Tag: Disruption

Manage an ecosystem or it will manage you

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Traditional management focuses on an atomised view of the relationships in a business. Relationships with employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, partners and the community are treated as mutually exclusive, individual & discrete transactions. We put all our relationships into a simple hierarchical structure.  

This convenient fiction is a classic example of organisational stupidity. Linear hierarchical choices are easier for us to use through than complex networks of relationships. Networks get messy quickly. We chose these simplistic view to make organisations easier to manage.  

In this simple model, relationships beyond the bounds of the organisation and its interactions are rarely considered, except under the categories of risks. In our disruptive networked world, every organisation exists in an ecosystem of complex networked relationships. We all need to adjust to making decisions in that ecosystem. If we keep managing to fictions, the ecosystem will take our influence and decision rights away.

So where’s the networked ecosystem?

No organisation is an island.  If you have one employee and one customer you have already begun to build a complex network in their relationships.  

We are increasingly experiencing the dynamic of a networked ecosystem as a result of following principles:

  • All the agents are connected: customers, suppliers, employees and the community are all much more able to connect, share information and collaborate. Importantly, they will connect share and collaborate whether your organisation exists or not.
  • Any agent can play multiple roles: An employee can easily be a customer, a supplier, an influential member of the community and even potentially a competitor simultaneously. The same could be said for any other agent in your ecosystem. Traditional linear thinking struggles to manage this. Just look how many organisations attempt to stifle their employees’ ability to connect with each other or play a role as customer or community advocates.
  • The pace of innovation brings down barriers: Traditional barriers like control of information, power or resources that kept agents isolated are coming down with the accelerating pace of innovation. It is far easier to shift between roles than ever before or to get access to information or connections that you need. If your organisation depends on barriers for its success, there is a great chance someone is working now to circumvent them.  
  • The tools of disruption help us see the system:  increases in networking technologies, data analytical tools and communication technologies increasingly help all participants see and manage the system

A social and natural ecosystem too

When we start to look beyond our traditional linear categories of relationships we can see a wider ecosystem around our organisations. This broader view of relationships helps us see the ecosystem in a fuller light:

  • We can see that our connections and our organisations contribute to social goals
  • We start to see the positive and negative environmental & social impacts of our organisation and its relationships
  • We see new ways to contribute
  • We can look to the relationships that occur beyond our traditional thinking and wonder what contribution our organisation can make or how we might leverage these relationships to add new value

Start Leveraging the ecosystem

With a new more complex view of the ecosystem around your business start asking new questions:

  • How does the wider view refine your organisation’s purpose?
  • What should you do more, better or differently?
  • How do you go faster if you leverage others?
  • What changes in the wider system benefit or harm you? What can you do with other players to have more of the good or less of the harm?
  • How do customers, suppliers, employees and others help you grow your business?
  • Where are the sources of value, the conversations, connections and opportunities in the system that you have been missing?

If you don’t ask these questions, somebody in the ecosystem else will.  There’s a good chance you won’t like their answers.

Assembly Line of Knowledge Revisited: More Human & More Social

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The future is here.

We are at a time of innovation in the future of work. We have choices as to the criteria by which we judge success. Let’s make the future of work more human and more social.

Some time ago, I suggested that we were approaching innovation in the way we work with knowledge (‘knowledge work’) that was of equivalent significance to the introduction of the innovation of the assembly line for industrial work. Roger Martin in HBR recently described changes at Proctor and Gamble that begin to treat knowledge work as a ‘decision factory’: focusing on project management of knowledge workers and leveraging algorithms to guide decisions.  To paraphrase William Gibson, the future of knowledge work is here, it is just not widely distributed yet.

Many knowledge workers recoil when you suggest the future of their work may resemble that of industrial work, even by analogy. Often they dispute that the work can be the subject of these kinds of innovation. However, we know dedicated entrepreneurs will find a way and that this disruptive innovation has begun already.  

At the heart of many of these objections is a concern that a focus on innovation will shift the focus of knowledge work from effectiveness into a focus on efficiency. In that change, people perceive real risks to the financial and social rewards of knowledge work, to the skills that will be demanded in future and the potential for change to wider society.  Many knowledge workers have benefited from traditional characteristics of human motivation, like autonomy, mastery and purpose. Losing those roles solely for efficiency may well be a great loss.

Assembly lines – more human and more social

Curiously enough, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line innovations to his plants the changes were not solely about manufacturing process. Henry Ford realised that for the assembly line process to succeed he needed wider social change.  At the same time as Ford introduced the assembly line, he introduced a suite of social changes that were an attempt to build more complex social system around his organisation. There are arguments today as to what Ford’s purpose was in these changes, whether they were truly implemented or effective and the extent to which they may have just been clever marketing. Still, Ford introduced to its workers:

  • a $5 day a day wage that was a huge lift in income potential for workers and shared a small part of the profits of the new processes
  • a sociological department that explicitly sought to assess employee fitness across a range of social characteristics including family, thrift & home life and address social ills, like gambling and drinking.
  • a newspaper, education & language classes, medical treatment, parks and playgrounds and even a band
  • new workspaces that were models of light and open space at the time
  • a vision of buying the product that they made as Ford disrupted the luxury car market by making cheaper cars at scale

Today, we struggle to understand the Victorian values of these social changes. We would not want Ford’s near feudal power over his team. Also, we can lack context and understanding of the diverse nature of industrial workplaces before the birth of the modern factory system. However, Ford was seeking to make social changes an explicit part of the system of changes in his production system. Those changes were as radical then as many of the working models proposed by start-ups and other innovative companies are today. Ford’s wider social innovations, whether successful or not, suggested that he understood and saw the need to engage with the wider social role of work.  

Work plays a larger social role than a source of income and a source of profit.  Work sustains communities and families. Work provides personal satisfaction, gives rewards for our time and underpins our complex webs of relationships.  Lack of satisfying work correlates with all kinds of social ills. Each of these effects flows back to the workplace and influences outcomes.

The future of knowledge work – more human and more social

Knowledge work is going to get more efficient. Even today there is still too much drudgery that can be innovated, automated or analysed away. Some organisations will focus solely on the efficiency opportunity of innovation in knowledge work. They will reduce their knowledge worker populations and streamline processes to realise profit.  

These same organisations will likely find that they will struggle to recruit and retain talented people. Designing and maintaining their new systems will require even more expensive knowledge workers.  The lack of engagement and innovation in their businesses will require expensive external consultants. More importantly, the broader society outside of the organisation will continue to question the relentless focus on efficiency and profit, query the negative externalities on society and demand a social dividend. Solving this issue transactionally will mean even more expensive marketing and corporate social responsibility activity.

We get to choose the success criteria for our innovations in the future of knowledge work. Profit does not have to be the sole motive.  

We have the opportunity to ask of our innovators in work that they design for social changes and consider the broader social aspects of work. We can ask that work is more social.  We can ask that it take account of criteria like sustainability, natural value, social value and ability to deliver benefits for a wider community of stakeholders. We can ask that work is more human and that better delivers autonomy, mastery and purpose for all workers. My experience is that innovations improve when we take this broader systemic frame and when we are more demanding in our measures of success.  Great innovations involve constraints and stretch.  We will only deliver significant social benefits from this innovation if we leverage design thinking and adaptive innovation to deliver changes in work.

An assembly line or decision factory for knowledge work does not have to be a race to the bottom. Employees in workplaces across the globe will get to shape and debate the changes being made inside and outside their organisations. As community members, they are a part of a public debate on the standards that organisations should meet.  We all can leave organisations that do not respond well and entrepreneurs will start organisations to leverage the best innovations and new opportunities to realise value.  

Potentially, it could be the birth of a new golden age of human and social growth.  

We get to choose.  

PS: Obviously, innovation and consideration of a broader social frame is something that will benefit industrial work too.  However, because industrial organisations are much more competitive and more directly impacted by social pressures around environment, many leading industrial employers have already begun to look into new models that leverage wider social value and engage and empowering their employees to add new value.  Toyota’s work on waste and the Toyota Management System are examples.

Notes:  my limited understanding of Henry Ford comes largely from Steven Watt’s ‘The People’s Tycoon’, wikipedia and The Henry Ford Museum.

Assembly Line of Knowledge Revisited: More Human & More Social

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The future is here.

We are at a time of innovation in the future of work. We have choices as to the criteria by which we judge success. Let’s make the future of work more human and more social.

Some time ago, I suggested that we were approaching innovation in the way we work with knowledge (‘knowledge work’) that was of equivalent significance to the introduction of the innovation of the assembly line for industrial work. Roger Martin in HBR recently described changes at Proctor and Gamble that begin to treat knowledge work as a ‘decision factory’: focusing on project management of knowledge workers and leveraging algorithms to guide decisions.  To paraphrase William Gibson, the future of knowledge work is here, it is just not widely distributed yet.

Many knowledge workers recoil when you suggest the future of their work may resemble that of industrial work, even by analogy. Often they dispute that the work can be the subject of these kinds of innovation. However, we know dedicated entrepreneurs will find a way and that this disruptive innovation has begun already.  

At the heart of many of these objections is a concern that a focus on innovation will shift the focus of knowledge work from effectiveness into a focus on efficiency. In that change, people perceive real risks to the financial and social rewards of knowledge work, to the skills that will be demanded in future and the potential for change to wider society.  Many knowledge workers have benefited from traditional characteristics of human motivation, like autonomy, mastery and purpose. Losing those roles solely for efficiency may well be a great loss.

Assembly lines – more human and more social

Curiously enough, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line innovations to his plants the changes were not solely about manufacturing process. Henry Ford realised that for the assembly line process to succeed he needed wider social change.  At the same time as Ford introduced the assembly line, he introduced a suite of social changes that were an attempt to build more complex social system around his organisation. There are arguments today as to what Ford’s purpose was in these changes, whether they were truly implemented or effective and the extent to which they may have just been clever marketing. Still, Ford introduced to its workers:

  • a $5 day a day wage that was a huge lift in income potential for workers and shared a small part of the profits of the new processes
  • a sociological department that explicitly sought to assess employee fitness across a range of social characteristics including family, thrift & home life and address social ills, like gambling and drinking.
  • a newspaper, education & language classes, medical treatment, parks and playgrounds and even a band
  • new workspaces that were models of light and open space at the time
  • a vision of buying the product that they made as Ford disrupted the luxury car market by making cheaper cars at scale

Today, we struggle to understand the Victorian values of these social changes. We would not want Ford’s near feudal power over his team. Also, we can lack context and understanding of the diverse nature of industrial workplaces before the birth of the modern factory system. However, Ford was seeking to make social changes an explicit part of the system of changes in his production system. Those changes were as radical then as many of the working models proposed by start-ups and other innovative companies are today. Ford’s wider social innovations, whether successful or not, suggested that he understood and saw the need to engage with the wider social role of work.  

Work plays a larger social role than a source of income and a source of profit.  Work sustains communities and families. Work provides personal satisfaction, gives rewards for our time and underpins our complex webs of relationships.  Lack of satisfying work correlates with all kinds of social ills. Each of these effects flows back to the workplace and influences outcomes.

The future of knowledge work – more human and more social

Knowledge work is going to get more efficient. Even today there is still too much drudgery that can be innovated, automated or analysed away. Some organisations will focus solely on the efficiency opportunity of innovation in knowledge work. They will reduce their knowledge worker populations and streamline processes to realise profit.  

These same organisations will likely find that they will struggle to recruit and retain talented people. Designing and maintaining their new systems will require even more expensive knowledge workers.  The lack of engagement and innovation in their businesses will require expensive external consultants. More importantly, the broader society outside of the organisation will continue to question the relentless focus on efficiency and profit, query the negative externalities on society and demand a social dividend. Solving this issue transactionally will mean even more expensive marketing and corporate social responsibility activity.

We get to choose the success criteria for our innovations in the future of knowledge work. Profit does not have to be the sole motive.  

We have the opportunity to ask of our innovators in work that they design for social changes and consider the broader social aspects of work. We can ask that work is more social.  We can ask that it take account of criteria like sustainability, natural value, social value and ability to deliver benefits for a wider community of stakeholders. We can ask that work is more human and that better delivers autonomy, mastery and purpose for all workers. My experience is that innovations improve when we take this broader systemic frame and when we are more demanding in our measures of success.  Great innovations involve constraints and stretch.  We will only deliver significant social benefits from this innovation if we leverage design thinking and adaptive innovation to deliver changes in work.

An assembly line or decision factory for knowledge work does not have to be a race to the bottom. Employees in workplaces across the globe will get to shape and debate the changes being made inside and outside their organisations. As community members, they are a part of a public debate on the standards that organisations should meet.  We all can leave organisations that do not respond well and entrepreneurs will start organisations to leverage the best innovations and new opportunities to realise value.  

Potentially, it could be the birth of a new golden age of human and social growth.  

We get to choose.  

PS: Obviously, innovation and consideration of a broader social frame is something that will benefit industrial work too.  However, because industrial organisations are much more competitive and more directly impacted by social pressures around environment, many leading industrial employers have already begun to look into new models that leverage wider social value and engage and empowering their employees to add new value.  Toyota’s work on waste and the Toyota Management System are examples.

Notes:  my limited understanding of Henry Ford comes largely from Steven Watt’s ‘The People’s Tycoon’, wikipedia and The Henry Ford Museum.

Infrastructure of culture

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Culture eats strategy for breakfast – Peter Drucker

Enterprise social networks are a new form of communication in organisations. Culture is the outcome of how we interact. New interactions will change the culture of our organisations over time. Managing culture changes is critical for organisations coping with disruption.

Adam Pisoni recently quoted a comment I made at Disrupt.Sydney that enterprise social networks are ‘infrastructure of culture’. The comment was building on Kai Riemer’s talk at Disrupt.Sydney that technology that acts as infrastructure (of connection, of transportation or of communication) is open to novel uses and depends on users to make new sense of the infrastructure. Kai was drawing a distinction with our traditional tool based view of technology where it exists for a specific purpose. This point highlights one reason why we often have an inability to forecast where new communication technologies lead us in terms of changes in interactions and societal change.

Enterprise Social Networking is an Infrastructure for Culture

The culture of an organisations is a sum of the interactions across the organisation. It is the ‘way we do things around here’ or ‘what happens when the CEO is out of the room’.  Culture runs deep and is the outcome of thousands of interactions. Speeches, posters and announcements don’t determine culture. As social animals, people look for guides as to what is acceptable in the stories of the organisation, the daily behaviours of others as they interact and importantly in how moments of crisis or conflict in the community are resolved. What happens when things get uncertain is at the core of the culture of a company.

Disruptive change tests the culture of organisations. Shaped by purpose and values as demonstrated in action, culture has an enormous influence on how the organisation runs and what is possible. Many organisations need new strategies to respond to disruption. However, if your strategy runs counter to your culture you will face challenges and likely fail. In the face of disruption, many organisations have found they simply cannot pivot their strategy because it threatens some deep elements of their culture.

A common goal of launching an enterprise social network to execute a strategy to ‘change  culture’. Looking for more leadership, authenticity, accountability, openness or innovation, organisations assume that the network is a tool to deliver that outcome. These organisations are usually disappointed initially. Culture changes the strategy. All they see at first in the community on their network is their organisation’s current culture, just much more visible than ever before. The good, the bad and the ugly is on display. Even worse, the much vaunted new values from the strategy are often not on display because the community is not yet comfortable with those novel interactions, is waiting for a lead from others or does not accept that they can be arbitrarily imposed from above.

Communication networks are infrastructure, not tools. The change in culture is in the community adopting new behaviours, not the technology. The potential of enterprise social networks to change the culture of organisations occurs over time as the interactions change. Importantly, social networks offer opportunities to accelerate this change.

How do new interactions accelerate change the culture of the organisation?

  • Build common purpose:  Social networks are a place to discuss and connect around purpose. Purpose is not imposed.  It comes out from interactions and work in the organisation. Too often when organisations have a new strategy, it is the executive team who assumes the right to set the purpose and only they understand the context that drives the need for change. A social network allows others to discuss and question this.
  • Empower change agents:  enterprise social networking often appeals to a group of early adopters, your organisational change agents. This group of diverse individuals have been looking for a way to have a larger voice, to connect and to drive change. These early adopters will drive a lot of the initial interactions & innovations.  Their goals are each different but they are often more comfortable with many of the values that organisations seek such as collaboration, openness, innovation and experimentation. The challenge for organisations looking to leverage these individuals to drive change is to authorise their activities and encourage the new interactions in constructive directions. Senior leaders can use their authority to play a key role in ensuring that your network does not become a sub-culture of the broader organisation.
  • Lead and role model: People look for role models and leaders. They will follow their guide in the behaviours that they demonstrate. Build a group of leaders of the community and let them know that they are responsible for fostering constructive interactions. Make sure your hierarchical leaders are playing a positive role and not discouraging change.
  • Share stories:  We learn culture from stories of interactions. Social networks allow us to share those stories in new ways and with new audiences. Encourage story telling and make sure you are looking to draw out the cultural lessons of the stories being told.
  • Make interactions visible:  Social networks are a new medium to see interactions. Remember the majority of people will watch, read and learn. Your culture will be on display and shared more widely than ever before.
  • Create interactions across sub-cultures:  Large organisations are often frustrated by the number of sub-cultures as communities within the organisation develop their own interactions. These sub-cultures often create unresolved conflicts blocking progress. Connect these individuals in one community and let them learn about each others contexts. Building shared purpose, concerns and understanding will build a greater commonality of culture.
  • Create conflict:  If there are values conflicts or other regular interactions driving conflict in your organisation, they will surface in enterprise social networking. The faster you bring these out the sooner culture changes. How you work to resolve these through collaboration will be key to your future culture. Remember it is better to resolve these internally before they leak externally through employees or other partners experiencing the conflicts and sharing them.
  • Allow the creation new interactions:  As infrastructure, an enterprise social network is open to employees, leaders and other participants to create new interactions.  If you encourage experimentation and quickly weed out failures, you will be driving innovation in your culture as each new successful pattern of interaction develops.  Embrace the chaos and you will see rewards as your culture develops.

Communities change culture when they adopt new interactions through the role modelling of others and the support of leaders. Enterprise social networking is an infrastructure to accelerate this process through new interactions and innovation. Disruption often demands rapid changes to organisation’s cultures that have been built up over many, if not hundreds of years. Networking the community within the organisation is critical to enabling the organisation to manage that change.

Empower the Audience

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The traditional panel has real limits.  Experiments are required for new formats to address disruptive, adaptive and emergent issues.

Yesterday at Disrupt.Sydney,  Ben Gilchriest, Mani Thiru and I ran an experiment with an Anti-Panel.

Why hold an Anti-Panel?

The traditional panel format is broken when the questions being considered are adaptive, complex or emergent.  A traditional panel can be:

  • Disengaging:  The panel supposedly has all the power, expertise and knowledge.  They deign to answer questions from a large group of supplicants.  The audience sits, listens and watches.   A facilitator often shapes the whole event and dominates the discussion. One person speaks at a time.  The tendency is for people to seek to hold everyone’s attention.
  • Lacking collaboration:  Panellist may or may not build on others’ views.  Debates rarely occur or get explored.  The audience has little chance to collaborate with the panel or each other.
  • Lacking diversity:  Only panellists views get heard. Questions are rationed.  Questioning may be intimidating in a large group. Group think can occur with few views on offer. Panels are often very chosen from a limited demographic of expertise.
  • Narrow in contributions: Discussion is limited to verbal questions and answers.  Other forms of interaction are limited and usually very formal.  Feelings and intuition is disdained.  Shallow, concise and entertaining answers dominate discussion.
  • Focused on a correct answer: Panels are heavily dependant on technical expertise.  There is no room for creativity or experimentation.  Reflection time is not available to any participants
  • Linear:  Panels are always ‘moving on in the interest of time’.  Iteration is limited. 
In line with the spirit of Disrupt.Sydney we set out to disrupt the panel model with something more connected, more collaborative, more adaptive and more open to diverse contributions.

How do you hold an Anti-Panel?

The first change is to make the anti-panellists servants of the conversation.  Instead of an audience, there is a room full of participants working together.  The role of anti-panellists is to facilitate the participants to discuss the issues.

Then you need to open up the format.  We used a structure which ran from the personal to the group, explored a number of contributions (visual, emotional, allowed for movement in the room, etc) and iterated the discussion across:

  • opening: to set a common context, understanding and a little role modelling by the anti-panellists of the openness, flexibility and informality of the approach.
  • individual reflection by the anti-panel & other participants to draw what they found significant.  This used drawing to engage another perspective of reflection and to speed later sharing.
  • small group sharing and discussion of the drawings to draw connections & similarities, explore doubts, questions and differences.  
  • a full room discussion of insights, lessons, actions, new thoughts and other connections.  Explicitly in this conversation we asked and encouraged questions to introduce a discussion of feelings and concerns to explore and to widen the conversation to include domains that had not yet been discussed.
  • closing reflections from the panel of any points of synthesis or intuitions that they have drawn and an open invitation for the participants to share their insights.

I suspect each anti-panel would need to be different to be tailored to its participants, time allowance and topic, so I have deliberately left out further details of time allocation, questions, etc.  We found ours changed as we learned what the participants needed.  We would have liked to have included more leverage of digital capture and sharing in the discussion.  That remains an opportunity for a future anti-panel.  

The anti-panellists played a role as participants in discussion, timekeepers, facilitators through open questioning to draw in additional views and tried to keep a perspective of the whole conversation.  Adaptive leadership questions that explore purposes, concerns, circumstances and that drew reflection on elements of the system proved valuable.

At Disrupt.Sydney, this format worked very well for the discussion on the topics of disruption.  The participant feedback was very positive.  We drew a rich range of perspectives from the participants, allowed the participants to shape the discussion and presented many opportunities to build, draw connections or add other elements to the topic of discussion.

More Experimentation Required

Our experience was a worthwhile first experiment.  More will be learned as others leverage a fundamentally different approach to sharing the expertise of a room full of talented people with the passion to engage in a topic.

Let us know what you change and what you learn from your anti-panel.  Post your experiences in the comments.  Open experimentation, collaboration and iteration can only improve the results.

Credit: Credit for the idea of the anti-panel belongs with Matt Moore who helped us plan the session and was sadly unable to join us in bringing it to life.

What’s your manifesto?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The hardest part of disruption is disrupting yourself – R Ray Wang.

As the Industrial revolution changed society and new communication technologies were born, the western world experienced an age of revolution. Manifestos flew from the printers as advocates for changes in society sought to draw people to their causes and changes to society and economic activity. The passion for manifestos quietened after the shocks of two world wars. By then massive change had occurred to the level of social support, to the structure of the economy and to the power of social classes. Society had adjusted to new social models that mitigated (or in the case of totalitarian states suppressed) issues of the prior disruptions, our corporate business models were relatively static and a long boom drove western and global economies.

A new age of manifestos

We could be entering a new age of manifestos. With new communication technologies, disruption to traditional corporate models and the economic activity, change is required but we are not yet clear on what that change means. In recent weeks we have seen

The new manifesto is personal

If we learn one thing from that last age of manifestos, it should be that nobody should surrender themselves unthinking to a cause. The quote above captures the challenge of this new adaptive age. We need to disrupt ourselves as much as we need to disrupt the organisations, economies and societies we make up.

So what is your manifesto? Your changes are unique. You have a unique purpose. The changes you will drive will need to be social but before you join a movement be clear on what you want to see done. Make sure you are shaping the movement to your causes.

Take some time to reflect but start to write down your own personal manifesto. Feel free to beg, borrow and steal. Practice your new manifesto. Live your new disrupted self.

Adapt and change your manifesto as you learn from the work. Adaptation is not just a challenge for organisations it is a personal challenge. Will you have the capabilities required for the future of work? Will your role and your passions survive the changes ahead? You won’t know unless you adapt, experiment and change yourself.

The more you live your manifesto the clearer it will be, the more power it will have and the better guide it will be for others.

Start today. Others are waiting to see your contribution to the new age of manifestos.

Be prepared for social change

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Our mental models of how things work are often a barrier to our adaptation to new capabilities.  Digital disruption will stretch our thinking in many new ways.

When railroads were first invented they were designed to be a powered form of wagon for bulk goods.  Only later did people develop the potential for railway travel, changes in communications and accelerate the distribution of fresh foods and other consumer goods. The introduction of railway travel created significant social change, demands for new resources and infrastructure, and ultimately innovation in business & society. After a start as a powered wagon, innovators changed the mental model of a railway developing its potential and its impact on society as a whole.

We are in the midst of digital mobile and social revolution that is so new and widereaching we can face the same challenges in adapting our mental models. Yesterday I attended the New Economy Conference in Melbourne. The audience and speakers who had chosen to attend the event were very aware of the digital & social transformations beginning to be realised.  

A key theme of the day was the impact of digital, mobile and social processes in creating dramatic improvements in connection and speed of information sharing.  This has major ramifications for markets and for corporations as they see their offerings atomised to services, boundaries becoming porous and competition expanding in speed and global reach.  Even consumers are getting into the act of being producers through collaborative consumption. These ideas resonated strongly because they connect directly with the short-term transactional focus of our industrial age mental models of production, markets and competition.  They involve the exploration of relatively simple changes to current models (who, where, what, volume or speed).

Harder for everyone to grasp are the changes to social systems which come with these new technologies and the need for new physical, legal and social infrastructure.  To run their cross-continental networks, railroads needed and inspired new social infrastructure.  An example was that railroads required society to adopt a precise concepts of time to manage their schedules.  Railroads determined the implementation of the continental United States four time zones and largely became the arbiter of time in the communities that they connected. 

There is already evidence that these broader social changes are being created. Work is shifting rapidly towards creative knowledge work in many parts of the world with new demands for leadership and organisation. The acceleration of social activism was discussed on the day and the consequences of eBay, the many task allocation and collaborative consumption organisations in changing natures of trust & work.  We also discussed the social infrastructure required to measure value creation and waste in a broader more human way than just dollars (and the odd bit of avoided carbon).  We need to innovate as hard in this social infrastructure as in that to support the transactions.

As much as we create new ways of transacting, we also need to create new forms of community to supply the social infrastructure to support the transactions.  We need to support the short term interaction with a social fabric that can supply a longer human relationship.  Just as the railroads need a precise sense of time, our new economy demands new precision in ideas like collaboration, work, trust, community and value. 

When we think of the future of digital disruption, we need to allow both for how it will change the mental models we use every day but also how it may demand of us entirely new models, such as new concepts of organisations, jobs, reputation, social relationships and new measures of success.   Success in the new digital era will take both adaptation to a new transactional environment but also adaptation of a new infrastructure of community, trust and long term relationships.  New models of leadership and new social innovations will be required to achieve both.