Background
Social media is very young, very very young, yet in about 4 years it has changed the way we think about business itself, and doing business in general.
Revolutions are often quiet and invisible to those they affect until they, like the dinosaurs, realise that things no longer support them and then they fade quickly and die.
For millions of years man hunted and gathered food from the plains of Africa and beyond. Nomadic and short lived humanity struggled to adapt and learn. Then farming began to emerge, some men settled in one place, changed their diet and grew stronger, they learned to plan, to think ahead and to organise in groups for work, rather than survival. It took hundreds of thousands of years, but hunter gathering became an outdated way of living, yet still a few survive today on that model.
Farming allowed a few to take time to think and try new stuff, the spare time it afforded brains to speculate allowed development to accelerate. Civilisations grew as people gathered in large towns and cities supported by farmers outside – philosophising became a rational occupation, we are now within 5,000 years of today, perhaps more like 2,000. 60 generations of people like us. An Agrarian revolution was complete
Thoughts led to gradually greater ease of farming and thus greater diversity of thought and 300 years ago industrialisation began to take hold. People gathered in cities and more industrialisation led to more wealth, more wealth to more time, more time to more things to fill it. Industrial working needed organisational structures to work. The business, the corporation, was born out of necessity. An industrial revolution was upon us. Virtually no hunter gatherers, farming mechanised to the point of total automation and a tiny proportion of the population left to manage it. Will the same happen again? Is the institution itself under threat?
Big revolutions start with small change
I covered some aspects of this in ‘Thinking big and speaking small‘ but it’s clear that whoever first farmed was probably treated as a heretic or worse, that’s just not how things were done. The ‘Luddites‘ just 200 years ago, 6 generations before today, fought an angry war demanding protection of their way of life. When Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web – in 1989 , his voice was small and taken up only by a few. It wasn’t a revolution, just a means of ensuring that communication continued in the event of external disruption. It will kill the institution.
When the revolution comes… Too late it’s already happened…
In 20 years time we will look back and wonder what has happened, where it all went, but we can see the signs of change around us now if we look. Business is increasingly done by virtual teams working in collaborative groups, they are fast, adaptable, specialist and don’t require an organisational structure to perform, in fact having an organisational structure can get in the way of performance. The tools and means of production no longer sit in one country or timezone, no longer under one jurisdiction, and the speed of communication means we can find the very best at everything to provide their expertise to us.
Revolutions kill outmoded models of organisation and move to new ones, they don’t eliminate the old, they make it ineffective, but some examples will continue, we still hunt and gather (as a race), we still farm, we will still have industrial organisations and there will still be strong corporations, but a new model is emerging, and it will become the dominant model.
What are the signs of this? The UK Parliaments meltdown comes from the ability of all to see what they have done and how the hierarchical organisation model failed to protect us from their excesses. General Motors, Woolworth’s in the UK and many others are failing or have failed.
Some will put this down to poor management, and that’s true, better management might have meant they could survive – for now.
We think it’s a symptom of an endemic problem. Industrial margins are squeezed and squeezed as we understand the true value of what we do, the old model cannot survive because it no longer provides the value that people want. Governmental organisation might breakdown to become a more global model of interacting, interrelated, specialists, where laws are defined in operating areas not geographic ones and local needs, where they remain, become managed in different ways.
In the last decade we’ve moved from only having local markets, where we could be a generalist and make a good living, to a world where average performance won’t cut it, because customers demand more and can find it from different geographies. Easily.
In the Societal Web world we have to be exceptional at one thing, be the only person who does what we do, and be found for doing it, by those who need it. Evolution shows us something important here, the strong species dominate their niche and competition doesn’t stand a chance. The Societal Web and Social media allows anyone with a will to do so to dominate their niche, anywhere. It’s still an adolescent, and sometimes does crazy things as an experiment, to learn what works and what doesn’t, but it’s preparing itself for a gathering storm which will sweep away much of what we know. Be ready.
