By Rod Collins
In his recently published book, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, Joshua Cooper Ramo relates the story of one the most closely guarded secrets during the early years of the Cold War: If the Soviet Union had engaged in a nuclear first strike, it was highly likely the United States would have been unable to respond. That’s because the American field officers and their commanders in Washington would have had no way to communicate with each other. Consistent with the technology at the time, the American radio and telephone systems were highly centralized, which made them also highly vulnerable. One of the key structural problems of centralized systems is that each regional center has the potential to become a single point of failure that can disrupt the entire system, as often happens when air traffic across a nation is snarled because of unexpected weather at a major hub. Fortunately, this national security vulnerability was corrected with an innovative solution: the distributed network.
Recognizing the urgency of this challenge, Paul Baran, who at the time was with the joint venture between the U.S. Air Force and the Douglas Aircraft Company known as RAND, devised a way of building messaging systems without any central hubs. Each message would be able to find its own path from point A to point B. Thus, if any part of the system was disrupted, the remaining pathways in the network could resiliently adapt to route all the traffic in the system with minimal disruption. This structural shift from centralized systems to distributed networks, which solved a critical military problem in the 1950’s, would turn out to be a harbinger of a dramatic phenomenon that would shape the early twenty-first century: digital transformation.
Digital Transformation
There is no topic that is both more important and more confusing to business leaders than digital transformation. With the deluge of articles and keynote speeches on how the digital revolution is accelerating radical change, you would think that there would be more clarity about this pervasive phenomenon. Instead there is general sense of confusion reminiscent of the Buffalo Springfield lyric: “There’s something’s happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.”
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About the Author: Rod Collins (@collinsrod) is the Innovation Sherpa at Salt Flats and the author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books).