By Rod Collins
The science fiction writer William Gibson once astutely observed, “The future has already arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed.” As described in last month’s blog, our future is a digitally transformed world that will usher in an entirely new human epoch where the dominant top-down hierarchical structures of the first 10,000 years of human civilization will rapidly give way to the far more powerful peer-to-peer network architecture that is now possible, practical, and increasingly more pervasive thanks to the proliferation of digital technology. However, despite the increasing evidence of the ascendance of hyper-connectivity, our rapid transformation to a fully networked world remains hidden in plain sight. Although we use our connected iPhones to do Google searches as we step into an Uber car on our way to close a deal we made on eBay, we are in many ways oblivious as to just how radically the world is changing around us. Our tools may be networked and digital, but the world we carry around inside our heads is still very hierarchical and linear. It’s an unsustainable situation, and we know how this ends: The future always wins, and it’s just a matter of time before the future will become very evenly distributed.
The Power of Many
The prime distinction between hierarchies and networks is that hierarchies are designed to leverage the “power of one,” while networks naturally enable the “power of many.” That is why networks are so much more powerful. Perhaps you may be thinking, if networks are so superior, why is it that hierarchies have shaped our social architecture for all this time? The simple answer is, until the digital technology revolution, we had no way to effectively bring people together into cohesive real-time networks. In the absence of this capability, the best we could do to coordinate the activities of large numbers of people was to build sophisticated hierarchical structures. The fundamental assumption underlying what was once the greatest human organizational innovation is that, by leveraging the individual intelligence of the elite leaders at the top, the whole organization is smarter than it otherwise would be if people were left to their own judgments. And for many centuries, this supposition was true.
However, the current technology revolution has spawned a new and very different innovation in organizational structure that has completely nullified this centuries-old assumption. In the hyper-connected network, the smartest organizations are not the ones with the smartest individuals, but rather those with the capacity to rapidly aggregate and leverage their collective intelligence.
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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).