I’ve been noticing what I think is called a "quickening" … there are anecdotal reports and more formal pieces flooding in from almost everywhere about the dawning realization by more and more people and sectors that the forces of curious and engaged people combined with hyperlinks and easy means of publishing material are having an increasing impact on:
- politics
- governance
- business communications, both with customers and employees
- traditional media
- advertising, one of the largest and most ubiquitous industries worldwide
… and no doubt a wide range of other areas of organized human activity. You can think of them and almost everywhere you will look you will find evidence of this happening. Our lives and our daily activities are becoming intertwingled with the net.
Here’s one example:
On a Networked World and "Tribal Mind" (Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge blog)
It seems to be that networks evolve, they are emergent, while hierarchies are designed. In effect that are enforced stabilities (and useful as such) whereas networks are fluid. In a hierarchy the entity is the prime unit, the linkages secondary; in a network the linkages are prime, the entities secondary and fluid.
Here’s another (the FastForward Enterprise 2.0 blog)
The User Revolution - The E2.0 Take
How does this apply to the Enterprise? If you think of Corporate Communications as “advertising” and culture as “lifestyle”, then the employee user needs to be connecting to the content or communities they seek and the employee needs to contribute back to the enterprise discussion. In other words, it’s a bottoms-up world emerging and how the company’s senior management manages and disseminates information is being upturned.
There are countless others, and as I said above, the reports are flooding in incessantly now.
Will we see more written about what will probably come to be called Management 2.0 ? No doubt. Will there be massive struggles with this new set of conditions and ongoing resistance to coming to terms with these dynamics ? No doubt. Will resisting and ignoring and denying work ? Maybe for the short term, but these new conditions are not going away … and I posit that the issues engendered by linked interconnected bottom-up activities will necessitate significant amount of unlearning and re-learning, notably in the enterprise setting.
These issues have been building for quite some time now, really. On a personal level, I began speaking and writing about wirearchy in late 1999 … I was essentially ostracized from the professional and business communities with which I was involved because of my wild-eyed and assertive beliefs about the future conditions I believed were beginning to emerge. I noticed a shift towards a slightly less alienated, more accepting stance only in about 2004, and now I am guessing that there is much more receptivity to these messages.
Nevertheless coming to grips with and learning how to be effective in these conditions will take a lot of hard work, a lot of listening and coaching, and eventually whole new models.
Like I said not too long ago, there aren’t really any recipes or "solutions". But most people have common sense and the ability to practice and learn readily available to them.
Once more, with feeling ;-)
Wirearchy - a dynamic flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credinbility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology
Tags: Hierarchy, Enterprise 2.0, netroots, wirearchy
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