I have said many times that teamwork is overrated. It can be a smoke screen for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. The economic stick often hangs over the team: be a team player or lose your job, is the implication in many workplaces. One of my main concerns with teams is that people are placed on them by those holding hierarchical power and are then told to work together (or else). However, there are usually power plays internal to the team so that being a team player really means doing what the leader says. For example, I know many people who work in call centres and I have heard how their teams are often quite dysfunctional. Teamwork too often just means towing the party line.
Democracy
Democracy
the democratic advantage
Three billion people around the world are now connected with ubiquitous digital technologies that keep improving. They also keep getting cheaper. History shows that technology can be an enabler of democracy. Distributed communications subvert gatekeepers. John Gilmore said that, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” As networks become the new companies, we may be moving toward a more democratic future of work, with authority distributed throughout the network. One significant counter to this trend is the emergence of platform capitalism.
Networked Knowing
I spoke at the UNL Extension conference in Nebraska last week. The theme was on the changing nature of work as we enter the network era and how learning is becoming integral to individual and organizational success. I noted how the period of 1900 to 1920 saw a significant shift in the American economy, with manufacturing replacing farming as the dominant economic activity. The resulting demographic shift was millions of men leaving farms and moving to factories. The Cooperative Extension program was created in 1914 while this shift was taking place. One hundred years later and we are witnessing a similar shift, from the industrial economy to the network era and a creative economy. For a deeper look at this phenomenon, see Nine Shift.
The Future of HR
“The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades” – Timbuk3
Complication
Many of today’s larger companies have overly complicated, hierarchical structures. As they grew to their current size, control processes were put in place to create efficiencies. To ensure reliable operations and avoid risk, work became standardized. New layers of supervision appeared, more silos were created, and knowledge acquisition was formalized, all in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization. Support departments, like human resources, were added to manage the resulting complicated structure.
Democracy vs platform capitalism
Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds.
A Digital Declaration – by Shoshana Zuboff
In the shadow and gloom of today’s institutional facts, it has become fashionable to mourn the passing of the democratic era. I say that democracy is the best our species has created so far, and woe to us if we abandon it now. The real road to serfdom is to be persuaded that the declarations of democracy we have inherited are no longer relevant to a digital future. These have been inscribed in our souls, and if we leave them behind— we abandon the best part of ourselves. If you doubt me, try living without them, as I have done. That is the real wasteland, and we should fear it.
Good leaders connect
Why do organizations need leaders? If you think about leadership from a tribal, institutional, or even market perspective, then it is about controlling information and appropriately using the power you have been given, in order to achieve the organization’s aims. But communications have changed that, as we move into the network era, a move that had its foreshadowing with the invention of the printing press, and has been accelerating with every electronic medium invented since. As author and historian, Gwynne Dyer, has noted, “Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.”
Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too. – Gwynne Dyer
A world of pervasive networks
According to Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture, the McLuhans’ tetradic Laws of Media state that every medium (or technology in the broader sense of the word) has four major effects:
- extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
- obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
- retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
- flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)
Move the hierarchy to the rear
In an environment where everyone is a leader, some other mechanism needs to be put in place to ensure that everyone can maintain and optimize the tenets of fairness, trust and transparency so the entire organization can move forward. —Harrison Monarth: HBR
The foundation for this ‘other mechanism’ is the wirearchy framework: a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” But what is the mechanism and why is it important to have an environment where everyone can be a leader? After all, most leaders are quite comfortable where they are. They worked hard to get there, didn’t they?
Make Work More Human
2013: The Incredibly Shrinking American Middle Class — Bill Moyers
2013: Five Myths about Canada’s Middle Class — Globe & Mail
2013: RIP: The Middle Class — Salon
2013: The Next Middle Class — Harold Jarche
2014: The Middle Class is Steadily Eroding — New York Times
The titles above indicate a shift in the economy and many of our assumptions about the nature of work, at least in my part of the world. There are many definitions of what middle class means, but for me it is the class of people who are experienced, trained or educated yet still have to work to earn a living. Where I grew up, many of our parents were immigrants who all had jobs. We were lucky. School did not require fees and most extracurricular activities were free. Many things have changed since then.
Democracy is coming
“Democracy is neither a gift nor a license; it is a possibility realized through practice grounded in a deep commitment to truth and an acceptance of the responsibility to seek justice for all.” —David Korten
A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the enterprise. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models. I know that we can do better than huge wage inequalities, generic work competencies, and dead-end jobs.
The Web is the catalyst that could democratize the workplace. The effect of the Web is explained by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks. He describes the changes that a networked society can have on our governance, economic and cultural structures:
“The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.”
We need to undo our dominant business models which are the legacy of military hierarchies because they are inefficient, ineffective, and stifle innovation. Not a single major business disaster in the last half-century can be blamed on too much democracy. However, many can be blamed on overly controlling management practices. Hierarchies are only as smart as the smartest gatekeepers. Networks are smarter than the sum of their nodes.
Business models that will allow connected leadership to prosper are essential in a network era. But democratic leadership depends on an educated and informed citizenry. While we may have easy access to information, we still need to continue with the education, especially social learning in peer networks. We need to learn how to change the rules of the game, because work is just a game, with man-made rules.
“For the vast majority of us who sell our labor in the marketplace, our economic insecurity and relative powerlessness impel us to play by the rules.” —Thomas Homer-Dixon
Perhaps the most effective business model for the Internet age is free agents working within a peer network. As tenure was essential for academic freedom, so an unfettered labour model may be necessary for effective connected business. In addition, imagine what kind of societal benefits would ensue if all individuals had the rights of today’s corporations? Given the loss of mid-skill jobs, outsourcing of labour, and the increasing wealth of the 1%, it’s time for a change in how work is done and wealth is redistributed. Those who sell their labour now have the ability to easily connect, learn, and do.
“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” —Dante Alighieri
It is time to bring democracy to the workplace on a large scale. Democratic workplaces do not divide labour and capital. Democratic workplaces are the real social enterprises, because they are open. The democratic workplace is how business can finally catch up to society.
