It seems to me, in the wake of exciting and enlightening presentations by Andrew McAfee, Don Tapscott, John Hagel and David Weinberger, that a core theme coming out this year’s FASTForward 08 conference is, as Andrew pointed out in his first slide, executives and managers in organizations have finally decided what we call Enterprise 2.0 is coming and will arrive whether they like it or not, and that they might as well get on with addressing the question "how" … "how do we do this, "how" do we make this work for us ?

Of course one of the key complicating factors is that implementation of much of Enterprise 2.0 involves some degree or other of empowerment, which has been a bugbear of organizational life and organizational development for a long time.

As I listened to and watched the presentations, my mind kept circling back to three interesting books I’ve gone though in the past couple of years …. 1) McLuhan For Managers - New Tools for New Thinking, by de Kerckhove and Federman, 2) The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel, and 3) The Future of Work, by Tom Malone.  And I thought of other books I have chewed through in the past as well, as the remainder of this post will show.

Combining the theme of the conference (The User Revolution) the two recent and important white papers recently cited on this blog about user co-creation of value leading to new business logic and new business models, John Hagel’s observations on the impact of the user revolution on organizations, and the presentations from the thought leaders cited above, and the countless articles about the changes observed and coming to top-down direction, control and management, one could be forgiven for suspecting that something big is about to come our way.

There’s always attempts to minimise complexity and the need to deeply understand (we were talking about the above issues at lunch today, and one of our lunchtime companions said "you’ve got to keep it simple, otherwise CEO’s and managers won’t engage").  Right !  

And I mean that .. I think he’s right.  Which is why I expect that many companies will have some interesting failures if they try to do too much too fast.  McAfee did note that there aren’t many horror stories out there, but I think it’s clear that as these tools and services spread, increasingly work will need to be re-designed and the changes to organizational structures and dynamics will accumulate until it’s clear that the networked organization operates very differently, and has different needs for hygiene and development than do today’s existing pyramidic organizations.

As a longtime OD practitioner, and with many friends and acquaintances in this field in several countries on at least three continents, may I say that with respect to hyperlinks and electronicised information systems that people use to communicate and sometimes collaborate .. yes there will be complexity added to the process of effectiveness in organizations, and yes, hyperlinks can and sometimes do subvert hierarchy (a la Weinberger).

Many OD consultants know a fair bit about Semler’s leadership of Semco and the structures and dynamics it has engendered, the earlier Saturn environment, self-directed work teams, socio-technical work systems, Barry Oshry’s work on power in social systems, the relative looseness and fluidity of smaller organization, Participative Work Design (Emery & Trist), Weisbord’s Productive Workplaces: Organizing And Managing For Meaning, Dignity and Community, Zuboff’s seminal study of pulp & paper factory workers  chronicled in her book In The Age of The Smart Machine: the Future Of Work And Power, Elliott Jacque’s stratification methodologies according to time-span of decision-making, and so on.  Another practical look at the emerging possibilities for the democratization of the workplace / organization can be found in Thomas Malone’s recent book The Future Of Work.  Seriously, I could go on … the issues are not new, and there’s a rich history out there to tap into.

The issue(s) of empowerment and how to work effectively as information and values exert a democratising effect have been with us for a long time.  There is a lot to learn about the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives from the thought and work of OD practitioners over the past three or four decades.

But (imo … an important caveat, to be sure) not very much has changed over the past 30 years.  I believe I could make an argument that hierarchy has actually in many instances increased its grip over the past five years.  In saying that, I am consciously remembering David W’s various statements about how hyperlinks and digitally-connected environments can cut the slack out of interactions between people.  With a ruthless focus on efficiency and the use of information technology to pour electronic concrete over many large-scale business processes, we can observe today that when it comes to purposeful interaction between employees and other employees, and employees and customers, and employees and management, there’s not much slack or room to experiment in may organizational systems today … and perhaps little tolerance for the messiness of experimenting with social computing.

Andrew McAfee did say, at the end of his presentation, that implementation would be hard, and that increasingly IT and social computing would create differences in performance between companies.

I think he’s right .. and I also expect that the practice of organizational development will rise from relative obscurity.  But .. and it’s an important but … not too many current OD practitioners have a lot of experience with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 tools and services.

The good news is that I think there’s a reasonable chance that there’s a new breed of line managers coming along who get this stuff, and will plunge into it relatively enthusiastically.

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