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My friend and colleague Bruce Stewart is in my opinion a smart and thoughtful person .. with the credentials to back up my opinion (at one time he was the head of the Gartner Group’s global research and advisory programs about core management issues).
He just offered up a comment to my recent post titled Crowdsourcing and Employee, Customer and Stakeholder Engagement. I think his comment is a worthy blog post in and of itself. His thinking deepens the meaning and possibilities implicit in crowdsourcing and the impact and dynamics of those possibilities.
With his permission I have elevated his comment to the front page of my blog, and I urge those of you interested in crowdsourcing and wirearchy and their implications for organizational leadership and management in the networked era to read it attentively.
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Crowdsourcing, Wirearchy and the Implications for Today’s Organizations
In observing a number of organisations over the past few years, it has become clear to me just how much managerial fear dominates them.
These are cultures where the manager must:
(a) Always know everything that’s going on
(b) Always have an acceptable answer
(c) Always be right
The first of these mitigate against giving crowdsourcing any credence, since “what the crowd might say” is unknown before it is said. (Crowds often coalesce around thematic ideas rapidly, but which ones out of all the ones that are “in the air” at the time isn’t predictable, being an emergent phenomenon.)
The second of these mitigate against putting crowdsourced views to work, as the only way a response can be “acceptable” is if it has already been well socialised amongst peers and a consensus around it formed. Almost by definition, that which comes from “outside” the closed system that is most management teams has not been vetted in advance.
The third of these is the worst of all. Rather than championing safe-fail experiments and other learning ventures to build upon crowdsourced views, having to “always be right” means that the antithesis of a learning culture exists. Learning occurs through failure far more rapidly, thoroughly and usefully than through endless “success”. Not knowing what might emerge means that a certain number of such attempts will fail to lead anywhere useful (even if they build foundations for future years in the process).
We find ourselves at an intriguing moment in time. Since the advent of consumer-level computing and communications a portion of our society has figured out how to listen, champion, catalyse and coordinate with others.
As some of these in turn didn’t need to be converted from the “Organisation Man” path, and others saw the joy in a more liberating environment, waves of new ventures — not-for-profit (the majority, and the majority of these not even “organised” to the extent of becoming a formal n-f-p society) and for-profit — have emerged. Some have grown to be large and influential; many have not, save only in that they form swarms of coordinating yet independent institutions (think of the tens of thousands of environmental-related groups around the world, for instance, teeming much as do insects in the natural world, to work together, yet in informal ways that transcend being “one hive”, “one hill” or “one mound”).
But the other portion — and here lies most of our corporate institutions, many of our large n-f-p foundations, charities and societies, almost all of government and quasi-government bodies, all political parties, etc. — is still well placed in the 20th century’s military-derived hierarchies and command-and-control systems. The three “rules” of being a manager are not only drummed into them, they are accepted and extended now by personal choice (“I want my pension” at one end; “I want to climb the greasy pole” at the other, and many motivations in between) derived from the Stockholm Syndrome effect of these little, self-reinforcing, mostly-closed worlds.
(Paradoxically, the military is often much further ahead in its thinking about organisation, learning and collective wisdom than are other forms of institution. In some ways the military is deeply Wirearchical in spirit, even if often less than perfect in practice — they, too, have their career cadres!)
Now some of these institutions will make it through our current time of troubles, whether on their own or with the generous support (actively opposed but never asked for) of taxpayers. Others will fail. The rip in our social fabric between those who are communitarian and those who are hierarchical will take one more step.
(This is why Wirearchy is an important concept: rather than lining up on one side of that rip or the other it proposes ways of working — indeed, ways of being — that help to seal up that social tear without requiring one side to “defeat” the other.)
Alas, change never happens as fast as we’d like — but it tends to be more thorough in the end as a result of that. In the meantime, perhaps we could “crowdsource” some real ideas about how to break through self-contained institutional worlds?
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