OK, we are no practitioners of this framework, but we largely agree with the principles behind. However, while looking at his picture, it suddenly occurred to us how much our natural reaction to this model is one of thinking about "increasing complexity". You start bottom right in the Simple domain and then things get gradually worse when you move counter-clockwise across the model.

It's very normal human thinking. Most of us crave for stability, for knowing that things will evolve as expected and that tomorrow will be largely a replication of today. The Simple domain. Cognitive science experts and anthropologists probably can explain us why.

However, wouldn't it be more interesting, especially in these days of frantic change, if we looked at this model as one of "decreasing opportunity", starting bottom left in the Chaotic domain and then moving clockwise across the model to the Simple domain?

Indeed, in the Simple domain, we are talking about commoditization, narrow margins and harsh competition. In the Chaotic domain, we are talking about novel opportunities, the yet unknown and therefore, the not yet done. The place where you build competitive differentiation and advantage.

This thinking about chaos and complexity as the potential sources for future success is also reflected in Nassim Taleb's latest book "Antifragility" where he makes the case for embracing unexpected events (his so-called "black swans") as the sources for fundamental improvement.

Agreed, it doesn't sound easy or natural. How do you live this type of complexity?

Well, reality of course is that you are not expected to start doing things at random. However, what is really needed is that you abandon a lot of your prejudices and firm beliefs.

Wanting to stay too long in the Simple domain is what makes you staying too long in the wrong company. We did it ourselves.

Of course, every change brings uncertainty and therefore risk and you might run into unexpected problems instead of realizing the great opportunity. In the Chaotic domain, nothing is guaranteed.

However, as we also know from our own experience, when you have many problems, then there aren't any longer big ones. So, why not just give it a try?

Tags: complexity, change

About the author

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma.
Marc started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

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Well, most likely, this might seem a rather obvious statement. Isn't it a normal consequence of our increasingly networked economy and of our own engagement in social networking, both in a personal as a business context?

Indeed, it is.

However, do we really understand what it means "collaborating in a distributed work environment"?

The issue is that most of today's "open systems" thinking still largely focuses on finding "information" as the solution to solve our problems. Posting, sharing, tagging, tweeting... basically, they are all ways of putting pieces of information (or if you want: "knowledge") at the disposal of the other members of our network community who then, perhaps, might benefit from it. And companies are deploying similar approaches hoping to find the solutions for their not yet addressed problems.

This thinking is reflected in this interesting post by Set Godin, Most people, most of the time (the perfect crowd fallacy), where he writes We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there's a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don't know who they are. [...] The new open systems embrace waste. They understand that most people won't contribute and most contributions won't be any good. But that's fine, because this openness means that the previously unfound star now gets found.

This thinking about open systems as a potential source for finding answers and solutions outside the corporate walls is absolutely correct. The more eyeballs you have on the problem, the more likely it is that someone will find the solution.

Unfortunately, this is a bit too little, too late. Reality is that today's open system approaches still largely address the problems as perceived by traditional organisations where every problem has a "perfect" solution and where the challenge essentially is of finding that solution. Can't the solution be found in-house, then you crowdsource.

However, in our future increasingly complex and rapidly changing business environment, this paradigm no longer holds. The solutions to the problems that really matter will not be provided by that unknown individual somewhere in our network. Having "knowledge" no longer is enough.

Instead, these solutions will have to be build, based upon the complex interaction of multiple contributors, either individuals or larger entities, either internal or external, who all provide parts of the information or knowledge that are required. And these solutions will all have one thing in common: they will never be perfect. In a world of complexity, perfect solutions don't exist; there are only "good enough" solutions.

So, while having and finding knowledge still will be important, the main challenge will shift to building and agreeing on what will be the good enough solution and this agreeing on the final solution will always require that all parties abandon part of their firm beliefs and certainties.

In a world of increasing complexity, organisations must abandon their thinking about right answers and perfect solutions. They must abandon their focus on collecting, preserving and safekeeping their knowledge internally. Instead, they must develop their interaction capability, allowing them to find, select and contract external knowledge holders and to collaborate with them on building the solution that is not perfect, but good enough.

In this future of work, traditional approaches such as cost minimization, the streamlining of processes, etc. all become largely irrelevant because outpaced by change. Stability no longer is an option, neither is direction. Organisations must be willing to grasp the unexpected, not planned for, opportunities that emerge while collaborating on new solutions. Move fast towards new destinations. Kill fast old approaches.

Little of what is needed for this is part of the corporate culture today. It does not fit with the expectations of the stakeholders. However, like it or not, not preparing for this is not an option. The days that organisations had the luxury of having lengthy ERP-implementation projects with a threefold overrun in time and budget are long over. It will all have to be much faster, more complex, somewhat more messy, but certainly, also a lot more interesting. While technology still will support and facilitate these interactions, the real stuff that matters will be human interaction and that, my dear Watson, is a good thing.

Tags: business interaction management (BIM), collaboration, future of work, knowledge management (KM)

About the author

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma.
Marc started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

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To some extent, this post is a bit the outcome or the synthesis of a number of observations and discussions we had over the past months including:

• First, there was this little discussion we had on Google+ with Dave Gray about distributed work teams and that we wrote about in this Snippet: What makes distributed work teams work?
• Second, there was a series of posts by Harold Jarche where he made the distinction between "cooperation" and "collaboration" in a social business context.
• And third, there was this news item about Yahoo's CEO Mayer "Requiring Remote Employees to Not Be (Remote)".

At first sight, these items might seem rather unrelated to our musings about the future of work. However, they are right on target.

In a future where work will be increasingly project-based, "excellence in collaboration in a distributed work environment will be the new competitive differentiator".

Now, what the above items tell us is that this "excellence in collaboration in a distributed work environment" is not a trivial game. Collaboration in a distributed work environment is difficult, hard and complex.

Indeed, we will face similar challenges as the ones we discussed with Dave Gray and that led Yahoo's CEO to her decision. Only, in this future of work, the different actors of the distributed work team don't even belong to the same organisation. Therefore, building trust and tacit understanding will be a real challenge that is nowhere near the "we are all friends" theme that we read and hear in the traditional social business discourse.

Indeed, Jarche is completely right when he makes this clear distinction between "cooperation" and "collaboration". OK, we are no linguistic experts (and certainly not in English), but this distinction is important.

Most of today's social business model (and associated tools) still build upon the Web 2.0 principles where participation and usage were free. "Free" not only in the sense that it didn't cost you anything, but also that you were allowed to make use of it (or not) the way you wanted.

Unfortunately, this is a model that has a hard time delivering real results in a business context. We share, we tag, we bookmark, we post, we tweet… but most of this input goes essentially down the drain. Not a single individual is able to absorb the flow. So the occasional value that results from this, the "cooperation" as Jarche calls it, is largely based upon randomness, the so-called serendipity thing.

OK, this will certainly happen. However, we must be well aware of the fact that this serendipity thing works best in a boundary-less environment, an environment where there is no imposed context. And that, unfortunately, is not exactly the definition of what we call "a company".

But it gets even worse. Above "cooperation" essentially addresses the needs of a single individual: the person who finds the gem in the flow that allows him/her to do the better job, to make the sale or whatever is of value for him/her. Of course, the company will also benefit from this.

However, this is not enough for what we will need in a distributed collaboration environment where "value creation" will have to happen in this delicate balance of interactions between parties that are essentially strangers for each other.

In this future of work, the problem is no longer about finding the right answer. It isn't even about finding the contributor who has the right answer. In this increasingly complex business environment, bringing together the available answers does not add up to the whole that is the solution.

In this future of work, the capability of deriving the solution out of the interplay of partial answers will have to become our core competence.

Unfortunately, reality also is that today's enterprise is a poor environment for developing such competence.

Tags: business interaction management (BIM), collaboration, future of work, trust

About the author

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma.
Marc started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

http://www.facebook.com/marcb254
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbuyens
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https://plus.google.com/114287775988184012785/

In this post, we continue our musings about the concept of "business colonies" as it was introduced by Thomas Frey in an interview by SmartCompany a couple of weeks ago.

According to Frey, one type of "business colony" will be the grouping of contributing parties to support the activities of the individual contributors.

Indeed, in a world where jobs will be increasingly project-based, a lot of today's "job security" will be gone. The rigid relation between companies and employees will fade away, being replaced by a more dynamic, network-like collaboration whereby the required skills and knowledge get contracted from external independent agents.

Today, we already know such independent agents as freelancers or interim managers. However, for various reasons, not everyone is interested in, suitable for or able to manage such go-on-your-own career. So, for these independent agents, this creates numerous challenges in order to build and maintain their position in this increasingly competitive environment.

Of course, already today, there are numerous types of organisations that provide some form of support and that act as intermediary between companies and job seekers. Examples are the interim bureaus and service marketplaces such as Elance and oDesk.

Still, reality is that the interests of these intermediaries are not always sufficiently aligned with the needs of the independent actors, which leads to the observation that, in most cases, there is a strong negotiation power imbalance between companies and job seekers.

Guaranteeing this correct alignment of interests will mandate the creation of new organisational structures that are co-owned by the individual agents and that will provide various forms of support for their activities, such as.

• Physical, e.g. co-working spaces;
• Logistical, e.g. billing and secretarial support;
• Service promotion and opportunity discovery;
• Bargaining partner for contract negotiation;
• Educational, etc.

Little of this already exists today. Yes, there are various types of organisations that look similar, such as consulting organisations that exist as a virtual company, representing a network of independent contributors.

Unfortunately, reality is that these individual contributors rarely are the controlling entity in these organisations. Most often, a small number of founders or senior partners hold this controlling position, still adhering to the industrial age paradigm of the reaping of disproportionate benefits by the few at the cost of the effort of the many.

If we ever want the so-called "social enterprise" to become a reality, we will have to rewire a lot of today's default management thinking.

Tags: collaboration, future of work, organisational change

About the author

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma.
Marc started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

http://www.facebook.com/marcb254
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbuyens
http://www.twitter.com/mbuyens
https://plus.google.com/114287775988184012785/

Diversity comes in many flavours: you have differences in gender, age, nationality, race, religion, education, professional background, etc. However, a perhaps less visible yet equally important form of diversity is our personality.

Also here, there are various ways for classifying the differences in personality. This week, we read this post on Business Insider where they discussed the findings presented in a recent paper from Abdolkarim Sadrieh and Marina Schröder of the Otto von Guericke University: 'About A Third Of People Have A Fundamental Desire To Manipulate Others'.

According to the paper, […] the population splits neatly into thirds. About one third try to make the most for themselves, another third are altruistic, and the final third, as the authors put it, have a 'desire to influence others'.

It is certainly not our specialism, so we cannot judge whether these findings are indeed correct. As said, it is only one of the many ways of classifying personalities and, at least, such classification with only three archetypes is a bit extreme. Within each category, you will find people who have this characteristic "somewhat" and you will find others who have this characteristic "in an extreme way". We should avoid thinking about people in terms of averages.

Still, it is a puzzling observation. Where do these apparently conflicting personalities fit with today's social business vision of openness, transparency, equality, trust, etc.?

The answer is simple: they don't.

Too much of today's social business thinking assumes a level playing field, a "one size fits all". Social is good for everyone.

Well, that is true to some extent. Irrespective of your personality, anyone is able to use these tools and approaches and to get some benefit from it. However, everyone will also use (and abuse) these tools and approaches according to their own personality and, with only one third of altruists on board, the interplay of all this is unlikely to converge towards this vision of openness, transparency, equality and trust.

Still, not everything is bad news. While some of these personality characteristics might indeed seem negative, reality also is that, most of the time, they go together with other characteristics such as taking initiative, willingness to take risk, etc. that we value as positive characteristics.

Therefore, same as for the other forms of diversity, personality differences are a needed factor for organisations to thrive. However, same as for the other forms of diversity, do not expect that it will be easy.

Tags: diversity, social business

In the present post, we will briefly explore some of the characteristics of this first type of organisational form. However, doing so, Frey’s use of a single expression to refer to the two distinct types of organisational forms is a bit unfortunate, especially for this first type that, by definition, is a temporary organisation, while the word "colony" rather suggests a more lasting type of organisation.

So, instead of "business colony", we will use here the expression "Project-centred Collaborative Organisation" or PCO.

Granted, such name is certainly less sexy than "business colony", so if you have a better idea, please let us know. However, at least, it clearly tells you what it really is:

• Project-centred – the organisation exists for the sole purpose of delivering a specific project and therefore, it is by definition a temporary organisation.
• Collaborative – it is about participants working together to reach a common goal, in this case, delivering the project. ^*
• Organisation – we call it an organisation, since it has rules, conventions and structures, possibly even a hierarchy and physical working spaces, but it does not map to a single company or enterprise. Companies or enterprises might be participants in the PCO, but no company or enterprise owns the PCO. ^**

Now, this definition is rather straightforward. Everyone can understand this. However, is this PCO thing really done? As we all know, there are various companies that via outsourcing and subcontracting get to organisational structures that look a bit like this, yet not completely. In most cases, they fail to match the last characteristic: an organisation instead of a company or enterprise.

Of course, Frey mentions the movie industry as prime examples of PCO’s, where for each new movie project they bring on writers, directors, actors and crew, working together for the project and once that is over everyone moves on to the next project.

It is indeed a good example. However, that’s about it. Unless you want to take into account 19th century whale hunting, no other industry comes close. How come? What makes the movie industry so special?

Well, there might be many reasons. Perhaps, the movie industry isn’t a "real" business. Perhaps this is more a virtual world of art, emotion, creativity, weirdo’s... All true, but the real answer is much simpler: the movie industry is about producing uniqueness, not about producing as much films as possible at the lowest possible cost. OK, perhaps not so in Bollywood.

So, the movie industry is the prime example of a business where, by necessity, all activities are project-based and whereby the real levers for financial success are the uniqueness, the excellence and the quality of the deliverable (of course, all within the category and the budget where you want to play).

Beware, as we all know, using this type of organisational form is no guarantee for success. Countless movie projects do not create the deliverable that ensures financial success. However, it is likely the only possible organisational form that has the potential of delivering the uniqueness and excellence that are needed for success.

Now, also for other industries, the Internet and all its related communication technologies increasingly allow us moving to such PCO model. From a technology point of view, there is nothing that blocks us. In addition, nearly every aspect of the business activity can be viewed as a series of interacting projects.

However, do regular businesses have this drive for uniqueness and excellence and therefore, need this PCO-approach? Or do they rather go for replication of processes and business practices, delivering average quality at the lowest possible cost?

The future of work still has a long way to go.

Tags: collaboration, future of work

About the author

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma.
Marc started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

http://www.facebook.com/marcb254
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbuyens
http://www.twitter.com/mbuyens
https://plus.google.com/114287775988184012785/

Last week, we came across this summary of an interview by SmartCompany with Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute, 'Seven future trends you need to be aware of'.

Now, whatever the qualities of Mr. Frey as a futurist might be, we seriously question whether these seven items are indeed the most important trends that we should be aware of. However, we certainly agree on the first two: "Project-based working" and "Business colonies", be it that they both are expressions of the same trend. The first one thereby covers the "what" is done, whereas the second focuses more on the "how" this is enabled.

Project-based working stands for the disappearance of the traditional employer-employee relationships, being replaced by far more dynamic, ad hoc, time limited relationships that emerge while coupling specific needs and capabilities.

As Frey says: The internet and the communications systems that have evolved out of the internet have enabled us to align the needs of a business with the talent of individuals in a far more precise way than ever in the past. Rather than hiring a full time employee it is now much easier for businesses to bring them on for a two-hour project or a two-week project or a two-month project.

Business colonies then stand for the decoupling of the formal workplace-business relationship, being replaced by virtual or physical spaces where all these temporary contributors gather to deliver a specific project, but also to support the activities of the individual contributors. According to Frey, kind of an evolution of our current co-working spaces that we have today.

These ideas are not entirely new. We already wrote about similar concepts years ago in 'The new market reality' and, more recently, in 'The future of work - Enterprise 2.0, get real!'

So, we can only agree with what Frey is saying. However, if we all agree that these will be the fundamentals of our future economy, are we then really preparing for this new paradigm?

In the coming weeks, we will try exploring the basics of this evolution and its consequences in some more detail.

However, as a teaser, if we look at some current hypes such as Enterprise 2.0 and social business, do these "transformational" evolutions really guide us to this future organisation of work?

Notwithstanding the likely exceptions, our overall impression is that today, most of these initiatives still are very enterprise-centric instead of project-centric. In addition, there still is a very strong focus on technology and platform capability and as David Armano rightfully wrote: 'Technology Will Only Solve 1/3 of Your Social Business Problem'.

As always, we welcome your comments and your own ideas.

Tags: enterprise 2.0, future of work, trends, evolutions, future aspects of society, social business

About the author

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma.
Marc started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

http://www.facebook.com/marcb254
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbuyens
http://www.twitter.com/mbuyens
https://plus.google.com/114287775988184012785/

Most of us will remember the e-business marketplace frenzy at the end of the Web 1.0 era. December 2000, the eve of the burst of the first Internet bubble. We all know the sequel.

Value. It is one of the most used and abused words in management literature. So, last week, above quote came back to our mind while reading this short HBR post by Nilofer Merchant 'Traditional Strategy Is Dead. Welcome to the #SocialEra', which is essentially a bit of marketing for her latest book '11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era'.

The post then triggered another, supporting post by Tim Kastelle 'Are You Ready for the #SocialEra?'

We haven't yet read the book, but the statements made by Merchant and Kastelle in these posts are of course correct. In this increasingly networked economy, new principles and rules will apply. Size will indeed no longer be a determining factor. Networks of smaller businesses will thrive.

Still, we have some concerns regarding their oversimplified use of the expression "value creation". Does social business as such create value? And for whom?

Of course it does. If a company makes better use of the available knowledge, skills and experience of its extended networked environment, then it creates real opportunities for creating more value. It's a matter of reach, discovery, serendipity and leverage.

However, is this greater "value" also distributed in an equitable way?

The Instagram case, as mentioned in Kastelle's post, is a prime example: 13 employees for a market worth of $1 billion. As a comparison: when we joined Tandem Computers in 1987, the company was at its top with a market valuation of some $3.1 billion and a workforce of around 7.500.

Of course, Instagram's "network" was not limited to these 13 employees. Other infrastructure and service providers were part of the extended "system" that delivered the service. In addition, there were the millions of free contributors who were happy to use the service for free, but in reality were the real source of value creation.

It all makes sense, leveraging the power of the network. However, who won the big ticket when the company was bought by Facebook? The founders, the few employees and the VCs. Not the other partners in the network. Not the free contributors who, most likely are still happy with the emotional value they get while using the service. However, this is the type of value that doesn't pay your meal or your mortgage.

OK, the Instagram case might be an extreme example. However, also in more traditional businesses where approaches such as crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation now make inroads, similar patterns are likely to emerge.

Indeed, the very nature of this mechanism of leveraging the network is based upon the principle of the creation of value for a small core group at a reasonable cost. However, this cost is then spread over a large number of network partners and contributors, making the average "value" for these network participants marginal.

So, the dominant actor in the network becomes the new 800-pound gorilla, even though this can be a very small company or even an individual. And the analogy in Merchant's book between the 800-pound gorilla and a herd of 800 nimble gazelles is of course inspiring but, as with most analogies, in reality it doesn't really work that way.

Of course, we can all dream about heterogeneous networks of small businesses that really collaborate on an equal basis as independent actors. However, show us the examples. The reality is that the fundamentals of our economy are based on competition, not on cooperation.

Or we can dream that all people and all companies in such networked economy will become "honest" and that everyone will try distributing value in an equitable way.

Even then, if we really apply the principles of leveraging our networks, we will rapidly run into the physical limits of our economy and our current environment here on earth. Already today, we run into the limits of available space, energy resources, food production, etc. Leveraging the power of networks only makes sense as long as there are no boundaries for growth.

Unfortunately, there are ample boundaries and therefore, the growth of one company or network will essentially have to be fuelled by the disappearance of another one. The "value" created by the Facebooks and the Twitters of this world is essentially a shift of advertising revenues away from other media or players, but the advertising spending as a whole cannot grow at the same pace.

These are obvious observations if you really want to look at the whole of the "system". It is only a matter of thinking. Unfortunately, this type of considerations is largely missing in most social business discourses.

Still, it might be that "thinking" is our real problem. Perhaps that our brain is hard-wired in such a way that our participation in networks, contributing to the value creation of a larger whole still is perceived as being valuable to us, even if it doesn't deliver us any tangible benefits.

This might be weird, but just read this post by Susan Weinschenk 'Why We're All Addicted to Texts, Twitter and Google'.

We are certainly no experts in these matters, so we cannot judge whether all of this is scientifically correct. However, it seems to explain certain types of behaviour that we observe in social networks.

So, perhaps that everything goes as planned. Perhaps that our very nature makes that we give priority to building the greater whole even if we are not really rewarded for it. It is likely the way our race will progress as long as it does not run into boundaries that it cannot remove.

So why bother?

Only, do not forget to buy an extra bottle of dopamine next time you visit the appstore. Just in case.

About the author

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma.
Marc started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

http://www.facebook.com/marcb254
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbuyens
http://www.twitter.com/mbuyens
https://plus.google.com/114287775988184012785/

One of these "irrelevancies" was the "library" sitting somewhere at the bottom of the sidebar. A "library" section, showcasing the books you had read, was once a popular item on blogs and personal websites. However, in the meantime, who still reads a book? And what does it tell you anyway? Exit library.

Still, since we had frequently written in our posts about some of these books, we had to check whether everything could really be removed without causing broken links.

So, doing these verifications gave us a small journey back in our thinking and writing over the past ten years.

It was a somewhat sobering experience.

Suddenly, we realized how much broader our past interests and our writing had been. Today, most of it is related to enterprise 2.0, social business and a bit of social media, all much of the same. However, in the past, our interests seemed to be much broader, covering a variety of subjects such as innovation, project management, cosmology, quantum mechanics, customer centricity, organisational change and many more.

For some reason, our interests had narrowed down.

Of course, over the past years, the flood of information that has become available via blogs, social networks, etc. has become so enormous that filtering is a necessity. There simply is no other alternative to handle the flow.

However, this filtering does not only seem to be a way of reducing the volume. Apparently, it also has as a consequence that we reduce the variety of the subjects that we are interested in.

The Shallows
What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Nicholas Carr

This observation that the Internet is changing the way we behave and think is not new. People such as Nick Carr already wrote about it. Still, this confrontation with our own reduced interests was an unpleasant experience. Before, we didn’t have this feeling at all, but the statistical evidence was there.

We should have known better. This daily ritual of subscribing, following and connecting introduces a high degree of clustering. Many of these social tools and networks make it easy to find information sources about a given topic. However, doing so, we rapidly reach the limits of the information we can handle and the net result is that our view gets narrowed.

Information availability does not broaden our view, it does narrow it down. We now have access to much more information, but we are especially accessing more of the same. Increasingly, we are entering a tunnel of reduced or single interests and at the end, perhaps, of just self-interests.

We have to get out of this tunnel as soon as possible.

Tags: trends, evolutions, future aspects of society, social media

About the author

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma.
Marc started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

http://www.facebook.com/marcb254
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbuyens
http://www.twitter.com/mbuyens
https://plus.google.com/114287775988184012785/

Of course, his somewhat pessimistic observations are directly linked to the difficult economic climate in his homeland Spain and the likely consequences this has for many of his friends. We can only hope for better times.

However, even while living in one of the less affected parts of Europe these days, we also have our own concerns about the potential mismatch between the "social" vision and the reality of our society.

More specifically, we want to ask the question: "Is a world that is based upon the principles and approaches enabled by the current social Internet revolution a world that we want to live in?"

Most likely, this will seem a rather stupid question for most of you. Isn’t this social Internet revolution all about democracy, equality, transparency, honesty? Just look at what happened with the Arab Spring!

Yes, of course, you are right. However, do we also look enough at the facts?

Just have a look at this interesting TED speech by Don Tabscott about ‘Four principles for the open world’.

Great, isn’t it? Don’t we all dream of this great open world?

However, did you really pay attention and gave it some thought?

Take the example of the goldmine owner. It isn’t a very new story, but indeed a great example of what openness, crowdsourcing and collaboration can achieve.

What is the outcome?

Well, there is of course the expert (or in this case, the expert company) who delivered the great advice and who earns a really decent amount of money. And there is the mine owner, an already wealthy person (an ex-banker!) who now becomes somewhat indecently rich. And then, yes a bit absent in this story, there are the other contributors who tried bringing in the winning answer but failed. The free contributors.

Winner takes all. Nothing wrong with that.

Indeed. However, this basic mechanism of leveraging the knowledge and the effort of the many to the advantage of the few is increasingly becoming a dominant theme in our economy and in our society. The social Internet has become a massive leveraging machine and we are the fuel.

The Power of Pull
How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison

The underlying principles are well-known and have been beautifully described in John Hagel’s bestseller ‘The Power Of Pull’: Access, Attract, Achieve.

However, can everyone achieve? Not everyone has the capabilities to do so. And even then, can a world exist where we all successfully execute these principles of accessing, attracting and achieving?

Of course not. The basic concept of leveraging necessitates that there are huge numbers of (nearly) free contributors to support the achievers. Free contributors are what made Facebook a $100 billion company. (Well, not really anymore according to today’s stock price)

That is the way we are currently going. It can hardly be avoided. We can all hope that these principles will be used to create a better, more human society, but reality will be different. As before, the few will control and exploit the many. It will only be a lot easier to do so. It is the dawn of the ant society. And we called it "social".

Tags: trends, evolutions, future aspects of society, social business

About the author

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma.
Marc started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

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