Many organizations behave much like biological organisms. It isn’t a coincidence that in one of the most important contributions to economic science of the last century, Richard Nelson & Sidney Winter made extensive use of biology as a metaphor for the evolution of organizational affairs. Their “evolutionary” economics are a matter of routines, mutation, replication and selection that scholars generally associate with a mixture of darwinism and lamarckism.

In contemporary organizations, select creative groups also enable such metaphorical discourse. In a credit union like Desjardins, for instance, a team assesses its position much like that of a bacteria. It develops ideas, artefacts, even products that it is able to share within and beyond its boundaries. It contaminates others, following epidemiological diffusion models whose virality may create strong counter-powers, alternative pockets of hierarchical resistance. It generates anti-conformist legitimacy. As far as the biological analogy goes, it is thus normal that the organism would like to get rid of it. But in this case, a little fever does little to help.

In large organizations these days, the demultiplication of informal communication channels makes it likely for such “bacterial colonies” to find places where they may nest up until they are ripe. They can identify specific dynamics they want to change, specific processes that are seemingly broken, and groom innovations and innovators to promote them at the forefront of the organization’s internal market of ideas. This is how the fuzzy front end works. A petri dish of ideas, innovators like bacterias, mutating, replicating, selecting their ideas. Virality isn’t only for YouTube. It may very well be happening, in a credit union near you.