Michael Lissack
As with LEGO, so too with ideas, knowledge, products, services, and the day-to-day activities that make up the modern organization. The next common sense is about increasing your ability to recognize parts and imagine how they might be recombined—not just in physical space, but across digital, social, and organizational dimensions. In an era of unprecedented connectivity and information flows, an or- ganization's ability to adapt to change is greatly enhanced by a concurrent ability to recognize components and imagine new combinations. New knowledge is formed by recognizing that a particular thing is made up of elements that can be combined in novel ways. Old knowledge becomes stagnant when systems are labeled as non-decomposable wholes or when possibilities for combinations are limited by arbitrary boundaries or rigid thinking. Today's most successful organizations—from tech giants to innova- tive startups to reimagined legacy companies—understand that combin- ing and recombining is not just a creative exercise but a fundamental ap- proach to thriving in complexity. This chapter explores how this principle operates in contemporary business environments and provides practical guidance for making it a core organizational capability. Building Blocks Are Integral to How We Think Imagine how confused and frazzled we would be if we had to treat everything we saw, every visual input, as a separate element. Imagine if we had to figure out connections anew each time we opened our eyes or moved them from one point to another. We don't see the world this way— instead, we see patterns. We have detectors to notice lines and boundaries. The world is organized in our eyes to highlight contrasts, before any infor- mation reaches our brains. We have other powerful organizers to frame the world, so that we group things together that are close to each other. When a flock of birds flies overhead, we see it as one flock, sharing a common fate. Each time the flock shifts direction, we don't have to track the trajectories of each bird individually. If one bird flies off on its own,
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