My colleague Jane Hart writes that, “supporting social collaboration is underpinned not only by new technologies but by a new mindset“.
Perpetual Beta is my attitude toward learning and work – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilise. I’ve realized that clients and colleagues with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those who believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilizes and we don’t need to learn or do anything else. I think this point is called death. Perpetual Beta is pretty well an artist’s perspective, always seeking a new creative endeavour and not just producing the same work over and over. As industrial and even some knowledge work gets automated and outsourced, adapting to an economic life in perpetual Beta may soon become the norm.
With 2 billion people connected by the Internet, we are entering a post-industrial Network Era. Effective knowledge networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network shifts its focus again. We are moving from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. The network enables infinite combinations between unique nodes. For example, better connections enabled a high school student to create a better cancer diagnostic tool. We will see many more of these connected discoveries in the network era. Also, in a networked world, where everyone is unique, there is little need for generic work processes (jobs, roles, occupations) and no need for standard curricula. Institutions, and mindsets, will collapse.
The real challenge to be productive in this new networked workplace will be an attitude shift. In the near future, organizations may no longer be concerned if you work a full shift or are spending time at your work space. Compensation may become focused not just on results but creative solutions. The core work attitude may be creativity, as in “what have you done that’s different?” Artists think about the impossible, as Hugh Macleod shows:
About one hundred years ago we moved from morality as our core behaviour, to responsibility, as workers left their agrarian communities, where your word was your bond, and became reliable factory workers instead. Are we now shifting from responsibility to creativity? If we are, then most of our organizational tools and measurements about productivity may be obsolete, as well as our mindsets about work and learning. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the MFA will become the new MBA.
What happens to the dystopian networks, closed completely or monitored heavily, wherein conformance and not creativity holds sway? I’m thinking government, military at a minimum.
I would call these hierarchies, not networks; even though some people say hierarchies are no more than constrained branching tree networks.
Interesting post Harold. I wonder if the notion of what constitutes “new” in terms of mindsets and behaviours is bounded by a personal metric? You make an excellent points about how we have seen behaviour modes adjusted in the past few hundred years, a point I have sympathy with. But as a historian by training it leads me to think that the past hundred years are a mere blip, blink or aberration. Hence the way I often talk about the advent of the social economy as actually being a return to a more enduring evolutionary state – we being the inherently social apes. Of course it does require we re learn that but I wonder if there is an argument that adopting and embedding a behaviour that may have a more deeply embedded legacy in us is perhaps easier than forcing us to work in the satanic mill model? Oh dear I feel a “freewill” debate coming on! :o)
I agree that the past 100 years have been an anomaly, but it is the first time that we have had a large middle class in certain parts of the world (though this is quickly shrinking). The corporation was an experiment to deal with large scale capitalism, and we had no real models to base it on, other than the military or the church. But perhaps this period was not a blip and really just the first phase of dealing with the new electric communications medium? Now that we are ~150 years post-telegraph, we are finally realizing that things have radically changed. It’s like the early 1600’s in Europe, 150 years after the printing press, and all hell is breaking loose.
Interesting post, Harold. Especially your proposed shift of core attitudes:
morality –> responsibility –> creativity
caught my mind.
Responsibility and creativity are two rather different qualities. This helps understand why the transition from clear responsibilities to practised creativity is such a huge challenge in organizations today.
The dystopia Urbe refers to is not a characteristic of the network or its form. Rather, it is a trope that is relied upon, unquestioned, by the observers and participants. Work is not challenged (or challenging) and learning doesn’t occur. In truth hierarchy can be incredibly powerful and fluid as Greg Satel explains for the military, in https://hbr.org/2015/06/what-makes-an-organization-networked