Three Faces of One Change: Search Engines, Mass Collaboration, and Leaderless Organizations

What do I mean by all this? A revolution, like what? Well, that's up to all of us to figure out, but we need to start with a vision and some more imagination - a lot more imagination. Imagine not having to stand in line anymore, I like that one. Imagine having all the TV shows and movies ever made, all the songs ever recorded, available to you for a small micropayment. Good-bye Tivo, so recenlty an innovation, but unless it adapts, maybe soon irrelevant. Imagine cures for society's ills, from millions hooked up to the Internet with access to the world's knowledge and a motivation to put their ingenuity and unique perspectives to work. This is the vision I'm talking about, not getting access to broadband for $10 less per month. That's so boring, when you understand the possibilities and start looking a little farther out.

But having a vision and being able to jump to new paradigms and shed old ones is a learned skill, I think, one that gets better with practice. So if it takes time, shouldn't each of us start practicing now? What do we have to lose? Imagination is free, but we often treat it as if it were frivolous, or an expensive pursuit.

Such are the advances of technology these days, that now it seems that our indivdual and collective traditional paradigms, and the visions they imply, the way we look at things and the way we imagine the future, have become for us the primary impediments to a better world for ourselves and our offspring. We often seem more afraid of change, than we are excited by it, so strong is the hold of the present on us, and the exhaustion of constant change.

In today's world, if you can imagine it, there is likely a way for it to happen, and probably, sooner than you think. We should just get used to it, because its become apparent that rapid innovation is here to stay. And with regard to wireless metropolitan broadband, it is more and more clear to me that it is the conservative visions of city leaders, businesspeople, and residential consumers that keeps us all locked into old ways of thinking about information technology, voice telecommunications, access to media content, and so on and so on.

I'll admit, most of my writings on this website, especially the provocative pieces, are intended to jar the reader into thinking in new ways, to challenge one to shake loose of an old paradigm and try on a new one. The nature of a paradigm shift is radical - can you remember those posters that were popular ten years ago or so, the random dots that looked like a Jackson Pollack modern art piece, but if you screwed up your eyes just so, you could see a ship or an airplane or something else emerge out of the haze. It was all a matter of refocusing your vision. And once you learned to do it, you couldn't look at one of those posters again without seeing the images pop out automatically. That for me is what a paradigm shift is like - it changes the way you perceive the world around you, forever - it's a one-way street.

But when you're well off, well positioned and doing fine, well, I think it's natural to want the world to stay that way - change becomes a threat, because the status quo is so good. When change is not necessarily your friend, you resist it. That's what's happening. For everyone who wants change, there seems to be another who will caution against the dark side of change, the negatives. "Sure, it can get better, but it can always get worse, too." But when the world is rapidly changing, and the competition is ever increasing, you either adapt and stay in the game or fade into the woodwork. In today's world, adaptation means leveraging the Internet for all that it's worth.

As I talk about these three books below, I urge you to be thinking about metropolitan broadband and what these changes imply for the way we each access the Internet, what we end up doing with that tool, and how we could do a lot more, for a lot less cost than we might think, if only we changed our paradigms about how the network works for each of us.

I recently read (and I recommend them all) three books that document the dramatic change being brought about by the spread of the broadband Internet and digital literacy. The three changes coming down the pike are Search Engines, Collaboration, and Leaderless Organizations.

Search Engines have come a long way - they now mean that we no longer have to have "a place for everything and everything in its place," at least when it comes to the digital "everythings" in our lives. When everything is tagged with descriptors, we just need a good search engine and a knack for describing our search problem - that's the scenario outlined in Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger.

Weinberger's thesis is this: historically, we've divided the world into categories, topics, and hierarchies because physical objects need to be in one place or another, they can't be in all the places they might belong. Computers and the Internet turn this on its head: because a computer can "put things" in as many categories as they need to be in, because individuals can classify knowledge, tasks, and objects idiosyncratically, the hierarchy is revealed for what it always was, a convenient expedient masquerading as the True Shape of the Universe.Boing Boing: Everything is Miscellaneous - how the Web destroys categories, disciplines and hierarchies

Collaboration and the changes it brings is well documented in Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams.

Ask the man or woman-on-the-street if they know what a wiki is, and they are still likely to respond "Huh?" but ask them if they've been out on Wikipedia and they will likely nod and then share their opinion with you. I grew up with Encyclopedia Brittanica, now Encyclopedia Brittanica Online, but I increasingly see Wikipedia as a viable substitute. It's better suited to keeping pace with the modern world, because of it's highly flexible and adaptive basis in Wiki technology, drawing from millions of opinions on millions of subjects, instead of hundreds or thousands. Some input is from experts, but much is simply persistent and self-correcting data input, that grows better with each iteration. Most often, its good enough for my purposes, and its rarely my only source. It's fascinating to contemplate how efficient it all is. This collaboration model goes way beyond an on-line encyclopedia, however.

Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. And when these masses of people collaborate they can collectively advance the arts, culture, science, education, government, and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways. Companies that engage with these exploding Web-enabled communities are already discovering the true dividends of collective capability and genius.

To succeed, it will not be sufficient to simply intensify existing management strategies. Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call wikinomics. This is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject. Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. Wikinomics, the Book

Leaderless Organizations are described and analyzed in The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. An organization without a leader? The "spider" is the rigid hierarchy organization, with well-defined leadership roles and responsibilities - think Army. The "starfish" is the more organic, self-controlled, self-directed organization of the twenty-first century, that emerges in response to a shared set of needs and then deals with issues and tasks from the bottom up. This self-organizing organization was hard to imagine before we had a tool like the Internet to help such a movement along.

It sounds like the opening line to a bad joke: What do the Apache Indians, Craigslist, Skype, and Al Qaeda have in common? The answer goes to the heart of a rewardingly simple new book: They're all decentralized organizations that have bedeviled the established hierarchy hell-bent on crushing them.

The Starfish and the Spider is about the open-source revolution, a trend that authors Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom demonstrate is simultaneously dismantling many established industries while harnessing the creativity of the masses to generate new ones. (The title refers to the authors' metaphor that a starfish and a spider appear to be structured similarly, but if you crush a spider's head, it dies. Cut a starfish in half, and you'll end up with two.) Open source has spread far beyond its recent successes with file sharing and software. You can now find cooperatively developed art, literature, even religion. Fast Company Reading List

If you've made it this far, congratulations! My bottom line conclusion from these three books is that the world, whether you like it or not, is very different than it was only ten years ago, and it is on its way to looking far more different than we can probably imagine in a short ten more years. The advent of 1) the instant access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips; 2) the ability to collaborate with thousands of others who share your interests, passions, and needs; and 3) the opportunity to harness these changes and new powers into commercial, political, or social gain - all at tremendously low cost of time or money - that is the change I'm talking about.

Now, where will these trends point your imagination? Will any of this become a revelation for you and lead to a paradigm change? Is a new, more revolutionary vision in store for you?

I encourage you to get these books, fully understand the changes implied by the impact of advancing technology on society, and figure out how this new world will help you get whatever it is you are looking for, be it a rewarding relationship, an opportunity to make the world a better place, a sense of meaning to your life, or a big old whoppin' pile o' cash - its OK to get rich too!

There is hope out there for all of us in the New World being created out of the Old World by these revolutionary technologies and human ingenuity.