The idea behind these last few posts has been to look at pragmatic ways to employ some tools to build resilience into organisations as they get swept by the third wave. Jon Husband describes the new organisational structure for the networked knowledge economy as a wirearchy. An important aspect of working in a networked structure is that every node (person) can now influence the entire network; quite different from a hierarchical, industrial organisation, with mostly up and down information flows.
In third wave economies knowledge workers are valued for their individual talents and the networks that they belong to. Titles and positions blur when the work requires creativity. Third wave organisations have to be creative because the second wave economies are already taking the cookie-cutter jobs and going to the cheapest possible labour pool.
A third wave workplace is more like this:
A workplace where everyone can connect with anyone else makes each node important and means that no one can hide in the corner office, especially when the proverbial sh*t hits the fan. That is why conversation is becoming very important. Conversations help people make meaning, whether it’s between co-workers, with potential employees, customers or suppliers. These roles are also blurring, so each conversation has to be at a human level to value each individual. For instance, treating a customer as just another “consumer” can backfire when that customer is also a blogger with an audience of millions.
We learn through conversations and the Web gives us all kinds of options. Your organisation can let those with experience write about it (blogs) or you can record professional development events for use later (podcasts). If podcasts are way too technical for your group, then burn them on a CD and leave them at the door for the commute home. You can let everyone into the conversation while creating new procedures (wikis) or you can record events as pictures and videos and let people continue to talk about them (e.g. Flickr or YouTube).
As our societies changed into democracies, they became noisier. So too will the third wave workplace. However, that noise will be sound of knowledge resilience.
2 thoughts on “Step 3: Converse”