One of my favourite blogs is Nine Shift and the book of the same title is still worth reading, even after being in publication since 2003. Bill & Julie have recently been asking several questions that warrant comments, so I’m linking to them here:
As we will see, the Internet is behaving exactly in the same way as the automobile did 100 years ago in its impact on society. The auto is not used here as an “analogy”, which is defined as something “somewhat similar”. Instead the influence of the Internet on our lives is exactly a replay, a mirror, of the influence of the auto on society 100 years ago. The outcomes will be different of course, but the forces and how these forces interact and change our lives, are the same.
This book is not really about the Internet. It is more about the consequences and changes of the Internet, about how the Internet is changing how we work, live and learn in this century.
I would have loved to attend the Going Solo conference in Switzerland last week, but alas I had neither the time nor the budget to fly across the Atlantic. I’m starting to see more interest in the option of freelancing and I think that some of this has to do with demographics (aging boomers looking for something to do) as well as economics (globalisation, outsourcing and downsizing). For instance, I was a bit surprised at the high level of interest in my presentation on Marketing Yourself as a Free-agent on the Internet.
I also see the free agent route as one of the only practical ways of currently implementing wirearchy, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, with a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology“.
The only situations where I have witnessed a real “two-way flow of power and authority” is when I work with other free-agents. All of these relationships have been built on trust and in most cases there is not even a contract. I think that free-agents, working together, will eventually come up with the new organisational and management models required for a wired future. I don’t see how we can make incremental changes to industrial organisations and expect them to change their DNA.
If you want to see the future of business, take a look at how interconnected free-agents do business today and find out what they still need to do better.
Jon Husband, whom I finally had the chance to meet in person this week, sent me a link to a 1999 article by management guru Peter Drucker. Jon tells me that this article helped spark his concept of wirearchy. In Beyond the Information Revolution, Drucker explains the similarities between the printing; industrial and information revolutions. He concludes that we are definitely in a knowledge economy and that knowledge workers, as the only means of economic production, can no longer be treated as employees.
Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries [the new ones created in the 21st C] depend will therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within ten years or so, running a business with (short-term) “shareholder value” as its first — if not its only — goal and justification will have become counterproductive. Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers’ greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and social power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.
If you agree with Drucker’s reasoning, which I do, then there is little doubt that industrial management and all that it has created (chain of command, human resources, line & staff, production, etc.) are the wrong models for the emerging workplace. We are seeing some signs of innovation in companies like Google, that give 20% independent research time to their engineers, but there is much more work to do.
The companies and societies that create and master the new models for wirearchy will be the leaders for the next century. However, there is no guarantee that this will happen here in Canada, the US, or Europe. In fact, it probably won’t happen where industrial models and values are the strongest. Look at the working definition of wirearchy and see if your organisation even remotely practices anything like this:
a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology
The P.E.I. government will be taking about a third of its school buses off the road immediately, and pulling the rest on Thursday and Friday after problems were found in some of the vehicles, the province announced …
All of the province’s older buses, 104 of the 320 vehicles, were being pulled off the road Wednesday. Students who had been dropped off at school already would be shuttled back home using newer buses and could expect long delays.
This is one symptom of our industrial school system. We are addicted to cheap transportation. Eighty years ago we closed down local schools and created factory schools that required a bus system to transport students back and forth each day, using large quantities of fossil fuels. Gas prices will continue to go up and therefore the cost of our aging infrastructure maintenance will increase. Industrial schools were premised on cheap transportation and centralised control. It’s time to consider decentralisation, especially since we have the information and communications technologies to support a wider variety of schools and administrative options. As with learning, one size no longer fits all.
The same can be said for the way that we structure our workplaces and our cities. We need to look at long-term options that let us live in a more environmentally sustainable manner. More people have to understand the scope of the problem and we have to keep pushing the issue, especially with politicians, planners and anyone in charge of publicly-funded organisations.
Le Café (Clark, Dave, George, Jane, Jay, and me) is in its infancy as a group of collaborators, but we’ve just finished an exercise that I think really shows the power of networks.
Jay is on-site with a large company and during the day many questions came up that needed more reflection and multiple perspectives. Jay posted these questions and the rest of us commented on our wiki or via e-mail (firewall issues). Not only do we offer multiple perspectives, but the fact that we live in multiple time zones works to our advantage as well. Comments came in last night and I edited these and sent a synthesized version to Jay before he had breakfast this morning. Even though I’m used to spinning on a dime, the speed of reaction and the ease of weaving our comments together still amazed me.
My post on wirearchy has an interesting conversation going in the comments. What I’m noticing as well is that the barriers to more flexible and open business models are breaking down all over the place. I’ve met with three local companies this week and have offered some free advice (FWIW). One is focused on HR, another on retail/wholesale products and another on higher-end retail. I’m also building a new community site for AWI using mostly free applications.
In each case there is a wide variety of online tools available for low cost or even free. These include easy websites, ecommerce, Facebook groups, Flickr photo sharing etc. These tools enable people in business to spend more of their time talking to their customers and have these conversations anywhere and anytime. It also means that people can more easily experiment with new business models. This is empowering and it’s fantastic to watch.
What is most interesting is that these changes are happening at the local level, with people who don’t live online. The revolution is speeding up, there’s little doubt.
In 1999, Jon Husband coined a new term, wirearchy:
a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology
As I bump against corporations in my work of implementing networked learning, collaboration or business, I am beginning to realise that Jon’s organising principle is what’s missing. As companies try to move to Enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0 they are constrained by Organisation 1.0. They may be using the tool, the terms, or some of the techniques but they are still mired in industrial management. The major premise of The Future of Management is that real innovation only happens when you change your management model. All other changes are incremental but management innovation can be exponential.
I’ve worked for some interesting start-ups doing some innovative work, but I’ve noticed that they all use the same management methods as the companies they’re trying to subvert. Even Google uses mostly instructor-led classroom training, for no reason other than that’s how training is done. I think that these industrial-age management models will be like a weight around these initially innovative companies, especially as cycle time decreases and competition for creative people increases.
I’m doing some work with a start-up in the HR field and I wonder if there are “2.0” versions of tools and techniques we take for granted in this space. Is there a better alternative to the organisation chart? Do job descriptions actually tell us anything? Do most businesses need regular hours of work? Is compensation based on time really necessary?
These kinds of questions don’t get asked until you start looking at the entire organisation with a different lens.
I’ve referred to my blogging as a permanent presence on the Web and have encouraged would-be bloggers to first get a permanent domain name. My site is where anyone can find out most things about me, such as what I think, who I’ve worked for or how to contact me on various platforms. Michele Martin writes that you can’t hide with Web 2.0 and that “managing your online reputation becomes a critical success skill for both individuals and organizations in a global trust economy”.
I just received an invitation to a service, Naymz, that will supposedly let you manage your online reputation. Kind of like a broker for your whuffie. This seems to be a step up from ZoomInfo which aggregates online information about people. I’m sure we’ll see more of these cropping up.
Of course, I can see the downside of these reputation management systems and I’m sure that there are people figuring out how to manipulate them already, just as Google Page Rank is constantly gamed. However, anonymity on the Web seems to bring out the worst in us. I’ve been reading CBC’s French immersion articles with some nasty and bigoted comments by anonymous posters. Viewing anonymously makes sense and in certain cases anonymous posting may be useful, but for the most part, online forums should tacitly encourage the use of real names, perhaps through OpenID or some other user-controlled service.
Overall, transparency is a good thing but I’m going to reserve judgement on whether we need centralized services to manage our reputations. I’ll stick to having my own little piece of the Web on which to make my own mistakes for the world to see.
The debate on the elimination of early French immersion will continue, but the NB Liberal government has drawn a line in the sand and is moving ahead with its one-size-fits-all approach to fix its industrial school system. Immersion was the grand experiment that began 32 years ago in order to put fact to the policy that this province was officially bilingual. Some embraced this view while others rejected it. Now even the Minister of Education is telling people to get their early language learning outside the school system.
Today our students score low on international literacy tests and have poor numeracy test results as well. The Minister wants to fix the system and fix it quick. However, he is stuck with an industrial school system staffed by an aging unionized workforce using crumbling facilities with students arriving in diesel powered buses from far and wide on a daily basis. There is not much room to manoeuver. Just imagine what fuel price increases will do to the bus contract in the next few years.
In order to get more leverage, the Minister and his staff have decided to consolidate their efforts in a last ditch attempt to make school relevant and hopefully effective. But hope is not a strategy.
Departure of RMS Titanic
What has kept this industrial school system going is that most parents feel that it is a “good enough” option and the costs of leaving (e.g. home-schooling) are high, especially when many families have both parents working outside the home. Early French immersion kept many of the more involved parents committed to the system. Now it is gone. We’ve run out of money and options, constrained by years of added bulk to the system.
I do not believe that this strategy will work for several reasons:
Many of the most motivated parents now feel alienated and they will start looking for other options. Second language instruction was one of the few areas that actually worked, especially in the early years.
There are more available options to the industrial school system, such as abolishing schools in the UK, or school as a design studio.
The Internet enables group forming on an enormous scale and parents can easily find others with similar concerns.
Just as the newspaper, radio and music publishing industries (all based on a broadcast model) are becoming obsolete, so too is broadcast education – we teach, you learn; perhaps. One system to save us all will not work and I think that this decision will create a sea change in the people’s relationship with their public education system.
Just after posting this, I came across Ross Dawson’s post on industrial policy [my emphasis]:
Japan and Singapore are examples of nations that have had highly interventionist industrial policies and industry support through the second half of the twentieth century, with great success. However once economies become developed, the key issues are far less about manufacturing prowess. Today the buzzwords in national economic development are knowledge, creativity, media, content, entertainment, design, and the like. All of these flow easily across boundaries. Moreover, the educational and social structures required to support them are dramatically different to those that support the creation of an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse.
