Explore and Exploit - some background

Although it's been several years since this compare-contrast first hit me, I suppose I should make a note of a few of the resources that helped me see that this view/pattern is probably widespread.

1. This first came from my thinking about the Cynefin framework (as a taxonomy, in this case) in conjunction with business processes and innovation...I first saw this as Discovery and Execution. This morphed into Exploration and Execution.

When I went searching for literature with these terms, I came across a number of items, including the following:

2. John Hagel and John Seely Brown's disucussion of Push Programs and Pull Platforms.

3. "When Learning and Performance are at Odds: Confronting the Tension", Singer and Edmondson, Harvard Business School Working Paper. See especially Figure 3.

4. Various HBS working papers by Tushman, et. al. Two that I found useful were:
"Organizational Designs and Innovation Streams"
"Ambidexterity as a Dynamic Capability"

5. "Strategy and Your Stronger Hand" by Geoffrey Moore (Harvard Business Review, December 2005.

6. "Organizing for Innovation in the 21st Century" by Deborah Dougherty (Rutgers Business School September 2004) - this has a nice summary of various approaches to innovation

7. "Planning: Complex Endeavors" by Alberts and Hayes - one in a series of publications about complexity and NCW that was published by the DoD's CCRP. This publication is the follow-on to Alberts and Hayes' "Understanding Command and Control", also recommended. If you're completely unfamiliar with how complexity science relates to organizations, Czerwinski's "Coping with the Bounds" is not a bad intro.

I'm sure there are lots of other (and much earlier) writers who've discussed this...these just happen to be some of the folks that helped me see what seems to be a basic pattern. Now that I think about it, Klein's Data Frame model covers this space well (i.e., "elaborate" is Exploit, "question" and "reframe" are Explore).