On the Emergence of New Forms of Organizational Structure and Governance

October 1, 2009 at 11:33 am · Filed under Event Announcements

(Stimulated by my colleague Rob Paterson’s just-published post on Emergence, I am taking the liberty of re-publishing a piece I originally wrote in April 2003.  I think the issues are still pertinent … just more prevalent today, which is in effect what emergence is all about

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Emergence and Organizational Structure and Dynamics

First, thanks to Euan Semple for lending me his copy of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. I think I’ll have to get him a new one – I am really using this copy (update .. I did get him a new copy, about thee years ago).

After reading it through for the first time, it seems clear that all of human history is a story of emergence, of neuronal connection, adaptation and evolution of the (perhaps) innate and latent capacity of Homo Sapiens.

It is also clear that Homo Sapiens is now co-existing with a wired (both literal and perhaps figurative) interconnected digital infrastructure.

In the book, Steven Johnson covers all the pertinent ground – where and how emergence first began to be understood, the “tipping points” where it became clear that the effects of full-surround media changed the game for politics, or when interactive online communities and online game-playing discovered that too few rules led to even more problems, rather than too many rules. He also explores the magic that is the human social animal, with our extrordinary ability to “read minds”, as he puts it.

Anarchy, it seems, is less attractive than rigid hierarchy – and heterarchy requires constant tinkering and fussing via negative feedback loops. We have had experience in addressing these issues before, but not in ongoing, always-on real time everywhere. To where will it all lead we don’t know – but there’s a good chance that this time it will be substantively different.

What continues to fascinate me is whether, how and when the critical mass of larger organizations that our modern society knows so well will begin to address honestly the clear evidence that a fundamentally new set of conditions – interconnected smart people and increasingly smart software – demands fundamentally different responses to their environment of interconnected customers and employees.

Oh, the signs have been around for a long time – QWL initiatives in the 70’s and 80’s, learning organization theory and practice in the 90’s, coaching, flattening organizations, turning the org chart upside-down, Emotional Intelligence, self-directed work teams, pushing accountability down the organizational chain of command, boundaryless organizations, and on and on, and on …

And yet … for each of these initiatives, there has been an equal and opposite reaction towards … more control, increased hierarchy, a growing divide between winners and losers. It’s as if we collectively don’t know how or can’t trust ourselves to operate in self-organizing, self-regulating, wise networks that will do what need to get done.

And this, I think, is the deeper message I am taking from Steven Johnson’s book – that the self-organization, the changes to the meta-rules of how humans work together in purposeful action and systems, will happen despite the best efforts of the commanders to effect their will.

It all depends on where you look at it from – 10 feet up, 10,000 feet up, 100,000 feet up or a million feet up. If we continue to remember the profound impacts of an order-of-magnitude change to societies around the world due to a profound shift in the means of distributing information and knowledge made available by the printing press … then the emerging changes to us and our social systems due to the gobal wired interconnectedness will, I think, inevitably lead to an age of wirearchy – a dynamic n-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, credibility, trust and focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology.

This will be the first age where we are truly, at the meta level, governed by the feedback loops that we create, both consciously and unconsciously. We will be organized for, and governed by, the dynamics of championing, channeling and coordinating rather than commanding-and-controlling.

I believe we are seeing this unfold in front of us, daily. Generally, the people at the top don’t like it one bit.

To borrow some wisdom from a poem that was popular about fifteen years ago, “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, I think we all need to learn how to “hold hands and stick together”, ’cause it’s probably going to get bumpy before the ride smooths out.

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Emergence Part 1 – So what is really going on?

October 1, 2009 at 8:58 am · Filed under Culture, Emergence, Social Media, Social Networking

Beyond disrupting organizations and value as we know it, what is going to be the deep result of the use of Social Media? Many of us see it as at least making organizations more effective – faster, more informed etc. But I wonder. My growing feeling is that the widespread use of Social Media might soon enable us to gain the benefit of “Emergence”.

What you might ask is “Emergence”. Here is an example of how each of us as humans acquire the scale free use of language:

Let me explain – I have a one year old grand daughter now so I am re living all of this. At around 9 -12 months, the child starts to make sounds – it is training the muscles. At about 12 – 18 months, it starts to use single words – Dada is usually first – so unfair but easier to say than Mama. It starts to use simple connectors such as “It” “a” “. 18 months – 24, the child adds a few direct verbs and qualifiers such as “more”. Then, as if by magic Emergence!. The child starts speaking in whole sentences – the full acquisition of the structure of language has been achieved. In some cases children are all but silent until this point and one day they can speak full sentences.

How does this happen? The child needs a few simple but essential environmental factors to be in place. I will come to these at the end of this post becuase they are directly related to what may be needed to have Social Media offer us this opportunity for Emergence as well.

One more example.

An oak tree produces many acorns. Only a very small number grow to become a tree. All the potential of the tree is inside this tiny thing. To have Emergence so that it can become a tree, there has to be a number of environmental factors that offer the acorn, the best shot at reaching this potential. You can imagine with me as to what some of these might be. Not get eaten by a squirrel – falling far enough away from the parent or being dropped by a squirrel – the right soil/moisture – not being eaten by a deer – not being mowed by me etc. If enough of the factors are in place, then the acorn will become a tree.

Now here is a vital insight, once it gets to a certain size, it gets very robust and only man cutting it down with a saw or a big fire will prevent it from growing further and living a long time. It is vulnerable only for a relatively short time at the front end.

There is more. An acorn has more potential than a tree alone.

Under the right environmental circumstances, one tree will lead to another until there is a small wood. With a small wood in place, more Emergence! The wood bursts into a complex forest that not only has more trees but a huge supporting other ecosystem that itself depends on and supports the oak first. Such a forest is tremendously complex and long lasting and offers all its normal inhabitants the optimal environment for more scale and less risk.

So Emergence leads to more complexity and to more resiliency.  The resiliency is the reinforcement of the environmental factors that support the inhabitants of the system in reaching their full potential.

I am not clear about the ideal factors for Oak Trees. But the ideal factors for allowing children to reach their full potential are now known. My bet is that what works for infants works for all people. If we can be clear about what these few factors are, then we can see how Social Media might be used by us to go way beyond where are are right now.

An irony is that this little boy’s name is Acorn.

The link will take you to the research that has captured what Acorn and all of us need as human babies to set off on the pathway to our full potential or not. For if we don’t get the key factors we stall – stall for life.

Here are the key factors for our optimal development in simple form – as I list them, think of how your work place lines up or not to them. For this is what we all need all the time to be at our best as primates and humans.

• Culture is the most important environmental factor - The family culture has to offer the child a mix of clear boundaries of what is not allowed and yet also the child must be allowed a lot of room to explore inside these boundaries. It is Boundaries and Freedom. The child must be listened to and must have “conversations” with her parents. Very authoritarian parenting – all orders and all rules and all about the use of power over – is a huge shut down. All permissive – you choose baby is very unsafe and also leads to trouble in development.

• Touch Is the main pathway to getting the neurons to line up the right way. Recall – we are Primates. For all Primates Grooming is the essential social bond that not only mediates stress and but mediates power differences. Touch is the first step. Tone of Voice is related to Touch. For humans, gossip has replaced touch in adults. The key to gossip is being listened too! We know from the Romanian orphanages, that babies that are only tidied up and not touched in a loving way not only cannot thrive but often die! Transactional relationships are really really bad for us.

• Emergence is all about Patterns connecting to scale free – so how many words a child years by 2 is the last factor - Kids whose development cannot be stopped have heard up to 50 million words by 2. Kids who will  never develop fully will only have heard 10 million by the same age. They can never catch up

What we do know about Emergence is that it is Fractal. The key factors that support “Growth” do not change for scale. And also, that the chances of the key factors being in place, rise when there is a critical mass. An Oak forest offers the best shot for all who rely on its factors versus an acorn, a squirrel, a hawk, a truffle and a pig on their own.

When I saw the first slide in this post the other day – a light bulb went off for me. If this is how we acquire language and the optimal path for our own growth as a human, then the power of these connections inside the right social container could lead to something really special. The Netflix Prize story got me even more excited – for this showed how groups of people being connected had a major result as a consequence of the properties of Emergence.

If I am right, then we surely stand on the edge of a great awakening? Something like this happened 60,000 years ago, when humans acquired complex language itself. What might this mean for us? I can’t know. But we do know what happened 60,000 years ago. Human development exploded as did our ability to manipulate our world. Until then we were simply one of the species.

Now I fear that our reductive mindset based I think on our reliance on engineering rather than on Growth as the main process for getting more is putting us at risk as a species. Our only chance I think is to work with nature. If we as humans can find the best social container, we may have a chance.

So what container and how might social software help?

In the next post, I will get more specific about how we might translate these factors and Social Software into ideas about what the opportunity is. In the 3rd post in the series, I will share with you some brilliant supporting work that reveals how we might make better connections between us as a very diverse population. How we might solve the challenge of how to connect the geeks to the bureaucrats and to the business people – all of who have a very different world view.

Part 2 follows here

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Implementing Social Bookmarking at Océ

October 1, 2009 at 1:58 am · Filed under Event Announcements

This is the fifth in a series of interviews with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ, about their Enterprise 2.0 implementation and adoption experiences. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Earlier, I wrote out their micro-messaging, wiki experiences, enterprise information architecture, and collaboration platform implementation. For this post I spoke with Samuel and Peter Kruizinga about their social bookmarking experiences.

Peter and a colleague set up the social bookmarking application in the Research and Development department using an Open Source tool.  Peter is a member of R&D and part of their job is doing research on current trends in various technical issues.  People were sharing links to web articles through email.  However, they would only send them to a few close colleagues so as to not “spam” others. The information was not getting fully distributed to the right people. It was hard to decide what to send to whom.

Peter wanted a better way to share important links connected with their research so he set up the social bookmarking application.  This provided a non-intrusive way to make these links available and placed the responsibility to accessing them wit the individual.  Several people had used public social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us but they needed a way to share information behind the firewall.  Peter said they did not want to give away their areas of focus to competitors.

It started slow with only a few contributors. However, there were many more readers so information was getting shared and the experiment is accomplishing its objectives. There are now plans to both promote the system and extend its functionality.

There have been some notable success stories that Peter and Samuel intend to use as part of the promotion. For example, one R&D project had both Peter and Samuel as part of the team. The other team members had not yet used the social bookmarking tool. They were amazed with how information could be easily shared with the tool and new information that could be discovered. Peter found a number of prior bookmarks on their topic so they had a very good history of the issue with very little effort.

In another example, Peter and Samuel are following different topics on the Web and then sharing each other’s findings. This way they act as a filter to portions of the Web, saving each other time.

They have a number of ideas on how to expand the social bookmarking capability.  First, they would like to integrate a trend-overview application based on bookmarks so they can look at what people are interested in over time. They also wanted to establish an offline cache to periodically fetch the bookmarked web pages and documents and place them in local storage. This prevents dead link problems and lost information for older bookmarks.

In addition, they want to offer the possibility to bookmark offline content such as files that were sent by email or any other files for which there is no URL. They want the possibility to search on tags, as well as on combinations of tags or words. They also want the ability to find experts for a specific tag (who submitted bookmarks with that tag). Finding the top three taggers on a topic can be a useful starting place.

We discussed both the integration and the differentiation of the bookmarking tool and other enterprise 2.0 tools. They can now bookmark pages in the enterprise wiki, as well as the memo filing system. They also plan to integrate it with the file sharing system. They will cross-promote the different enterprise 2.0 tools within each one and provide guidance on when to use each.

R&D is an ideal place to start using a social bookmarking tool because of its heavy research of the Web. They now plan to spread its use into the broader corporation. This will enable everyone to better stay current with their areas.

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