As much as I hate the status-quo, I've been burnt enough times participating in new ways of working together that I'd now explicitly look for prior art before i

As much as I hate the status-quo, I've been burnt enough times participating in new ways of working together that I'd now explicitly look for prior art before innovating on them. There is a historical, evolutionary reason for things to be the way they are. The status-quo however is path dependent, and great innovation happens when we figure out the implied assumptions that were path dependent, but are no longer true. The Tyranny of Structurelessness has been brought up here multiple times, but it is still a good reminder for the brave ones pushing boundaries: "For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites." - http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm