Innovation between redundancy and vicariance: the rising need for a culture of variety

Innovative processes, by their very definition, relate to phases of instability and transformation, characterized by the circumstances in which traditional schemes and models that belong to the cognitive endowment of the decision maker – and that can be defined as consolidated within its specific context of reference – appear ineffective, ending to be progressively not adequate, when reiterated in the attempt to be used to recover the balance of the organization. The concept of complexity – understood as the inability of the decision maker to perceive a problem by analyzing and detailing with usual procedures and proceeding to the identification of related solutions according to the consolidated schemes – has the characteristic of consistency with scenarios that are typical of the innovative processes. In fact, innovation is necessarily achieved through the preparation and implementation of change. Change, which should not be seen just as a substitution or replacement, intervenes determining new methods, alternative routes, procedures that are different from the usual. Having agreed that, in the interpretation of any innovative change, intervenes the use of a factor that can be defined as creative emphasis, as something that is necessary, but not sufficient, we proceed to point out that this factor indicates a mode, an emerging approach, which, different and new compared to the action of the past, cannot avoid borrowing the cognitive elements already present in the set of the organizational culture. What we want to substantiate is that the set of knowledge that is not usually used in the routine management processes, and is normally considered a burden, also in economic terms, compared to the productivity of the organization, becomes an element of wealth and opportunities in creative processes and organizational transformation. From these considerations, our contribution proposes the introduction of the concepts of redundancy and vicariance, and the need to define their role in fostering the notion of information variety introduced by the Viable Systems Approach, vSa (Barile, 2009).