Thomas Stewart spoke at the recent Supernova conference. The full report on his session is here – good reading, pretty “wirearchical”, IMO
What does all this mean for business? First, it highlights the importance of having lots of ways of giving individual people at the center of their universes, access to all kinds of information about other people to make business decisions for themselves.
But most of all it highlights the possibility of a new layer of design. The next layer up is the organizational layer. And the biggest challenge will be how to design human organizations and business organizations in ways that can take advantage of information technology, give people more information, and give people more freedom and decision making power.
The more we do that, we’ll be able to foster more motivation, creativity, flexibility, and happiness.
The working definition of wirearchy:
a two-way flow (up and down, or out and in) of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
(It’s actually multi-directional, decentralized – but so much of the world still relates mainly to down and out 😉
Common definition(s) of hierarchy:
– Any vertical arrangement of people or things
– the group of people at the top of an organization vested with power and authority
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