(Cross-posted at the Supernova ConversationHub blog. Disclosure: I will be a (non-paid) conference blogger at Supernova June 16 – 18)
There’s a lot of both noise and substance about transparency and trust these days, and it’s been building for the last several years.
I was on the bus in Montreal today, on my way to the offices of Michel Cartier, a relatively unsung 75 year-old retired professor at UQAM (Univerity of Quebec in Montreal) who founded the communications and new media department at that university. Cartier is to my mind the francophone world’s equivalent of Marshall McLuhan. However, he has had the benefit of living and working in the era of media now becoming dominated by the decentralization afforded by computers connected together on the digital infrastructure we know as the Web.
While riding along Avenue Papineau on the 45 bus on my way to Cartier’s home office, I was re-reading Clay Shirky’s "Here Comes Everybody – the power of organizing without organizations" and reminiscing about conversations I have had over the last several years about the lack of scalability of peoples’ attention, and thus the growing need for filters both technical and sociological.
In keeping with the focus of Supernova 2008. it seems that more and more people are becoming aware that we are living in the midst of a large-scale transition or transformation of society. From the Supernova 2008 web site:
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Supernova 2008: Challenges for the Network Age
We’re at a turning point. The “web 2.0” boom has lasted longer than its “web 1.0” predecessor, and there are storm clouds ahead for the global economy. Battles over the future of software, the data center, broadband, the media, the social ecosystem, and the planet have been joined in earnest.
This is not the time for small ideas or business as usual.
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Clearly technology is redefining the conditions in which we act and interact. However, M. Cartier and many others (including Shirky) are careful to note that while technology is enabling the shifts we are witnessing (along the lines forecast, for example, by the Tofflers in the 1991 book Powershift – Knowledge, Wealth and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century), it is ultimately just a support mechanism. Human psychology and behaviour being what they are, new frames of reference, new ideas and new forms of governance will be needed to engender sustained progress in the face of accelerating complexity and ambiguity.
We humans are somewhat habituated to relatively clear roles within societal structures that have been informed by Industrial Era assumptions about decision-making, responsibility, efficiency and effectiveness. The usefulness of these structures have depended upon that relative role clarity … we take our cues from, and delegate responsibility upwards, to those who occupy leadership roles and positions.
Musing about the last several years while reading "Here Comes Everybody" I was reminded of three quotes I have used from time to time in blog posts and essays:
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"Networks make organizational politics and culture explicit" (Michael Schrage, MIT)
"The most difficult thing about IBM’s transformation was that so many people delegated responsibility upwards" (Lou Gerstner, IBM CEO)
"Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust" (Warren Bennis, USC)
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Our increasingly ubiquitously-interconnected societies may be outgrowing the usefulness of traditional hierarchy, and may be moving along a path towards forms of decision making and action more suited to societies in which centralization and decentralization operate together. Networks allow us to create temporary responsibility-driven hierarchy whilst at the same time distributing complementary responsibilities in a decentralized fashion. Thus, it may be that we are moving into conditions wherein "it’s not all top-down, but it’s also not all bottom-up". It’s "both / and" depending upon what’s needed where, when and by whom.
Michel Cartier has been tracking the evolution of technology, economics and the social dynamics of our western societies for the last 35 years, and has developed a rich treasure chest of research and concept maps (visualization set out in schemas) outlining many of the impacts this evolution has engendered. Here (below) is his introductory concept map or schema outlining the high-level dynamics we are experiencing as we are on our way to a decentralized-but-interconnected-and-interdependent set of societal structures within which shared knowledge and consensus will be necessary for effective governance.
In the diagram the words Data, Synthesis, Description and To Watch in each of the curves were live links to the treasure chest of 35 years of research contained in the web site Constellation W, which is currently offline and being revamped.
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I’ll close these musings with a quote from Stan Davis’ book Future Perfect, outlining how he foresaw in 1987 the ways in which traditional hierarchy and networks would necessarily begin to inter-operate.
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"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization (here, we can read organization in the large sense, as a nation or society as well IMO) to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it.
What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.
Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both.
We are still a long way from figuring out the appropriate and encompassing organization models for the economy we are now in."
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Tags: Michel Cartier, Clay Shirky, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Stan Davis, networks, hierarchy, decentralization, centralization
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