The message from the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo: We are at an inflection point in human history. Doug Engelbart’s vision of harnessing our collective intelligence is unfolding. We’ve only just begun. The turning tide is frightening or wonderful; that’s a matter of perspective.
Tim O’Reilly told us Web 2.0 is becoming the platform for everything. It’s an amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence. It is turning the enterprise inside out. It is the platform beneath a new way of living. We are at a turning point — a huge change in the way the world works.
Tim retold a great story from Clay Shirky. IBM’s Thomas Watson predicted the world would need about five computers. Clay points out Watson was wrong. Not in the direction you think. Watson overstated the number of computers by four. It’s all one cloud. Web 2.0 is evolving into cloud computing and the internet operating system. Ambient computing is on the way but it rides on mobile phones and sensors, not computers. It converging into one platform for the world.
Participatory is too uninspiring a word to describe what’s going on. Since the middle of the last century, we’ve received a gift: discretionary time. Confused, we didn’t make good use of it. When we weren’t taking instructions (at what we call “work”), we became accustomed to doing nothing: sitting back and letting the world go by. Watching the idiot box. From now on, we have to make better use of this gift of time. We must build and share; we must co-create the world we live in. This is a mind-blower on the order of the Industrial Revolution.
In that revolution, abandoning country life to live in cities and working in factories instead of farms put people into a state of perpetual disorientation. One thing enabled them to cope with the crisis: gin. People escaped mental chaos by becoming blotto. Gin pushcarts rolled down the streets. Swilling gin by the tankard blocks out everything.
Clay Shirky told us about one about a four-year old girl searching for something around and behind the family television. Her father asked what she was doing. She asked, “Where is the mouse?” To a four-year old, a television without a mouse is broken. If something doesn’t include you, it may not be worth sitting still for.
What are we doing collectively? Instead of drinking gin. We’re looking for the mouse.
The Blogopolis room here accommodates about a hundred people. As I write this, three or four huddles of them are recording interviews. I am sitting on the floor, beside a large screen. Three people in front of me are waving their arms in the air; they are air-bowling with Wii handhelds; the screen is their virtual bowling alley.
This is the blogging room, a freebie for people who self-identify as bloggers. You want to do something besides sit in a chair listening? This is the place. To the right, several 1′ high robotic dinosaurs are shmoozing. To my left, two people are slumped over the backs of chairs, receiving massages. Scoble’s here. Stowe Boyd is here. Dan Farber sits on the other side of the screen writing a story. A Finnish guy tells me about a web service that warns you of dangerous websites while you are on the net. I mention that for most corporate leaders, this room looks like an outtake from a science fiction flick.
As the keynotes conclude, the Blogopolis is shoulder to shoulder. Soon, people will be fanning out to continue the Expo 2.0 Expo conversation in bars and restaurants. A mash-up of Twitter, Upcoming, and an interactive map will enable them to locate friends via cell phone. They can also get a map — and a report on how big a crowd is at the bar. That’s part of the message: the formal event closes down for the day but the conversation continues on. Care for a pint of gin?
Dorothy Parker:
I like to have a martini
Two at the very most
After three I’m under the table
After four I’m under the host.
Gin is not my drink of choice. I wandered through the one-time wasteland that is now Yerba Buena Gardens reflecting on the day. Serendipity kicked in. Two guys were walking along Mission Street, next to Yerba Buena. Clay and Tim. I re-introduced myself and told them their presentations were awesome. I wasn’t buttering them up: jointly, they had delivered a wake-up call.
JAY CROSS CHALLENGES THE CURRENT PARADIGMS OF BUSINESS AND LOOKS AT HOW TECHNOLOGY AND THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE IS TRANSFORMING LEARNING
Business firms evolve or die. Many organisations will not survive the journey from the industrial age to the network era.
Until a few hundred years ago, people lived in the countryside, farming the land with their families. Then the industrial revolution came along, and farmers became factory workers. Machines took over the physical work and managers improved efficiency. This is what most of us are accustomed to.
But brains are replacing machines. We are in the midst of a great transition to an era of networks and service. Einstein’s relativity has replaced Newton’s clockwork universe, not just in physics, but in the way we regard the world. Reality emerges from the interaction of complex adaptive systems; the future is unpredictable; nothing is certain. As in nature, everything is connected to everything else. Nothing is ever finished: the world is in perpetual beta, always evolving.
Ideas and relationships have become more valuable than tangible assets. Shareholders owned the factories; workers own their minds. Information spreading through network connections, empowers workers to take responsibility for their own decisions.
LOSE CONTROL AND LOOSE CONTROL
As Jan Carlzon wrote in Moments of Truth, "An individual without information can’t take responsibility. An individual with information can’t help but take responsibility."
Why would a manager want to give up control? Carlzon again: "Problems are solved on the spot, as soon as they arise. No frontline employee has to wait for a supervisor’s permission."
Hierarchies are like the children’s game of telephone, where a message is whispered from one person to the next, becoming unintelligible in the process. Networks enable direct, static-free, one-to-one communication.
Today’s executives grew up in a business world managed by industrial-age rules. Many pay unquestioned allegiance to the vestiges of the industrial paradigm. They believe in hierarchical organisation structures, top-down control, information hoarding, lack of collaboration, rigidity, formality, competition, and undervaluing intangibles.
In the opposite corner, most network age business people support flat organisations, shared responsibility, information sharing, extreme collaboration, Flexibility, informality, cooperation, and the importance of social capital and reputation.
The industrial-agers see the network folk as undisciplined techno-optimists. The network-agers think of the industry people as clueless reactionaries. The conflict between the two groups is building.
As young people accustomed to the internet join the workforce, they bring with them network technologies such as instant messenger and social networks. Imagine an old-style organisation where new hires in the local ranks swap information with colleagues in other silos and with customers. They will be better informed. As the saying goes, "networks subvert hierarchy."
This is not to say that networks should replace all hierarchies, for that leads to chaos. Someone has to sign the paychecks and mediate among the stakeholders. The organisations’ challenge is to achieve the right balance, applying command-and-control as appropriate for stability and networks when it improves performance.
LIQUID KNOWLEDGE
What is learning when knowledge is liquid? We used to learn in order to get along in the environments we take part in. Familiarity with how things worked enabled us to adapt, and adapting to one’s surroundings is still the goal of learning.
In The Future of Management: Gary Hamel writes, "The most bruising skirmishes in the new millennium won’t be fought along the battle lines that separate one competitor, ecosystem or economic bloc from another.
Rather, they will be fought along the lines that separate those who seek to defend the prerogatives, power and prestige of their bureaucratic caste from those who hope to build less structured, less tightly managed organisations that elicit and merit the very best that human beings have to give."
Hamel thinks business managers are acting like generals fighting the last war. When the musket was introduced, it took two generations and countless deaths for the military to change from the strategy they had developed to fight soldiers wielding axes and pikes.
Come with me up to the balcony, where we can look down on all this. From on high, we can see innovation in operations, products, and strategy formulation. But innovation in management methods is nil. We cling to a topdown world of dependent workers who follow instructions, the solo metric of cash return on investment, rewards for hours instead of accomplishment, the conceit that management has all the wisdom, and helplessness in the face of monumental change.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In one of his first staff meetings after joining IBM, Lou Gerstner flipped off the Powerpoint projector and said, "Let’s just talk about business." Candor replaced puffery. Small teams run each of Whole Foods’ hundreds of markets. They make buying decisions and decide how to present the goods. They are driven by pride of accomplishment and pay for performance. And every store has the feel of a local store.
W.L. Gore maintains small factories run by smaller teams. Factories are co-located to enable workers to cross-fertilise. The organisation is almost totally flat, and everyone is expected to innovate. Google hires the best and the brightest, and gives them lots of discretion to do their work. Seventy percent of an engineer’s time is dedicated to core assignments; thirty percent is spent on new product concepts. How does Google keep track of someone who works five days a week but then disappears for six weeks to work on a self·defined project? It doesn’t. Laissez-faire is more valuable than the cost of measurement and compliance, and the apparent lack of trust measurement suggests.
I know what you’re thinking. The UK is not America, and your company is no Whole Foods, Gore, or Google. Wrong attitude! Innovation of management practice is the road to survival. This train is leaving the station.
KEYNOTE THOUGHTS
At the opening keynote at the Learning Technology Conference, I plan to ask the audience a few questions to gauge their innovation and assess their use of technology for innovation. (After all, this is a technology conference.)
Ponder the accuracy of these statements for your organisation, and you will get more out of the conference:
- Our employees can access the entire internet from their desktops.
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Our people are learning and growing fa enough to keep up with the future.
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It’s easy to set up an online meeting
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We are so busy we don’t have time to reflect on our experience.
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We distribute information through podcasts
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It’s easy to set up a blog or wiki.
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My team talks about the trends that drive our business.
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Relationships between departments are cordial and effective.
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We learn something from every interaction with a customer.
Jay Cross is a strategist, speaker, consultant, designer of corporate learning and perform systems. Jay will be speaking at the Learning Technologies 2008 Conference and can be’ contacted at jaycross@interneffime.com
