Steve Case

Co-creating ..

.. is a term we’re starting to hear very often, and perhaps too often too soon.   I think it might cheapen and mis-direct the important process of making deep changes to the ‘colonization’ (by the rampant corporatism of today) of the exchanges between people that are necessary to create almost anything that finds form and expression.  

But clearly it’s important (generally) as a widespread new way of creating things and services, and getting things done by and with people.

The growth and spread of the term “co-creating” has led to significant interest in more open people processes, both in workplaces as well as other forms of organizations.  And more and more processes both conceptual and practical in nature from the domains of art, theatre, ludic play, improv, circus, farce and pantomime are being drawn together and applied to why and how people interact and create.

Participative processes like Open Space, World Cafes, Unconferences, Peer Circles and so on are beginning to appear in a range of hybrid forms wherever people are meeting and interacting to advance an interest, a topic or subject, a project, etc.

At the same time, in the wide-ranging realms of art and culture-making activities we’re witnessing the advanced stage of a long-term wrestling match between commercial forces and the various main forms of funding the expression of creative endeavours.

The explosions of creative technology we’ve been experiencing have spawned a series of sociological responses, in the form(s) of Barcamps, Wordcamps, Govcamps, Foo Camps, Unconferences, high-end celebrity-and-marketing-and venture-capital ‘experience’ markets, new cultural and artistic festivals with technology-and-culture-making themes.  There’s also a rapidly-increasing range of maker faires, many and various configurations of online education (viz. the recent explosion of interest in MOOCs), community-and-consensus building, organizing for activism and fundraising, and other similar events and happenings.

The impetus behind this explosion is both technological and sociological.

Technological … There has been an historical evolution of various kinds of technology over the past three decades, but for the purposes of this essay we are referring to information technology and the creation and evolution of the Internet and the Web.  When we speak of ‘co-creating”, most often we’re interested in the appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development.  The changes have been massive and fast, and touch virtually all areas of human activity.  And … it’s not going away.  As Stowe Boyd has said, “welcome to the post-normal world”.

Sociological … People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems. As awareness spreads and experience grows, more and more of these types of events and purposeful gatherings occur. Thus, the “get informed and take action” aspects of general culture are strengthened and reinforced, leading to yet more of these types of activities.

Developing familiarity and practice with open and collaborative processes are a way people can prepare for a messy and uncertain (post-normal) future.  These processes invite us to play and work together.  They occur in spaces in which people can 1) learn more about themselves and the courageous act of finding and using one’s voice, 2)  show and see how useful and positive it is to expose and discuss various ideas, 3) demonstrate how effectively they can operate together in a small temporary community of ideas and energy about an issue.  It can be seen as “practicing for the future”.

The orientation to open and participative is now regularly taking form  in the arenas of education, learning and organizational change.  The processes outlined above, and others using the same principles, are cheap, easy for people to apply with a few simple rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the ‘community’.  The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.

Today, our culture-making activities are well engaged in the early stages of cultural mutation. These processes are for these times.

What’s coming along next ?  “Smart” devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ?  Deep(er) changers to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ?  New mental models ?  Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?

Shorter cycle-based development and release of software and web services incorporating the latest user- and-market feedback characterize our environment today. A philosophy known as Agile development and the related approach to Agile programming are having a rapidly-growing impact on how software applications, functionality and platforms are being developed. Focusing on the participation of users with respect to their needs and ways of using software is an important signal or development. It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that has come to signify the implementation of intelligent sensors and software into objects that we find and use in daily life … clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoples’ daily life activities. This arena of concentration is experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used. The implications for the uptake of the IoT and the sociological changes it fosters are being explored and examined in media and network culture research centres, universities and think tanks in many societies.

The IoT concept is being combined with the new-ish concepts of Open Data and Big Data, and plays directly into the imagining of Smart Cities / Intelligent Cities. Many of the issues are known and understood, but carry the weight of necessary ethical, political and social impact policy decisions with regard to the presence of intelligent-and-connected objects and activities in our daily modern urban life.

The implications go beyond the tools and the political and economic effects of their use. Rob van Kranenburg, the author of “The Internet of Things” and colleague Christian Nold, recently published a document in which they discuss the future implications and ramifications of deploying the IoT. The new document is titled “The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World”.

This document makes clear that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoples’ activities and lives. It is expected that the proliferation of the IoT will introduce significant challenges, particularly with respect to dissembling the dominant mental model of commercializing the use of technologies and consumption of products and services generated thereby.

Therefore, they posit, we had better involve people in asking the appropriate questions about why, what, how, when and to do what with the IoT.

• Issue for people everywhere: reclaim a politics of technology that is based on the struggle over the terms of their own participation.
• Needed: a public debate and tangible design interventions that challenge the need for commercial tools.
• People from all walks of life have to be at the table when we talk about alternate uses of ubiquitous computing.
• We suggest an IoT as a non-commercial refuge … as an umbrella of emerging technologies that do not only serve capital but also facilitate grassroots survival networks in a world faced with ecological and social devastation. 

(Nold & van Kranenburg)

Whether or not these emergent issues become partly or fully commercialized, or whether they remain mainly in the domain of unfunded or grass-roots initiatives, it’s increasingly clear ‘we’ are on our way towards more integrated eco-systems of issues, people and technologies.

And in these new sets of conditions, participation and inclusion enabled by interconnectedness are quickly becoming the ‘new rules’.

In the new era of the Web of Things, if you want to build a better mousetrap …

you’ll need to ask the mouse.
(B. van Lamoen)

What the Future May Hold

Assessing and forecasting possible futures has become a legitimate domain of research and exploration over the past two or three decades. One of the powerful tools used in this domain is the ‘scenario planning’ approach, wherein alternative scenarios (usually three or four) are created based on looking at possible extrapolations and evolution of the current and emergent elements of our world’s politics, economics, anthropology, technology, psychology, sociology and philosophy.

Research observations, anecdotes and examples are combined with data to develop responses in a scenario format about a question or issue seen as important to our collective future. The responses are then crafted into the form of a narrative scenario which can be read, digested and explored. One of the best-known expositions of the method and its uses is available in the 1996 book “The Art of the Long View” by Peter Schwarz, a senior member of the renowned Royal Dutch Shell Strategic Planning Group.

A scenario planning exercise carried out by the Rockefeller Foundation looked at the possible futures for an interconnected world. The issues we face were assessed on the axes of Adaptive Capacity (low to high) and Political and Economic Alignment (weak to strong). The descriptions of the four possible scenarios shows us quickly how many of these elements are already in play. And of course, our collective future is likely to become some blend of these four scenarios as the components play themselves out in an increasingly complex world.

Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century – the full bloom of the industrial era – are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies.  For a couple of decades now we’ve been being told by future-seekers, philosophers and technological and social innovators that we will henceforth be living, working, playing and co-creating our future at the brave new frontier offered by the information-saturated ‘wired world’.

The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope. Whether we will shape this into an harmonious and effective new paradigm or some relative degree(s) of dystopia remains to be seen. As noted earlier, these are all early signs of cultural ‘mutation’ that are already with us.

Significant transformations and mutations demand new and effective principles and guidelines. Many are seeking to articulate the outlines and ‘rules’ of our new environment. However, it seems clearer by the day that new principles are emerging that can help guide us, individually and collectively, towards our preferred future

J. Husband & H. Macleod

The concept of wirearchy (other terms also have been used to describe the elements and dynamics of emergent network principles and guidelines) has been applied to offer insight into the manifest implications of this new environment.

Today, more and more people confirm seeing these principles in action in a range of important ways.

Wirearchy

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on
knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results,
enabled by interconnected people and technology.

- Jon Husband (1999)

More and more of the emergent activities associated with communities of people and interest coming together to engage around a problem, issue or opportunity contain the elements of wirearchy (knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results) at the core of the initiative.

Prominent examples include the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East, or the shocks to our traditional power structures administered by the appearance on the scene of Wikileaks, with its bias towards transparency that menaces established government dynamics. Alvin Toffler foresaw much of this in the 1990 book “PowerShift – knowledge, wealth and violence at the edge of the 21st Century” .. today this shift is indeed underway. Where will the shift will take us is an interesting (and still open) question.

To underpin and support that transition, it is becoming more and more useful to look at the utility of the principles of a domain that began emerging in the 1950′s and 60′s, in the early stages of the growth and development of what we know today as our modern society. The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory.  It’s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.

Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities. Perhaps the clearest enunciation of these principles applied generically to organized activities can be found in the six pillars of a philosophical approach called Participative Work Design, created in the 1960′s by Fred Emery (Australia) and Eric Trist (UK, US and Canada).

Participative Work Design – The Six Criteria
1.  Adequate elbow room – also known generically as ‘empowerment’
2.  Continuous learning – an obvious must
3.  An optimal level of variety – conscious avoidance of boredom or meaningless repetition
4.  Mutual support and respect – reciprocating, giving and getting help
5.  Meaningfulness – a clear sense that what one is doing is useful and aligned with personal values to an appropriate degree
6. A desirable future – people usually don’t want to invest time and energy in dead-end work

Using these humanist principles of organizational development, leading organizational complexity theorists have in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.

To date we have by and large existed and responded to conditions and contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.
Dave Snowden, ex-co-founder of the IBM Centre for Organizational Complexity, has over the past decade created and refined the Cynefin model for assessing and responding to these new challenges. It offers a well-synthesized and coherent framework for evaluating issues and conditions and then making decisions and taking appropriate action(s).

 
Cognitive Edge, D. Snowden

Much of today’s co-creative activities must and probably will find ways to come into being.  Indeed, a growing practical response to these various conditions (above) can be seen more and more frequently. Arguably, Occupy Wall Street was an early attempt to bring some global coherence to the power of peer-to-peer connection and conviction in the face of oppressive oligarchy / plutocracy.

Another useful example is offered by burgeoning peer-to-peer movement(s) unfolding around the world. The dynamics of co-creation are deeply embedded (if not foundational) to P2P activities. The proliferation of cultural festivals and events and happenings at salons, forums, galleries and other venues reflect participative responses to many of the challenges emerging from our growing societal complexity. These events and happenings are where people gather to view, wonder, communicate and explore the infinite ways art and culture stimulate reflection, attraction and the opening of minds and hearts.

People everywhere are seeing and feeling the loss of parts of their lives to the ‘enclosure’ of privatization and the diminishment of the commons (the public spaces where certain types of common services and goods are made available to the public).

Co-creating may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity. But .. the dominant models of commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is created are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing and dominant paradigm of proprietary commercial creation.

The post Co-Creating as Disruption to the Dominant Cultural Framework appeared first on Wirearchy.

It is the narrative text for a soon to come infographic video René is working on, seems for years, about the ongoing InfoMutation. Jon provided the English translation and René is offering him the web scoop for this.

Hope you like it, but as René says, with the graphics and soundtrack it’s going to be even more punchy … can’t wait to show it to the world soon.

By René Barsalo, mutant since 1984

================================================================================

We are living through the most important trans-generational media ‘fracture’ ever experienced in history. During the past 100 years, across most developed nations, each generation integrated an additional information technology into its daily life… one not known when the older generation was born.

Yet, regardless of all the innovations in communicating now at our doorstep and our hands, creating a consensus between generations for acting upon today’s societal problems has never before seemed to present such a complex challenge.

Why is that?

We are living through the fracture’s first impacts on collective human sense-making. Each of the generations alive today perceives part of the world differently, depending on how it interacts with our mediated world.

In order to better visualize the size and scale of this InfoMutation, let’s return to the very beginning of the complex system of human communications.

After basically grunting at each other for more than 33,000 generations, the first major transition occurred with the development of speech, which started approximately 3,300 generations ago. Since then, our daily life experiences and concepts generated words, which were transferred orally from tribe to tribe, humans to humans, and thus to our collective memory, generation after generation.

The next major transition occurred with the arrival of text and writing. Both appeared about 300 generations ago, in parallel with the growth of cities and the interactions necessary to carry out commerce. Written texts enabled information transfer beyond face to face interaction, time and space. They were passed about and shared hand to hand, and again from generation to generation. This enabled the cross pollination of ideas developed by scholars and diplomats. Nevertheless, most peoples’ knowledge remained constrained by the limits of shared languages and memory.

About 30 generations ago, the growth of interest in writing and texts was initiated by the arrival of typography and printing. This development increased the scale and speed with which texts could be circulated amongst people of all generations. However, the majority of people still remained confined to the use of oral language and memory, largely because of the limited growth and spread of literacy.

Along came the steam engine and the dawn of the Industrial Age, followed by the development of the combustion engine and the invention of electricity. The industrial revolution ‘centralized’ activities, mainly in factories which were mostly found in urban areas. The public school, a result of an alliance between the state and industrialists, was created to educate future workers in how to read instructions, newspapers and advertising, write reports and pay attention to and respect schedules and deadlines.

This mechanical acceleration of society, more or less consistent over the past century, has brought us to the beginning of the next transition, the electronic one. This new science of sending and interpreting electric signals unleashed the rapid development of a sequential series of major innovations, one generation after the next. This acceleration has brought us the edge of a real fracture between generations regarding how information is consumed and used.

If we estimate the moment when each of these new electronic medias has been adopted by the public at large, and thus taught to our children, the past century has unfolded rapidly and with dramatic impact on one generation after the next, as follows:

1910 – the telegraph, audio recording and cinema;
1925 – the telephone;
1940 – the radio;
1955 – television;
1970 – printed circuits and the fax machine.

And all of a sudden, starting in the early 80′s but growing exponentially since then, the media-based “fracture” has become a yawning chasm and initiated a new transition we still barely explored, the brave new world of digital information and connectivity:

1985 – the PC;
2000 – the Internet
2010 – mobility and gps

The degree and scope of change of the last century is something we never experienced before at such a scale in human history. No more long periods between major changes, periods of adaptation that allowed us to understand the impacts and then in turn teach and guide our children well. From elders to the very young, the changes in the processes and forms of interpersonal communications are now ongoing and constant.

The following quotation by Marshall McLuhan allows us to understand clearly the scale of the impact of the fracture. “Media, by altering the environment, evokes in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act — the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.”

After living through a consecutive series of arrivals of different forms of media and their subsequent integrations into our daily lives, it’s quite normal that each generation actually perceives at least part of its world quite differently from the other generations. Why? Each of them communicates and informs itself with the most recent information technology, but each generation perceives and uses them quite differently.

In parallel, just to add more complexity, innovations in health have more than doubled our life expectancy in the last 100 years, enabling us to reach an historical peak with respect to the numbers of different generations, living and working together in the same society.

With the arrival of the digital era, humanity is now split into two groups: those who only inform themselves and communicate in the physical world, representing almost two thirds of the human population, and those who also inform themselves and communicate in a digital and virtual world, which is essentially invisible and intangible to the first group. 30 years ago the second group did not existed. 30 years from now, they will be larger than the first one.

The generations born before the personal digital era, before 1985, were all educated in a world in which information, once it had been reproduced and distributed, stayed fixed forever on paper, vinyl or film. To access that information, one had to have physical access to the media upon which the information had been printed or recorded.

The generations born after 1985 are brought up and educated in a world wherein each word, each letter, image or location-derived coordinates can be indexed, modified, compared and shared with anyone else on the planet, without being printed, without a recording studio nor a media empire. In order to gain access to that information, the only requirement is access to a network online. Information can appear on a screen, on the wall or on a piece of paper so as to in effect re-appear, later, on the next interface of that day.

Those generations born before 1985 who have in an important sense been forced to realign their habits over several decades, must once again, question a significant part of their worldview in order to integrate the digital mutations being visited upon them. For those generations born after 1985, this brave new world is the only world they have known.

This media-based fracture impacting the generations, and now society at large, is also having significant impact at school and at work. The hierarchical model of knowledge transmission in the familiar top-down fashion is being put to the test on a daily basis with the meteoric arrival and spread of socially-networked human interactivity on vast global platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

In this new era of interconnected digital communication, just as with the beginnings of speech or writing, knowledge is created and disseminated daily. The major and never-before-experienced difference now is that real time is now measured in milliseconds, not moons. Co-creation of knowledge along with self-directed and continuous learning are becoming part of our daily lives.

Even though we are now finding a growing number of pre-1985 generations familiarizing themselves with the daily use of the internet, most of them are following their existing media habits, which they learned growing up: they send mail, and access their books, newspapers, radio shows and television … but in online formats. However, post-1985 generations perceive networks as extensions of their immediate, present-day environment, which enables real-time access to their friends, their colleagues, and to re-programmable technologies and re-usable, re-mixable knowledge … whenever and wherever they are on the planet. They are exploring in deep ways the possibilities of the digital environment, without assets or territory to protect.

Educated to levels never before seen, they rapidly understand the advantages the new set of conditions – interconnectivity and real-time flows of information – offer for new forms of coordinated action. They are demanding a “re-boot”, at least a major digital update of the political and economic systems of our planet. They feel ready to code their future. But those who sign the cheques, those who vote into place the laws and protocols and policies of our society are almost all from the pre-1985 generations. Already overloaded and pre-occupied by the management of daily issues and the growing impacts of rapidly-accelerating ecological, political and economic crises, they have little time to understand and grasp the opportunities of the digital environment. So they keep resisting it and pushing it back till “later”, thus not learning or knowing how to put this new environment into action and into the service of society at large.

If the ensemble of the managerial class had been educated with handwritten notes, big auditoriums and printed books, the class which will replace them in 30 years will have been educated with screens, interactivity and network-based collaboration. The rules which today regulate our identities, our territories and our economies have all been written for the pre-information-technology physical world… the only one known by humans up until the digital era. This InfoMutation is enabling new ways of interaction, some judged impossible within our traditional views of identity, space and time. The necessary changes for carrying out this massive digital transition are more important than a simple refresh or update.

Our new virtual memory recognizes us already, counsels and coaches us, knows our friends and carries out activities and transactions in our names. But what do we actually know about it? Where I live, as most industrialized countries, 45% of the population has lived at least the first half of their lives in the world of fixed physically-based information, 78% have been born before the arrival of the Web. Yet, the majority of the web natives still cannot vote because they are too young, but not for long.

Now is the time to share between all generations what we value the most of a non digital environment. Over the next several decades, this media-based fracture will close in upon itself when there will no longer be any witnesses to the pre-digital world. At this early stage of the infoMutation, we can still influence our future “digital” code of conduct, and teach our children to value time to think and share ideas and emotions, not just clicks. Some might consider it’s already too late. Others, including myself, consider it’s too late to be pessimistic.

Thus, we have every interest in the world in co-creating our digital future, together, elders and youngest, and assuring ourselves that all stages of human life will be positively encoded into the “great algorithm”, knowing full well, as McLuan once more noted, that “first we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us”… as did speech, text and electronic before.

René Barsalo, mutant since 1984
This short essay is inspired by the notes and schemas from my “Mutation Notebook” which I keep on filling in by crayon (my type of resistance … ever since the first computer appeared in my life in 1984.

( www.renebarsalo.com )

The post InfoMutation – we must build bridges between our past and our future appeared first on Wirearchy.

First we shape our structures

Then, our structures shape us

                   - Winston Churchill (and other attributions)
                        

SUMMARY: As the Internet has moved through the dot.com boom and bust (and the more recent waves of Web 2.0 and social networks), and integrated software encases the activities of many people and most organizations, the dynamics of hierarchy have begun to morph into a new dynamic called wirearchy.

Wirearchy is a dynamic flow of power and authority, based on information, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected technology and people.

As hierarchies evolve, “wirearchies” emerge

According to Webster’s Dictionary, hierarchy is:

• A group of priests holding high office within a religious organization and having graded authority to govern the organization
• The group of people in any organization vested with power and authority
• Any arrangement of principles, things, knowledge, etc. in an ascending or descending order

We have long understood that “knowledge is power.” Knowledge in and of itself is non-hierarchic, as Peter Drucker notes in The Economist’s Survey on the Next Society (November 2001). However, gathering and using knowledge to do things, to create results, requires context and decisions.  Creating context and making clear decisions requires effective structures and processes of governance. Hence, as human society evolved through successive eras of new ways to distribute and use information and knowledge, it has become understood that those who able to gain and control access to critical knowledge were able to acquire and/or create power.  Knowledge is power.

Let’s look at history for just a moment. For example, if we can loosely accept the definitions above as chronological, long before the printing press and widespread distribution of the printed word knowledge and power resided with the “royalty” of the church, the monarchy and their court, and those chosen by these small groups of people to stimulate and participate in the control of society. The rest of the populace were busy farming – on the royalty’s land – and making clothes and shelter in order to survive the rhythms and forces of nature.

Fast-forward several centuries. With the discovery and invention of new forces and technologies such as the printing press, electricity and the steam engine knowledge began, primarily through the connected networks of the powerful elites – the royalty and the clergy - to spread around the world, albeit ever so slowly. Having access to knowledge, funding its sources and guarding and/or controlling its distribution created a integrated system of power and authority.  We have learned of the many attempts to control the mass populace through famous stories such as the Spanish Inquisition, Braveheart, Joan of Arc and many other such examples. Always, these stories have been about attempts to resist and control change that sprang from informing and catalyzing popular movements. There has always been the attempt to control and shape knowledge through the restriction of media and dissidents – and this continues today, although in more subtle and sophisticated ways.

Fast forward once again … to the dawn of the Industrial Age. Collectively in the emerging industrialized world, while managing our way through world wars and the re-shaping of important colonial empires, we learned how to build the infrastructure of what we all know today as the modern world – roads, highways, factories, suburbs, downtown cores of larger and larger cities. The demise of colonization and the last vestiges of traditional control, for example in Africa, India and South America is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the last half of the Twentieth Century, there has been an ongoing move off the farm, through the factories and suburbs, and into the offices of modern urban centres. This growth was accompanied by the spread of scientific management and the rise of the professional executive and manager – the Industrial Age equivalent of royalty and clergy.

Hierarchy as the dominant form of organization became encoded into the structure of virtually all institutions of society during the Twentieth Century, mainly as a necessary condition to support efficiency and productivity. Frederick Winslow Taylor has become famous as the father of time-and-motion studies, as the ongoing drive for productivity and efficiency was born in the early 1900’s. Tools and techniques such as division of labour, organization charts, and job evaluation evolved into standard management instruments, and were applied to most forms of organized work activity.

It is only through enforced standardization of methods,enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured.               (F.W. Taylor)

The structures and forms that resulted have become over the past 75 years the standard model.  These principles have become encoded in all commonly-accepted management and leadership models (yes, even new-paradigm ones), and have defined the general shape, rhythm and rules of behaviour in organizations that we now accept as traditional . As noted at the outset of this essay …

“First, we shape our structures…then, our structures shape us.“

Today, paradox is everywhere. Those of us old enough to grow up in the 60′s and 70′s knew a different world, a world in which conduct and behaviours were much more homogenous – roles were clearer, and we knew how we were expected to act as we grew up and moved into adulthood. The movie Pleasantville, released in 1999, gives us a graphic representation of this unfolding of today’s paradox .. as diversity and access to voice have increased, so has the complexity we encounter in the course of our daily lives. The film’s narrative arc morphs from a homogenous, monotonous black-and-white “Father Knows Best” type of family, work and community life to a rainbow-hued juicy diversity of passions and (seemingly) outrageous behaviours. Pleasantville’s “hierarchy” – the mayor, the police chief and their cronies – feel threatened and attempt to control this emergent celebration of life through reining in the perpetrators – to no avail.

Now, as the Information Age has become firmly rooted, we’re moving through living rooms and offices out to the world on the Information Highway – and the ways we use the raw materials and interactive rhythm and pulse of this Information Age are transforming our social structures and behaviours.  

Many of the structures and forms we use to carry out human activities, such as schooling, shopping, cooking, working and entertainment, are “wired”. The next generations of families, friends and workers are growing up surrounded by electronic tools, digitized images and information, and have been connected to the World Wide Web since infancy. Hierarchy’s “command-and-control” is transforming into as-yet not clear forms of “champion-and-channel” and we will all have to learn how to live, work and manage in this new form of organizational dynamics. We’re beginning to build wirearchies where hierarchies stood, and there’s no going back.

The characteristics are becoming clearer more quickly than we are learning how to behave – not surprising given the ways that mental models shape our perspectives, beliefs and behaviours, as Peter Senge reminded us in The Fifth Discipline. We need to move from stability-based predictability, power and control to an ongoing flow of flexibility, integration and innovation.

So…what do you do as a leader and as a peer in the Knowledge Age, when past traditions of always gaining rungs on the professional ladder by being the smartest, the most decisive, the clearest, and the strongest may no longer work or result in resistance and cynicism? What do you do now, when perhaps previously much of your power and clout came from your position, but you may not have much more information than many of the others in your organization or market? What do you do when suddenly, many people in your organization, and many of your customers and competitors are loaded with that same information?  What happens when there are a number of people just as smart or smarter .. and more talented than you .. wanting to do what you want to do ?

You may no longer have privileged access to information, other than through keeping secrets or manipulating information – which may come back to haunt you? How do you “unlearn” your old mental models? How do you need to communicate and behave in order to establish credibility in this interconnected Knowledge Age?

The Internet and the World Wide Web burst into mass human consciousness only 17 or 18 years ago .  Their reach and penetration have multiplied exponentially since then.

And yet, this dominant defining factor of a new era is only in its infancy.

The accessibility and interconnectivity they provide already responds to almost any need or desire, and much more capability seems sure to emerge in the next five to ten years.

Also, Web-enabled tools have begun to transform work processes in ways that are important and pervasive. Even though the dot-com boom has come and gone, workplace integration and human resources management applications are proliferating. Very large enterprises such as MicroSoft and Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, IBM Lotus and others have ‘updated the market for productivity and knowledge-work software’, encasing virtually all organizational activity in software. There are too many workplace and business process applications to catalogue, and new more integrated, easier to use versions or competitors appear on the horizon every few months, while new integrated services emerge and jostle for attention and marketplace acceptance. Websites like workbrain.com, Ninthhouse.com, Smartforce.com and Click2Learn.com are delivering the first wave of on-line learning in easy-to-use formats ( .. online learning has become re-defined – and none too soon – as social or informal learning and today, MOOCs are becoming the ubiquitous scene ..).  Many Fortune 500 companies already have intranets or are planning better versions based on what they have learned to date about what works and doesn’t. There has been push-back, and significant resistance to change, and yet the tide of integration keeps on coming, inexorably. 

And ‘clouds’ of cloud computing are overhead and on the near horizon ..

Much of what the average worker sees of this is through the daily communion with the computer screen on her or his desk. They access the software with which they work and communicate with other employees through portals, of some form or other. As we learn more about how to integrate all growing software-based capability into our daily work lives, we will see various forms of employee portals, partnership portals, project management portals and, eventually, comprehensive real-time enterprise computing applications take root and grow in many organizations. Organizations’ IT infrastructures, coupled with ongoing growth in the scope and use of smart software, will create a type of integrated nervous system, providing top management and workers with an improvement-and-learning focused feedback loop.

When software connects customers directly to business processes, and employees have “line-of-sight” responsibility for making a clear contribution or directly impacting business results – when most of an organization’s strategy and value proposition is directly coded into its CRM, ERM and B2B applications, will the types of supervision and management we learned in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s continue to be effective? There’s a very real issue here that is helping to create the emerging dynamics – the more that work activities are encoded and embedded into integrated systems, the more the human will and spirit needs to surface, assert itself, and make it known that the multi-coloured diversity of Pleasantville is here to stay.

The proliferation of information technology, business process re-engineering and wrenching changes to established business models created by the rapid development of the Internet are exerting significant pressure on long-standing business hierarchies. Top-down, command-and-control management structures and dynamics struggle to maintain effectiveness in the face of free-flowing streams of content-rich information, coming from all directions.

The dynamics of how people relate – to work, to markets, to bosses and to each other – are changing. “Wirearchy” – a dynamic flow of power and authority based on connections and conversations, is emerging as a social dynamic in both business and society.

This emergent organizing principle is an informal but pervasive emerging structure of governance, strategy, decision-making and control based on knowledge, trust, meaning and credibility. Things get done and results are achieved through the interplay of vision, values, connections and conversation. Wirearchy is generated by an open architecture of information, knowledge and focus, enabled by connected and converging technologies.

It suggests a fundamental change in the dynamics of human interaction in – and with – organizations of all sizes, shapes and purposes. It also represents an evolution of hierarchy as an organizing principle and dynamic. Wirearchy will not render hierarchy obsolete, nor the need for direction and control; rather, it will render them more necessary. However, it will change the meaning of those terms and how they are used and experienced.

People won’t accept authority easily any more. While old-guard keepers-of-the- keys still cling to authority and power, the older models of how to lead and follow are unravelling. Organization charts are still useful, but only as they become more fluid. Certainly, they appear in a much wider range of shapes than before, and often convey new messages about power, status and control. “Organigraphics,” or pictures of the ways organizations flow and operate, are clearly more pertinent, accurate and useful, according to strategy and organizational structure guru Henry Mintzberg.

Perhaps the shift to wirearchy is a result of the conflict and dissonance generated by dated structures, mindsets and dynamics clashing with the irrevocable new forces created by the open access to information and knowledge. An early scenario (.. almost 15 years ago now .. ) describing this change is found in The Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com). It describes how fundamental shifts in values and attitudes due to connections, openness and cynicism demand openness, transparency and authenticity from the prevailing power structures in our corporate-led society.

How do today’s leaders, managers, employees and freelancers respond to these forces? Clues are evident in initiatives emerging in the fields of customer and employee relationship management, organizational development, human resources management and organizational change: The use of techniques such as scenario planning, dialogue, open space, 360 degree feedback, emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring have all grown significantly over the past several years. Together, these soften the rigidity of outmoded structures, and help people respond and adapt.

Most organizations carry out ongoing initiatives to create, clarify and improve capabilities in each of these emerging areas. Indeed, a large percentage of the global consulting industry is focused on diagnosing, developing and implementing strategies for these goals. Wirearchy is significantly different in that it focuses on the structural and psychosocial dynamics generated by interconnectivity and access to knowledge. It begins not only with what’s happening at the top, but also what’s happening in the roots and branches of an organization. Where hierarchy created focus and meaning through the control of knowledge, wirearchy implies that the control and use of knowledge acknowledges and involves a much wider range of stakeholders..

Yesterday’s success factors involved secrecy and control, size, role clarity, functional specialization and power. Today’s emerging factors are openness, speed, flexibility, integration and innovation. The concept of wirearchy allows readers to develop a strategy for creating, implementing these factors in ways that respond with value to continuously changing conditions. The core components of wirearchy are:

• a crystal clear vision and values
• a strategically designed and integrated technology infrastructure
• comprehensive, clear and completely open communications
• pertinent objectives and focused measurement
• characteristics of culture that create, support and enable responsiveness, adaptability and fluidity
• leadership that is clear, focused, open, authentic and shared

It will take time and experience in this new era to know what “success” and “effectiveness” mean and look like. In a wired and wirearchical world, where there is literal meaning in the phrase, “everything is connected to everything else,” we will have to watch, learn and imagine how to lead and manage in ways that foster ongoing growth in human development. As the forces that are creating it grow, this organizing principle – Wirearchy — will impact business, governments and societies in ways that we have never before encountered in human history.

Positing an organizing principle for the interconnected, networked Knowledge Age is aimed at understanding and shaping a new organizational dynamic for the benefit of individuals, organizations and the societies in which we work and live. It’s giving a name to a new organizing principle that reflects more realistically and accurately what’s going on out there, and we believe that this principle should be used to create work structures and cultures that respond authentically – with speed, flexibility, integration and innovation – to customer needs.

“Wirearchy” – a dynamic flow of power and authority based on connections and conversations – is emerging as a social dynamic in both business and society. The definition suggests a fundamental change in the dynamics of human interaction in – and with – organizations of all sizes, shapes and purposes. It firmly suggests the necessity for the evolution of hierarchy as an organizing principle and dynamic for the networked era.

The new conditions do not render obsolete the need for direction and control; rather, what changes is the meaning of those terms and how they are used and experienced. Wirearchy is a structure of governance, strategy, decision-making and control based on trust, meaning and credibility – things get done through connections and conversation. Preferred futures .. choices about direction and response … are generated from an open yet structured social architecture of information, knowledge and focus, enabled by connected and converging technologies.

Work will keep changing faster and become more uncertain, more focused on delivering results. Work will become an ever-flowing combination of the necessary results delivered by people using their unique combinations of skills, personalities and motivations – the mass customization of work. Mass customization was defined and popularized by Stan Davis, a leading organizational and business thinker, and suggests that standardized products and processes can be adapted – customized – to the specific needs of small groups and or individual preferences and needs. It’s clear that the spread of this concept during the 90’s throughout manufacturing and service processes is now being followed by its penetration into the nature of work – the more work activities are standardized, the more the preferences and needs of small groups or individuals assert themselves and demand satisfaction.

This changing nature of work has been brought about by the ongoing penetration and spread of computers and ever-smarter software into virtually all areas of human activity, notably work activities. Where control of information, knowledge and thus power used to reside in the hierarchical structures built to manage work in the Industrial Age, the changes to work that we are experiencing demand that knowledge, power and control are shared, diffused and distributed. Thus, the new organizing principle – Wirearchy – is required to help us make sense of the consequences of our new conditions and the structures that are being born in response to these conditions.

New models and new ways of doing things are clearly necessary – and emerging. Symptoms of this need are cropping up all around us – from new approaches to leadership and the recognition that issues like Emotional Intelligence and team work are responses – not always well-designed or implemented – to the need for effectiveness in any organized, organizational endeavour.  We see and live a 24/7/365 work and life, we experience increasing degrees of artificial intelligence in the form of chips and software built into almost everything humans do, and local and national economies are buffeted by global markets and global competitiveness. The established forms of governance, leadership, management and citizenship are under attack from all sides, and new ways of addressing these critical issues are appearing in the current affairs and business news every day.

In addition, the types of organizational structure that can accommodate the necessary responses to ongoing change generated by interconnected markets and constituents are changing in front of our eyes. Much has already been written – and more will follow – about networks, partnerships, and strategic alliances. Competitors regularly partner, or form strategic alliances with a third party where their main competitor is the third party’s other main, and equally important, strategic alliance.

In the face of this often confusing and paradoxical landscape, leaders and managers everywhere are searching for tools and techniques that will allow for continued effectiveness in the face of swirling change. Often, the working assumptions they use to guide their quest is based on the traditional mindset – eroding in effectiveness in plain view – that controlling the playing field, being right and minimizing the risk of not knowing and denying or shutting down flexibility and openness, is what will show to their masters – most often the capital markets – that they are decisive and know what to do. The trouble is…it’s really hard to create and achieve sustained success when working from ineffective or unaware mental models.  It’s been well-documented, for example, that the average lifespan of newly appointed CEO’s grows shorter and shorter each year. Why is that?

As unrelenting change and the spread of interconnected distributed knowledge continues to grow, the structure and shape of organizations and work also continues to evolve. More and more work takes shape in time-and-results defined projects, and the presence of teams and teamwork is ubiquitous. Out-sourcing and contracting, as organizational responses to carrying out critical work and tasks while limiting the impact on the core operational aspects of an organization, are widespread. The flattening of hierarchies has also been a common response – and yet the legacy mindset and dynamics of hierarchical command-and-control are still dominant – even though at the height of the dot-com boom it seemed that the dynamics of the “geek revolution” might forever replace traditional power structures.

A unifying, organizing principle will help greatly in coalescing meaning and sense out of this swirling morass – exploring, defining, and explaining what is observable about Wirearchy will be an essential first step in moving forward.

May 2002, updates March 2013

About the Author:
Jon Husband is currently a Strategic Advisor with several high-tech firms, and a workplace coach and futurist.

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That is my question …

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I don’t mind its increased use .. it’s just a neologism, after all .. but most of the the increased use comes from consulting (Deloitte & Deloitte / Bershin) and social software vendors (SABA Software and Cisco).

And if they are going to use the term and concept to help sell services and software …

I feel compelled to note that I copyrighted the term and definition in 1999, and began writing about wirearchy – the term, concept, definition and its implications – shortly thereafter, in early 2000.

For the record …

 Wirearchy – a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

(Jon Husband, 1999)

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