… with emphasis on “emerging”.
From an interview with Andrew McAfee on KMWorld.com – an early set-up of his emerging keynote November 17 at KMWorld 2009
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Writing the book on Enterprise 2.0
[ Snip … ]
We are basically throwing the doors wide open and saying, “Look, if you’ve got something to contribute, by all means pitch in.” So, we are not having membership criteria. We are not assigning people into roles. We are not making the credentials upfront, and we are letting them do whatever feels right to them. This is a really big difference from how we are used to using technology. Over the years, we have been really good at using technology to make people step through standardized processes or fill in fields in a predefined database—to do things like that.
[ Snip … ]
The second big shift is one away from that mindset and one of just kind of, “everyone, you’re welcome and do whatever you want to.” That sounds like a recipe for chaos or anarchy or just getting drowned in a sea of undifferentiated information.
What has, indeed, happened I find really interesting is that the smart technologists of the 2.0 era have found ways to let the cream rise to the top and to let structure appear over time, even though we are not trying to define or impose or make that structure upfront.
For example, Wikipedia has very well defined senior contributors, editors, administrators, people who are good at various tasks inside the encyclopedia, even though none of those people were assigned into them or had to present particular credentials upfront. But the Web as a whole has no central card catalog, in fact, no central librarian or taxonomist, and we used to think that was just going to be a recipe for chaos. Someone said the Internet is the world’s largest library; the problem is all the books are on the floor.
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The paragraph I have emphasized in bold font speaks to the emergence of patterns of structure, and reminds me of:
… which I have from time to time suggested is an emerging organizing principle for the era of networked people and information flows.
It’s not just the technology, though hyperlinks, easy publishing tools and platforms that aggregate, concentrate and distribute connections and content have unleashed an emergent workplace sociology than that driven by Taylorism and other central tenets of management “science”.
As scores of 2.0 pundits and commenters have pointed out time and again, organization structure and culture, and participative work design, will be the longer-term (and likely much tougher) challenges.
I’m reasonably sure Professor McAfee will have said so as well, many times. But if I am not mistaken, he comes from the technology side of the business school, so it makes sense that his perspective may lean towards tthe technologies and technologists.
What do you think ?
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