or they can be a set of proactive tools that can be used to address pressing business challenges. Creating and benefiting from productive friction is one of them.