Evolutionary boundary spanning

The ability to deliberately broker novelty, recombination, and the organisation’s capacity to adapt intelligently across boundaries.

Leaders with strong evolutionary boundary spanning understand that organisations do not evolve by refining what they already know. They evolve by importing difference. New ideas, practices, and business models enter the system through its edges, not its centre, and are recombined through relationships that span functions, disciplines, organisations, and industries.

Rather than working primarily inside their own silo, these leaders operate in the white space between groups. They translate language, align meaning, and broker connections between communities that would not naturally collaborate. They cultivate weak ties, bridge structural holes, and act as carriers of novel information across boundaries.

Evolutionary boundary spanning shifts leadership from optimising within silos to stewarding the organisation’s evolutionary edge. By accelerating the movement and recombination of ideas, leaders increase the organisation’s capacity to sense change early, learn faster than competitors, and adapt under conditions of uncertainty. Without this capability, organisations become inward-looking, repetitive, and eventually brittle, even when operational performance appears strong.

“Innovation happens at the intersections.” — Frans Johansson

Why evolutionary boundary spanning matters

Evolutionary boundary spanning matters because, in complex environments, advantage depends less on how well organisations optimise internally and more on how quickly they absorb and recombine external intelligence.

Most organisations fail at this not because they lack talent or data, but because their networks are structurally inward-looking. Information circulates within silos, meaning forms locally, and novelty is filtered out as “not how we do things here”. By the time new ideas surface through formal channels, they are often late, diluted, or misaligned with the organisation’s lived reality.

Leaders who lack evolutionary boundary spanning tend to invest heavily in internal optimisation. They refine processes, standardise behaviours, and scale what already exists. These moves improve short-term performance, but quietly reduce the organisation’s exposure to difference. Over time, the system becomes efficient but blind, well-run but brittle.

When leaders develop evolutionary boundary spanning, leverage shifts to the edge of the system. Weak ties become active sensing channels. Structural holes become pathways for recombination. External ideas enter earlier, travel further, and are translated into local meaning faster. The organisation becomes better at learning in motion rather than reacting after disruption has already arrived.

Under pressure, the difference becomes visible. Instead of launching large, late transformations, leaders are able to make smaller, earlier adaptations. Instead of reacting to competitors, they begin shaping emerging patterns. Instead of relying on heroic innovation projects, novelty becomes a continuous property of the system.

Most importantly, evolutionary boundary spanning increases adaptability without increasing complexity. It strengthens the organisation’s ability to evolve through everyday leadership behaviour rather than episodic change programmes.

“Not all the smart people work for you, so you need to find and tap into the knowledge and expertise that exists outside your company.” – Henry Chesbrough

What good and bad looks like for evolutionary boundary spanning

What weak evolutionary boundary spanning looks like (Silo optimisation)	What strong evolutionary boundary spanning looks like (Evolutionary brokerage)
Efficiency fixation: Invests mainly in improving existing processes and models.	Novelty investment: Actively creates channels for importing and testing new ideas.
Network closure: Maintains dense internal networks with few external weak ties.	Network openness: Sustains wide, low-friction connections across boundaries.
Meaning insulation: Interprets issues only through local language and assumptions.	Meaning translation: Actively translates between disciplines and organisational dialects.
Gatekeeping: Restricts access to people, data, and decision spaces.	Gatewaying: Creates access and connection pathways across silos and organisations.
Edge neglect: Rarely engages with customers, partners, or peripheral groups.	Edge presence: Regularly operates where new patterns and anomalies appear first.
Internal benchmarking: Compares mainly against internal standards.	Cross-domain sensing: Scans other industries and disciplines for transferable practices.
Reinvention reflex: Builds solutions already proven elsewhere.	Recombination mindset: Adapts and recombines proven ideas into new contexts.
Static social capital: Maintains long-standing but narrow professional circles.	Social capital renewal: Continuously refreshes networks to sustain exposure to difference.
Local problem solving: Solves issues inside silos even when causes span boundaries.	Cross-boundary brokering: Brokers problems and solutions across organisational lines.
Short-term optimisation: Improves current performance at the cost of system learning.	System learning stewardship: Protects learning, experimentation, and recombination across the whole system.

“Weak ties provide people with access to information and resources beyond those available in their own social circle.” – Mark Granovetter

Barriers to evolutionary boundary spanning

Internal optimisation gravity: Leaders feel pressure to improve what already exists. They invest attention, funding, and recognition into refining current processes and products because these deliver visible short-term results. Over time, this pulls leadership energy away from the edges of the system, starving the organisation of exposure to difference and quietly collapsing its capacity to evolve.

Comfort-zone networking: Leaders default to familiar domains, known peers, and safe professional circles. Relationships outside their discipline, industry, or worldview are treated as optional rather than essential. As weak ties decay, the organisation loses its early warning system for emerging change.

Not-invented-here reflex: External ideas are filtered out because they do not match existing models, language, or standards. Leaders protect internal coherence at the expense of adaptive learning, mistaking familiarity for quality and control for effectiveness.

Translation avoidance: Leaders allow specialised language and local dialects to remain unexamined. Misalignment is blamed on “communication problems” rather than on untranslated meaning. Over time, this fragments learning and prevents ideas from travelling across boundaries.

Edge neglect: Leaders spend most of their time at the centre of the organisation where performance is measured and controlled. They rarely operate at customer, partner, or frontier interfaces where new patterns appear first. Novelty is detected late and often already stabilised elsewhere.

Static social capital: Networks are allowed to age. Leaders rely on long-standing professional relationships while failing to deliberately refresh their weak ties. This reduces exposure to new perspectives and locks the organisation into its own historical worldview.

Reinvention comfort: Leaders repeatedly solve problems internally even when proven solutions exist elsewhere. Effort is spent rebuilding what is already known, slowing adaptation and consuming capacity that could be used for recombination and experimentation.

Local problem framing: Issues are defined and solved within functional boundaries even when their causes span the wider system. This creates fragmented fixes and prevents cross-boundary learning.

Risk aversion to difference: Difference is treated as disruption rather than intelligence. Leaders suppress divergent perspectives to protect speed and consensus, unintentionally removing the very signals that indicate where adaptation is needed.

Late sensing bias: Leaders wait for trends to appear in formal reports, competitor moves, or market data before acting. By the time change is formally visible, the system has already moved on.

“Competing on the edge requires managing the boundary between order and chaos, stability and change.” – Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and Shona L. Brown

Enablers of evolutionary boundary spanning

Edge sensing discipline: Leaders deliberately spend time at customer, partner, and frontier interfaces where emerging patterns appear first. They treat anomalies, workarounds, and weak signals as early intelligence rather than noise.

Weak-tie infrastructure: Leaders maintain broad, low-friction connections beyond their immediate domain. These are treated as sensing and learning infrastructure rather than as optional relationships.

Recombination practice: Leaders actively import, adapt, and combine ideas from other industries and disciplines rather than rebuilding internally what already exists elsewhere.

Translation stewardship: Leaders translate language, assumptions, and meaning across silos so that ideas can travel beyond their point of origin and be understood outside specialist communities.

Gateway leadership: Leaders create access rather than restrict it. They open data, people, and decision spaces so that ideas and solutions can cross organisational boundaries easily.

Network renewal discipline: Leaders intentionally refresh their relational landscape to prevent their worldview from becoming historically trapped.

System-level problem framing: Leaders define problems at the level of shared causes rather than local symptoms, bringing all relevant groups into sensemaking before acting.

Difference-seeking discipline: Leaders deliberately include dissimilar perspectives in decisions, recognising that divergence is a signal of system intelligence rather than a disruption to be managed.

Early-signal activation: Leaders act on emerging signals while they are still small, enabling low-cost adaptation rather than large-scale late transformation.

External learning loops: Leaders establish regular pathways for external insight to enter internal decision processes.

“Exploitation of old certainties and exploration of new possibilities are fundamentally different learning activities.” – James G. March,

Self-reflection questions for evolutionary boundary spanning

Where did the last materially new idea that improved your organisation originate, and how quickly was it integrated into decision making?

Which boundary relationships currently contribute most to your organisation’s ability to adapt?

How much of your leadership time is spent where performance is measured compared with where new patterns and opportunities first appear?

Where are you most successfully importing and adapting ideas from outside your immediate domain?

Which assumptions in your strategy have been most strengthened by external or cross-domain perspectives?

Where have cross-boundary collaborations produced better solutions than silo-based efforts?

Which parts of your network have you deliberately renewed in the last year?

Which dissimilar perspectives have most constructively influenced your strategic sensemaking?

Where are you detecting emerging changes early enough to make small, timely adaptations?

In what ways is your leadership making it easier for new ideas to move across organisational boundaries?

“Sensemaking is about the interplay of action and interpretation rather than the influence of evaluation on choice.” – Karl E. Weick

Micro-practices for evolutionary boundary spanning

1. Run an edge-scanning circuit

Once a quarter, deliberately step outside your normal domain and spend structured time with customers, partners, startups, or adjacent industries. Do not ask for updates. Ask what feels confusing, inefficient, or newly emerging in their world.

Capture patterns rather than ideas. Look for recurring anomalies, workarounds, and frustrations. These are early signals of where adaptation will be required before it becomes obvious in your own organisation.

2. Maintain a weak-tie cadence

Create a simple personal cadence for renewing weak ties. Each month, reconnect with three people you rarely speak to who work in different functions, organisations, or industries.

Do not ask for favours. Ask what has changed in their world and what they are learning. This maintains your external sensing network and prevents your perspective becoming historically trapped.

3. Run a recombination review

Before launching any major initiative, ask a small group to identify similar challenges solved elsewhere, in other industries, or by competitors.

Review what can be adapted rather than rebuilt. Explicitly decide which elements will be imported, modified, or discarded. This turns innovation into recombination rather than reinvention.

4. Translate across one boundary

When working across silos, take explicit responsibility for translating language, assumptions, and success criteria between groups.

Summarise what each side means in plain language and confirm shared understanding before decisions are finalised. This prevents misalignment and allows ideas to travel without distortion.

5. Create one new gateway

Each quarter, deliberately open one new access point between your area and another part of the organisation or ecosystem. This might be shared data, shared meetings, shared pilots, or shared decision forums.

The goal is not collaboration for its own sake, but to remove friction so that ideas, problems, and solutions can move across boundaries more easily.

6. Act on one early signal

Choose one emerging signal that would normally be ignored because it is small, unclear, or not yet urgent.

Run a low-cost experiment or adjustment based on that signal. This builds the organisation’s capacity to adapt early rather than relying on large, late transformations.

This page is part of my broader work on complexity leadership, where I explore how leaders navigate uncertainty, sense patterns, and make decisions in complex systems.