John Hagel and John Seely-Brown have a new piece on CNN Money called “Welcome to the Hardware Revolution” that nicely highlights an issue I touched on yesterday: the limits that institutionalized power — or the ways we institutionalize power — can place on learning and innovation.

I suggested, in passing, that business organizations rely on hierarchical models of command-obedience in order to achieve efficiency; but that doesn’t always work to their advantage (and the performance advantage to be gained from scalable efficiency, Hagel and Seely-Brown have argued elsewhere, isn’t anywhere near what it used to be). What these companies may gain in efficiency they lose in creativity, learning and innovation.

Here is what Hagel and Seely-Brown have to say in their “Hardware Revolution” piece:

many of the executives we speak with list talent development and innovation as top priorities, but for all they push, progress remains a struggle. Part of the problem is that most businesses’ institutional structures, hierarchies, and cultures actually limit the connecting, exploration, tinkering, and improvisation that make learning and innovation possible.

Increasingly, the sharing of ideas and new developments are taking place outside big companies or officially sanctioned workflows and processes, in what Hagel and Seely-Brown call “creation spaces.” These are spaces — communities, networks and cultures — conducive to what Illich would call conviviality: places real or virtual, open and decentralized, where people congregate to share tools and experiment together, learn from one another, try new things, and be part of a community of people with shared interests.

The article goes on to recommend some basic questions business executives can ask themselves in order to improve their companies and move them toward creativity, or at least get their bearings. But there’s another question looming behind those: the question how (in a large and established organization) you go about institutionalizing the kind of practices you find in creation spaces. Eventually, something’s got to give; and if it comes down to a decision between preserving organizational hierarchies and legacy models of how stuff gets done or opening the doors to creativity — how many will choose the latter?

Maybe the choice is not as stark as my title makes it out to be. Let’s just say there are better ways to spur creativity than to command it.