specifies with incredible detail what happens when,
what the workflow is, who does what, what the roles
and responsibilities are, what the decision rights are.
While we can think about that as some kind of soulless
destroying of the human spirit, it’s actually incredibly
valuable. If I’m in charge of an organization, I want all
of my vendors to get paid via a standardized, completely repeatable process that makes sure that they
are going to get paid, that there’s no fraud and that the
potential for abuse is as low as possible.
At the same time, we can use technology to do exactly the opposite thing, which is essentially to get
out of the way and watch what happens. Let people
self-select into their roles what they’re going to do,
who they’re going to work with, what they want to
share. Stop presupposing that we know what the
right answer is and who should and shouldn’t be involved. What we see over and over again is that
surprisingly good stuff emerges, and the bad stuff
that happens is not worth worrying about.
This contrast between systematized and self-organizing regimentation — what terms do you
like to use for it?
I use verbs to describe the difference between these
two approaches. One of the verbs is “impose.” People
at the center and the top of the organization get to
impose throughout the rest of the organization their
ideas for how work should be done. This is what the
business process is. This is what the org structure is.
This is what the roles and responsibilities are.
The other verb I use is “emerge,” which is basically get out of the imposition business altogether
and start watching what emerges, what people
actually want to do and how they want to use technology to work with each other.
This is exactly the shift that happened during
the history of Wikipedia [Wikimedia Foundation
Inc.]. They started out trying to impose a workflow
for developing encyclopedia articles. People stayed
away in droves. It was only when the leaders of that
organization got themselves out of the middle of
the process, deployed some weird new technology
and watched what happened that the Wikipedia
we know emerged.
So, recapping: Companies need to, ( 1) change
their decision-making practices, ( 2) instill the
scientific mind-set and ( 3) think about the im-pose-and-emerge dichotomy. What else?
The clearest part of my crystal ball about the future is that it’s going to be a busier place than the
world we live in today, in a business or a competitive sense. The rate of change is only going to
continue to increase. We have the ability to get
smarter more quickly than we used to. The question is, when you come up with a good idea, can
you impose it very broadly across your organization with technology?
As consumers of that industry’s products, we
should be thrilled that everything is faster. We’re
going to get better and better stuff at an increasing
rate. As a competitor, it’s a little bit less comfortable.
We’re going to have to keep up with that pace and
play that game. Sitting it out is a really horrible idea
as a business strategy.
Another favorite quote of mine is from Norbert
Wiener, who was this incredibly bright, weird guy
who worked at MIT in the middle of the 20th century. He said the world of the future is going to be
an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable
hammock in which we can lie down to be waited on
by our robot slaves.
So our robots are getting fantastic, but they’re
not going to make life calmer and easier for us as
businesspeople. They are going to push against the
limits of our intelligence.
Is there anything people should be paying less
attention to when it comes to technology?
The main redirection I would urge is turning away
from relying on HiPPOs. I forget who coined the
acronym, but it’s wonderful. It means highly paid
person’s opinions. These are the business gurus of
the world who have been around the longest and
who are relying only on their business intuition.
Now, let me try to phrase the answer with a more
positive spin, which is, what are the things that we
can encourage leaders to do in the short term? There
are two things I’ve already mentioned: developing an
analytic or scientific mind-set, and thinking about
how easy or difficult it is to propagate it.
Specifically, I ask, “What are some of the most
important decisions that need to get made in your
organization?” On a tactical level, on a day-to-day,
