Stowe Boyd & I are opening the presentation on corporate culture this morning, here in Toronto at Sibos. We will be looking at how organizational frameworks and models have changed. Stowe will talk about the architecture of cooperation:
The new architecture of work is now emerging, after decades of transition. White collar work became knowledge work which has now become creative work. The transition from process to networks is not just a recasting, not just a different style of communication. The work is styled as information sharing through social relationships, and where ‘following’ takes the place of ‘invitation’. People coordinate efforts, but work on a wide variety of activities, which are not necessarily co-aligned with others’ work, and which are not necessarily even known in a general way. A new degree of privacy and autonomy animates cooperative work, in comparison to collaborative work. Individuals cooperating hand off information or take on tasks in a fashion that is like businesses cooperating: they see the benefit in cooperating, and don’t have to share a common core set of strategic goals to do so: they don’t need the alignment of goals that defines old style business employment.
I will discuss the TIMN model, which I learned about via John Robb. I will overlay it with a look at dominant communications media and talk about some of the organizational changes we are seeing and may see in the near future.
We may see more of the following.
Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
Heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same “horizontal” position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role [wikipedia].
Chaordic refers to a system of governance that blends characteristics of chaos and order. The term was coined by Dee Hock the founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association [wikipedia].
And I’ll ask these and some some other questions:
Do networks obsolesce hierarchies? Can they co-exist?
What happens when your customers are more connected than your organization?
How does the transparency that networks enable change your organizational model?
