The Economist: Thriving in the Collaborative Age

In the long history of humankind
(and animal kind, too) those who
learned to collaborate and
improvise most effectively have
prevailed.
Charles Darwin

The Economist Nick Jankel
The Big Rethink
www.wecreate.cc connect@wecreate.cc
1

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Thriving in the
collaborative age

The Economist Nick Jankel
The Big Rethink
www.wecreate.cc connect@wecreate.cc
2

I have 12 or so minutes to take you on a rapid ride through the landscape of the collaborative age - and its impact on
organizations. I also want to share with you some of the deﬁning characteristics of individuals and companies that thrive in the
wikiﬁed world.

hierarchy

www.wecreate.cc 3


Our story begins in the 30s, here in Detroit at the home of General Motors. Alfred
Sloan had become CEO and invented a management solution to the challenges of
vast industrial scale.

command
and control
www.wecreate.cc
4

Command and control management. Line mangers, economic evaluations, KPIs.
These became the norm of modern business the world over.

authoritarian
marketing
www.wecreate.cc 5


Consumers were sold dreams and encouraged to move up a pre-designed ladder
of success, whist planed obsolescence drove them ever onwards

cogs in cycle
www.wecreate.cc
6

Both the internal and external structure was premised on the everyman being a
cog in the wheel of consumption and production - homo economicus - self-
interested (and selﬁsh) man.

equal & opposite
reaction
www.wecreate.cc
7

And the reaction to this hierarchical imbalance was the formation of another
hierarchy - the union - which began to stage sit-ins in the 30s to balance the
power. This conﬂict has been key to the history of GM since then.

law of requisite
variety
www.wecreate.cc 8


Ashby-Ross, a pioneering cybernetician, introduced us to a key concept, the law
of requisite variety.

minimal
variety

If the environment is limited in scope, the internal structure of an organism need
only display the same level of variety to survive

massive
variety

But in environments of increasingly complexity, an organism, an organization,
must change how it is structured to survive.

monolithic
media
In the past, monolithic media told the ʻconsumerʼ or ʻworkerʼ how to think -
reinforcing hierarchies and allowing businesses to ʻprogramʼ the minds of people
to conform.

social
media
But now there are hundreds of ways for people to share, contribute, bounce ideas,
learn, complain or ﬁnd people that resonate with their values.

winning through
innovation

www.wecreate.cc
mechanistic 13

Organizations must move from a linear, cause and effect, mechanistic world where
people must be controlled and dominated

networked
www.wecreate.cc 14


To one which recognizes the heterarchical, networked, collaborative nature of life
today. Recent research from Harvard Medical School shows that even obesity is
passed to us by our network, more than parents so it is vital the we harness the
nodality rather than ﬁght.

world has
been rewired
www.wecreate.cc
15

This is at its most symbolic in the rapid rise of social media - where content (media)
and conversations (social) combine, recombine and create inﬁnite levels of
complexity distributed across massive, overlapping networks which has rewired how
people (Gen Y & Z espeically0 view the world. This is creating change in business,
society, scienec and culture as whole – demanding organizations and individuals
become more collaborative, open and networked in nature.

www.wecreate.cc 16


Over a billion tweets a month. A trending topic has a shelf life of 5-10 minutes
126 million blogs. 350 million on Facebook - 50% log in every day
1 billion videos served by YouTube each day - 182 videos / month

Twitter - 39
Facebook - 38

www.wecreate.cc 17


To dispel any myths.... the average age of a Facebook or Twitter user is in the late
30s. And 84% of sites have more women than men

power shifts
virtuously


We see the collective power of connected individuals, ʻnetwork effectsʼ making the
whole ever greater than the sum of the parts, and people perceiving the growing
force of their individual contributions massed together, which stimulates a virtuous
circle.

hierarchies
www.wecreate.cc subverted
19

Just as in the annual carnivals within medieval times – where for one day
traditional churches and states hierarchies were subverted now ideas spread at
unprecedented speed, effortlessly reaching the right people at the right time -
destabilizing traditional centers of power, subverting existing and established
hierarchies and the status quo

peer-powered
media
www.wecreate.cc 20


Audiences get news before CNN accesses the story.

peer-powered
politics
www.wecreate.cc 21


Citizens organize in the face of massive state crackdowns - and have now
invented the idea of ʻsous-veillanceʼ: keeping an eye on big government / big
brother from bellow.

• http://spacehack.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/
cstart.jpg

peer-powered
science
22

New ways to create, produce and evaluate science – from analysis such as GoldCorp and NASA’s collaborative data projects to the emerging
collaborative ways of generating validity and citizen science

peer-powered
creativity
www.wecreate.cc 24


People-powered creativity and production – prosumers and proams cut, paste and
replicate IP as they see ﬁt

peer-powered
consumption
www.wecreate.cc
25

This is Kevin Smith on a SouthWest Airlines plane, a few minutes after being told
he was ʻtoo fat to ﬂyʼ.

Dear @SouthwestAir - I know I'm fat, but was Captain Leysath
really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was
already seated? 5:52 PM Feb 13th


His Twitter
lifecast...

www.wecreate.cc 27


Becomes a top 20 tweet and reaches the evening news across the globe that night!

www.wecreate.cc 28


Demanding the organization respond rapidly - costing time, resources and
reputation

www.wecreate.cc 29


And itʼs been happening for over a decade as the internet has slowly yet steadily
permeated every area of life - both physically and emotionally.


A threat to all hierarchical business
practices...


And also an opportunity to embrace a networked, collaborative reality, assuming a
business shifts its capabilities and strategic intent to...

empower
the edges
www.wecreate.cc
32

All the big winners - Wikipedia, Craigslist, Amazon, Google - have allowed the people
at the fringes to become actors and agents and removed unnecessary middlemen

dissolving
boundaries

www.wecreate.cc 33


Open IP, source, info and
APIs

co-creating
the
unthinkable
www.wecreate.cc
34

Harness the wisdom distributed across the networks - leveraging Hayekʼs ʻgenius of
the marketʼ to achieve ambitions that could not be realised alone such as Googleʼs
moon robot $30 million prize.

the long tail
www.wecreate.cc 35


And realize the market even in the most niche user needs - like Netﬂix or LoveFilm

re-designed
models

www.wecreate.cc 36


Invent new business models that tap into, rather than ﬁght, the network, such as
Amazonʼs Mechanical Turk.

petabyte
intelligence

www.wecreate.cc 37


As the network grows exponentially, must learn how to crunch billions of bits and bytes
to create meaningful insight - such as Wolfram Alpha and Googleʼs early detection of
ﬂu trends

augmented
reality
www.wecreate.cc 38


Use networked information to improve and deepen reality...

web to world
www.wecreate.cc 39


Take the web into the real, physical world - such as Google Earth and its role in the
Amazon

culture
comes
first

If everyone could collaborate successfully , everyone would be doing it to innovate and re-design their business. Above all its what is in your

organizational DNA that counts. In a study of 4000 firms in 17 countries , firms’ cultural traits drive
innovation across nations
Source: Innovation in Firms Across Nations, Cambridge University Judge Institute / Journal of Marketing, 2009

nurture
collaborative
natures
www.wecreate.cc
41

Foster rather than eradicate our collaborative natures, now proven by recent science
(de Waal et. al.) to be as strong, if not more so, than our selﬁsh survival instincts. This
is much to do with helping people move beyond ego.

radically

www.wecreate.cc 42


Encourage the creativity that comes with openness and collaboration – and be ready to
explore and release the frustrations that are inevitable within a crowd.

embrace
ambiguity
www.wecreate.cc 43


Acknowledging that openness and collaboration decrease your ability to control and
predict so the leadership must learn to tolerate unknowns.

emergence
& evolution 44

Let ideas emerge from the collective, from the melting pot, with patience – but know when to run with smaller, directive teams / missions

listen
receptively
www.wecreate.cc 45


To what the chatter is in the network and to what lies behind the chatter – favoring the
‘receptive’ mode of consciousness as much as the ‘analytical’ (although the latter dominant in West).

heed
intuition

www.wecreate.cc 46


Learning to sense subtle shifts fast, trusting in moment-by-moment intuition because
there is not enough time to analyze all the data nor remove all the noise. What to one
business is noise / a distraction is to another the emergence of a new paradigm.
Perhaps GM could have beneﬁted from that…

cycle
between
node and
www.wecreate.cc
network 47

Be able to dance between the detail and the overview at will – responsive to the micro
(node, individual, psychological, local, indicative) and macro (network, group, social,
political, market, predictive) needs, fears and possibilities.

think
digital
www.wecreate.cc 48


Ultimately being able to think in multiplicities, in parallel, embracing contradictions and
noise - in digital and no longer in analogue - recognizing the shared humanity that
bonds and connects us all in this networked world.

nurture
mavericks 49

Nurture mavericks and self-taught virtuosi as the source of radical innovation – getting the most out of the network. Tolerate dissent. Use
agreed values and vision, heuristics etc and the inner compass they generate, to guide behavior

trust peer
leadership
www.wecreate.cc
50

Hierarchical leadership fails in the face of networked realities. You cannot pre-regulate
for all eventualities and centralization is not efﬁcient nor effective. Move away from
rules, regulations, punishments and rewards to foster inner-motivation. Build trust
within the network. Invent new ways to lead and guide.

share
transparently
www.wecreate.cc 51


Distribute value back to the network you use and are reliant upon.

mission
motivated
www.wecreate.cc 52


Reorient the business to focus beyond ʻproﬁtʼ - tapping into the deepest values and
highest aspirations of the people in your network. Employees, suppliers and
customers. Allows less micro-management as people can be trusted to make the right
decision – at the time, in their eyes, for them – within the powerful context of a shared,
and vital, mission

liberate
group magic
53

When people feel trusted, valued, creative and ennobled they can contribute with all their energy to their role whether inside our outside
company. And leaders are freed to spend our energy on co-creating the great – rather than spending it reducing the human spirit to
mediocrity.

• rambuntious human nature

interconnected
intelligent
interwoven
54

We must move to a world premised on a very different view from the cog within the cycle – one where we are all alive, intrinsically
interwoven, interconnected and inter-dependent. ‘Self organizing' behavior – a fundamental property of living systems - emerges from collective
interactions among many different components that share intelligence, mutuality and vitality.

self
organized
success

www.wecreate.cc 55


Leverage the enormous beneﬁts of self-organized systems - robustness, ﬂexibility, the
spontaneous development of complex adaptations and innovations. All with semi-
autonomous non-hierarchical functioning that needs minimal supervision. But it doesnʼt
come without transformation in our foundational thinking.] and being able to manage
with a lack of control and foresight.

it has been
a privilege

wecreate.cc
nickjankel.com
100open.com

The Economist: Thriving in the Collaborative Age

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The Economist: Thriving in the Collaborative Age