With the emergence of writing, physical presence was no longer necessary for sharing information. In other words, a person’s being there was not necessary in order to feel her influence. As typing replaced handwriting or when movable type substituted hand copying of words, it became even easier to communicate words that replicated ideas and simulated human interaction without the face-to-face contact.

Cultures without writing used human contact as means for interpreting common reality. Information within these cultures was community based and people tended to construct their identities in relation to the community. People were dependent on contact with others for information. Print cultures in contrast encouraged more individuality and less connectivity with the community. Literacy led to people looking for information in the relatively isolated practice of reading rather than through face-to-face interaction.

When encountering anything for which we don’t already have a term, we turn to metaphor in order to make a comparison between the new phenomenon and a familiar thing. For example we display applications on our desktops, we place documents in folders, and we check our mailboxes for messages or we speak about virtual communities when we refer to groups of people communicating online.

Online communication has challenged our conception what a community can be. Social media allow people to relate to groups of people who live beyond the borders of location and time in the very same way than print once allowed information to be free from the constraint of location. Social media thus redefines what local interaction is and removes the constraints we earlier had for community building. The view of online as a separate space, a “virtual” space or “cyberspace” is an unfortunate example of a misleading metaphor making it hard to understand what is going on today. Our social media tools are no more alternatives to real life than books; they are very much part of it – making life more meaningful. People who are concerned about the increasing use of online communication and digital media often state their worry over the decay of face-to-face contact, but in effect social media are reducing the transaction costs of group activities and are increasingly the new coordination tools for real-world action. It is all about a richer life!

Communities are about belonging. The public access that the Internet now allows people to have, is mistakenly believed to mean trying to get the broadest possible audience. But in effect people are trying to reach people like themselves, like-minded people, to belong to a community. There has been a tremendous increase in the material that is available to the public, not really intended for the public, but instead for the emerging communities.

Many of our behaviours are held in place not by rational decisions or desires but by present or bygone constraints. Our cultures are shaped as much by these constraints as they are by capabilities and aspirations. Changes often take place very fast when the constraints are removed. The challenge is that misleading metaphors are often the biggest obstacles for moving forward after the technological constraints are gone.

Change occurs not so much as a result of new information leading to individual learning but when the patterns of connectedness between individuals change. Learning as a result from the print revolution was seen as an individual process. Learning as a result from the social media revolution is an active process of communication between people. Knowledge was earlier seen as stored in content. Today knowledge is understood to be perpetually constructed in communication. Books could be transmitted from one person to another. Today knowledge is the process of relating. The technological constraints are gone, now is the time to get rid of the wrong, constraining metaphors.

We are living a communication revolution that equals the changes brought by print.

Thank you Andrew Wood, Euan Semple, Matthew Smith, Clay Shirky and Ralph Stacey

Background

Reading revolutions

The mainstream approach to groups and teamwork underline the need for consensus and cohesion. It is believed that members of an organization should commit to its policies and chosen direction. Many writers claim that people should share the same vision, be positive and work harmoniously together. Seeking consensus often becomes so dominant in a group that it’s members tend to leave out of any alternative thinking. The symptoms of what is called group-think arise when people are not motivated to judge or criticize views and assumptions. At meetings the members of the group adopt a soft line of criticism, often even on their own thinking. People are positive and seek harmony on issues with no conflict to spoil the “we” atmosphere.

Often the more cohesive the group, the greater is the inner compulsion on the part of the group members to avoid creating disturbance. This often leads to people believing in the soundness of whatever proposals are promoted by the leader, or by the majority present. The danger is not so much that each individual will fail to reveal his conflicting ideas to what the others propose, but that he will think that the proposal is a good one, without attempting to carry out any critical study of the pros and cons of the possible alternatives. When this kind of group-think becomes dominant, there is often a considerable suppression of deviant thinking. But it takes the form of each person deciding that his differing thoughts are not relevant and should be set aside.

An evidence of the group-think symptom is that things are left unsaid.

James C Thomson was a historian who studied Vietnam War through observing decision-making in the US State Department and at the White House during the war. He writes about the victims of group-think ignoring warnings. People collectively construct rationalizations in order to discount any negative news and feedback that, taken seriously, might lead the group members to reconsider their assumptions, as they recommit themselves to past decisions. Thomson’s findings came into my mind as I last Wednesday listened to Anssi Vanjoki defending Nokia’s past strategic decisions. Thomson writes: “In the fall of 1964, before the bombing of North Vietnam began, some of the policymakers predicted that six weeks of air strikes would force the North Vietnamese to seek peace talks. When someone asked, what if they don’t? The answer was that another four weeks certainly would do the trick!”

What is being discussed in groups is often unclear. The lack of clarity is the very reason for having the conversation. We come to know what we are talking about as the conversation develops over time, if it develops. Communication is not one person saying something and others listening in order to understand what is being said, and thus formulating a joint decision. Whatever people do in groups is accomplished in communication that always has a thematic pattern. The thematic patterns are in turn iterated over time as both repetition and creativity. The  demand that (management) group meetings are carefully planned and agenda based may actually kill the possibility of any new meaning to emerge. A group’s ritualistic adherence to meeting procedures and idealized rules of behaviour may create a false justification on the decisions made.

Research on complexity and creativity has shown the importance of diversity. If members join a group and have nothing in common at all, obviously joint action will be impossible. But perhaps the bigger challenge today is if they conform too much and thus block the emergence of new. Organizations have the capacity to change only when they are characterized by diversity and deviance.

What is needed in groups is paradoxically conformity and deviance at the same time.

Thank you Irving L Janis, Clay Shirky and Patricia Shaw

Teams are the archetypal functional units of a firm. They provide the means to combine the different skills and perspectives that are needed to get things done. Interaction between people is relatively easy because of the co-location of the team. People are physically together in the same place at the same time. The office space and office hours matter because they make managing easy. Coordination and communication are efficient and low-cost. Recently, however, many teams have been organizing themselves very differently. Teams increasingly consist of people who are scattered around various locations.

Almost all teams are dispersed on some level. Their members can belong to different organizational units. They can be spatially separated with work-spaces on different floors of the building. According to recent research, this is equal to working in different cities. They can also be temporally separated, meeting seldom or even working in different time zones.

Research has shown that even small degrees of separation affect the quality of collaboration in traditional settings. I understand collaboration here as an equation involving three variables: communication x coordination x responsibility. My idea of collaboration is thus very close to the mainstream understanding of the role and tasks of management. The more collaboration there is, the less (command and control) management is needed. You get my point?

It is no surprise that conventional management thinking has suggested that performance suffers with increasing dispersion. Because of this, managers have typically seen mobile and distributed work as liabilities rather than as opportunities. Geographically distributed teams have commonly been called virtual teams and seen as a secondary, less real, alternative to real teams. This label is not adequate any more. Distributed teams are very real!

Distributed work is not an alternative work practice any more, but the default state of value creation. Distributed participation offers tremendous opportunities and can significantly outperform co-located work when the setting-up and management are done in the right way.

The new landscape of work is alien territory for most of today’s business leaders and business schools, but things are already moving towards a new world. Important decision making is often distributed in order to enable fast responses to change. A lot of the work is done in global teams. These teams are often partly composed of people from outside of the corporation. Teams assemble for a single project and the leader has no formal authority.

The most interesting thing is that coordination and communication take place mainly through digital, rather than face-to-face interaction.

The new rules for network based work

The new landscape of work consists of the network as the architecture of work and work as interaction between non-co-located but interdependent people. The astonishing thing is that we can find an existing, efficient, working model for this kind of digital work. It is multiplayer online games and the game environment in general.

The game environment may be the best productivity suit available for digital work. Adopting the qualities of the multiplayer games could help firms to meet the pressing challenge of mobile and distributed work. What then can be learned from these games?

The pace of games is normally very fast and requires fast decision making. Decisions are typically based on incomplete information and are iterated as more data become available later. You can’t take a lengthy pause to weigh up the options. The culture needs to embrace changing decisions and adopting constant corrections to the course that was initially chosen.

Acting in the game environment is always based on uncertainty. You can’t succeed in an uncertain environment without trial and error, without taking risks. You can’t embrace risk taking without accepting failures. Here the game environment is fundamentally different from most corporate cultures. In corporations the often-heard objection to trying out something is: “We’ve already tried it and it didn’t work!” The game environment approach is “Let’s try that again. The situation has changed and we have learned!” Frequent risk taking and confronting risks routinely help players to learn to keep paradoxes alive calmly and to live efficiently with continuous uncertainty.

Leadership in games is often temporary. Leaders switch roles. They direct others one minute and take orders the next. Leadership is a task, not a position or part of the identity of an individual. Players with good relational skills are efficient at forming teams and keeping them motivated. The leader of the group in the forming stage knows that someone else’s skills may be better suited for the next effort. The group often makes the choices about who will lead and who will follow. These decisions are most often based on volunteering, not dictated by a higher authority.

Companies often identify people as leaders because of the high potential they show early in their careers. That model may not work in the future. The growing complexity of business means that no single leader can handle all the different challenges any more. Treating leadership as a temporary state and a task can be the new model of the future. The assumption that leadership resides within an individual may not be correct.

Getting the network environment right for collaboration is much more important.

Foursquare and Facebook likes

To get the network environment right, there are some readily available lessons from which to learn: We can learn from Foursquare, Facebook and the World of Warcraft. The takeaways from Foursquare and Facebook likes is that digital credits that are earned can (and will) be a synthetic currency. People care a lot about gains and losses of points that are made visible immediately after a task is completed. The gains are even more interesting if they can be compared with the scores of other players. People could get credit/synthetic currency from their peers for contributing a blog post, or even re-tweeting important information. Pushing the Facebook  like button could mean giving virtual money.

Transparency allows the taking of responsibility

Efficient digital environments like the World of Warcraft make information open to all of the players, all of the time. This information includes performance statistics and trend information for reflexive work. Real-time status updates on operations make planning the next move easy. The mainstream corporate approach to knowledge management has assumed that thinking and doing are separated. In the game environment a player is expected to act on the available information, without waiting for instructions from the boss. The most interesting thing in the game environment is that transparent information allows players to take responsibility, to assume leadership as needed.

Widespread adoption of game mechanics to communication, coordination and taking responsibility would require a dramatic change in the mainstream organizational culture. However, these games are here today and the generation that has grown up playing the games is growing up and joining corporations. They are going to be the drivers of the change towards a more productive and more fun work environment.

Thank you @Joi Ito and Thomas J. Allen

Background

Real-time information. The Sandbox Summit. The Diaspora project. On collaboration. Jane McGonigal. Seriosity. Vili Lehdonvirta

When coordinated behaviour takes place without the intervention of a regulating authority, we often attribute the coherent action to the existence of values and ethics. We tend to think that the existence of a strong value base means that less or even no regulation is needed. A decay of values conversely means that rules and regulation are needed.

A game theory approach to values assumes that people choose the kind of behaviour that gives them the highest expected benefit over time, given their expectations about what the other players will do and the rewarding or punishing feedback they get as a result of their own actions. Players learn by trial and error, keeping strategies that work and altering the ones that turn out badly. Players always observe each other. Those with a poor performance often tend to imitate those who are doing better. What has worked is likely to be used again.

In most games who wins and who loses is the whole point of playing. It would be hard to imagine a more unpopular outcome in the reality TV-series that today are watched by millions, than an announcement that all the players ended up as winners! It is, of course, beneficial that the place of the lazy, the incompetent, and the unmotivated is taken by better-motivated and more enterprising players.

Competitive games require rules to prevent players from cheating. Competition should be as fierce as the existing laws allow, we think. Any ambiguity in the regulations is immediately exploited. This is where our thinking does not serve us any more. Innovations by the players often make existing rules obsolete and call for new ones, as we have recently experienced in the financial markets. The present relationship between regulators and financial institutions is a competitive game in itself. Instead of a home audience watching, here we have the markets watching. The principle is the same.

There are also other growing problems with the games we play. In competitive games, there is always a lack of appreciation for the need of complementarities. You are supposed to manage without help from others. As a result of competition which excludes, diversity is reduced in the system that the game is played in. There are also more losers than winners in our games. Losers multiply as winning behaviours are replicated in the smaller winners’ circles and losing behaviours are replicated in the bigger losers’ circles.

As losers are excluded from the game, they are not allowed to learn. The divide between winners and losers grows constantly. This is why, in the end, the winners have to pay the price of winning in one way or another. The bigger the divide, the bigger the price that has to be paid. The winners end up having to take care of the losers, or two totally different cultures are formed, as is happening in the big US cities today. Psychologically, competitive games create shadow games of losers competing at losing.

The games we play have been played under the assumption that the unit of survival is the player, meaning the individual or a company. However, today the reality is that the unit of survival is the player in the game being played. Following Darwinian rhetoric, the unit of survival is the species in its environment. Who wins and who loses is of minor importance compared to the decay of the (game) environment as a result of the competition.

We need a new concept of the game

In games that were paradoxically competitive and collaborative at the same time, losers would not not be eliminated from the game, but would be invited to learn from the winners. What prevents losers learning from winners at the moment is our outdated zero-sum thinking and the winner-takes-all philosophy. In competitive/collaborative games the winners would be all those whose participation, comments and contributions were incorporated in the development of the game.

The most important reason why we need a new concept of games is because the players and their contributions in the real world are, at best, too diverse to rank. They are, and should be, too qualitatively different to compare quantitatively. In competitive games the players need to have the identical aim of winning the same thing. Unless all the players want the same thing, there cannot be a genuine contest. Zero-sum games were the offspring of scarcity. In the era of creativity and abundance, new approaches are needed.

In competitive/collaborative games the approach to rules is very different from before. The rules should be created, agreed upon and changed by the players themselves as the game continues. As there absolutely cannot be pre-existing rules for every conceivable situation that might arise, we have to move beyond seeing the players and the rule-makers as separate parties. The games are too complex to be governed totally from outside. We desperately need values-based participation as a prerequisite for taking part.

The players have the responsibility not only for adhering to the existing rules, but also for developing the rules further – specifically when the game (environment) decays as a result of the actions of the players.

The criteria for success in competitive games do not lie solely in winning but in the development and continuation of the game itself through collaboration.

Thank you Fons Trompenaars and Robert Axelrod

Background

Situational values or sustainable values.

The real Enterprise 2.0

April 30, 2010

Lenin famously said that the economic system in Russia would be run as one big factory. Many economists at the time said that this was impossible. Yet there were already big factories in the West then, and there still are, so why not? Is there a limit to the size of a factory that cannot be surpassed, or is it because the factory logic cannot be used outside of a real factory?

The typical hierarchical form of an organization is meant to simplify communication, accountability and the coordination of tasks. In theory an employee needs only one connection, to the boss. This is far easier than communicating with all and trying to coordinate actions with everyone. And what about accountability? The worker is accountable only to her manager. That manager reports to her manager on the next higher rank, and the chain goes further, leading in the end to – Lenin.

During the centuries since the publication of “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith, in 1776, the principal theme of most economists has been that government regulation or centralized planning were not necessary in order to make an economic system function well. The coordination would be the result of markets. Lenin and the communists were advised to move to a market economy. The parties in that system follow their own self-interest and are governed, when it comes to the actual choices they make, by a system of prices. This is the polar opposite of centralized planning. Adam Smith was a proponent of extreme decentralization.

A 21-year-old comes out with a revolutionary new theory

Ronald Coase was one of the first economists who started to question mainstream thinking in economics. If a system of prices and competition would do all the coordination necessary, why did we have centralized planning, not only in the now bygone communist countries, but also in well functioning and successful firms? Why did we need management, whose function was to coordinate?

Ronald Coase set out to bring the different views together. It is almost impossible now to fathom that he found the answer as early as during the summer of 1932, at the age of 21. He realized that there were costs involved in using the pricing mechanism. The needs and offerings have to find one another. The prices have to be discovered. Negotiations need to be undertaken. Contracts have to be made. There may be disputes that later have to be settled. These costs were not part of “the invisible hand” equation of Adam Smith. Ronald Coase called these costs transaction costs.

The first revolutionary argument was that a firm would emerge, exist and continue to exist successfully only if it performed its planning, coordination and management functions at a lower cost than would be incurred by means of market transactions, and also at a lower cost than would apply if the same things could be performed by another firm.

The second revolutionary argument was that a well-functioning economic system needs both markets and planning. This depends on the size of the organization and the level of the market side transaction costs. Increasing the size increases (internal) transaction costs. Running an organization is difficult and running a bigger organization is more difficult.

Management is an overhead

Managerial overhead increases as the organization grows. Management, communication and coordination are all transaction costs. Every sales call, every offer, every agreement and every meeting also consumes limited resources and increases transaction costs. As the corporation grows, all its energy finally goes into maintaining the corporation and does not benefit external stakeholders.

Whenever transaction costs inside the organization reach the level of the transaction costs in the markets, markets outperform firms and outperform central planning/coordination in general. This was the main theoretical argument against Lenin. The same thing is clearly still evident today in companies like GM, or organizations like large health care units. Communist countries learned their lesson, but we still haven’t.

An organization can only be successful when the costs of hierarchical coordination are lower than the gains achieved from that coordination.

The existence of high transaction costs outside of firms leads to the emergence of the firm as we know it now, and management as we know it now. A large part of corporate economic activity is designed to accomplish what high market transaction costs prevented earlier.

The Internet is an extinction-level event for the traditional firm

If the (transaction)costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically, the form and logic of economic and organizational entities also change! Accordingly, a very different kind of management is needed.

Today, with social media, we stand on the threshold of an economy where the fundamental processes of communication and coordination are being transformed.  Familiar economic entities are becoming increasingly irrelevant as the Internet, not the traditional organization, becomes the most efficient means to communicate, coordinate and exchange value.

For most of the developed world, hierarchies, as much as markets, make up the dominant economic pattern. The Internet is nothing less than an extinction-level event for the traditional firm. The Internet makes it possible to create new forms of value creation and new forms of value exchange. It changes our views of markets and hierarchies in ways that Adam Smith or Lenin could never have imagined.

Thank you @cshirky

In our competitive view of the world, we often think that the most capable are those who are the most competitive, and accordingly that competition creates and secures efficiency. But it may be that high performance is incorrectly attributed to competition and is more a result of diversity, self-organizing communication and non-competitive processes of collaboration.

Competitive processes lead to the handicapping of the higher-level system that these processes are part of. This is because competitive selection leads to exclusion: something is left outside. Leaving something out always means a reduction of diversity. The resulting less diverse system is efficient in the short term, but always at the expense of flexibility. Agility and complex problem solving require diversity. Everything goes fine if nothing changes and if there are only easy problems to take care of!

Self-organizing, non-competitive processes are about interdependent individuals and groups solving problems in a shared context. Interaction creates capability beyond what could ever be predicted just by looking at the performance of the individuals involved. The higher performance and robustness are emergent properties of interaction. They are not attributable to the parts of the system.

Social networks provide problem-solving capability that results directly from the amount of communication and level of diversity of communication. Most organizations would soon fail if all their employees thought alike or had little or no contact. There are two new challenges. The first is to understand the need for networking with views and values that are different. The second challenge is even bigger because of the mainstream reductionist thinking: our assumption has been that by understanding the parts in detail, we understand the whole. This is simply not possible! What happens in interaction between the parts is more important than the parts. The whole is the emergent pattern of that interaction.

Diversity here means the degree of unique information in the network. If all contribute the same information, then diversity is low. If each agent contributes relevant, unique information that is not shared by others, then the diversity measure is high.

Networks with a wide spectrum of information/experiences are resilient to noise. This facilitating effect of diversity is critical when dealing with difficult problems where false information can lead to expensive consequences.

Higher system performance and robustness occur through the simple combination of the different experiences of individuals, even though each individual takes part in communicative interaction from their own limited perspective.

The importance of self-organization and diversity is unfortunately still greatly underestimated today, particularly in hierarchical, centralized, monoculture systems – like firms. One of the great societal promises of social media is that interaction in wide-area networks, with enough diversity, can solve problems beyond the awareness of the individuals involved.

Thank you Stuart Kauffman, Sari Baldauf and Norman Johnson

Nonlinear dynamics are concerned with complex, messy systems. Examples for these systems are the human brain, the evolution of life itself and the weather. There is not a single science of non-linearity, but there are different streams of research such as chaos theory or the theory of complex adaptive systems. The latter strand takes up an agent- and rules of interaction-based approach to modeling complexity. The first explains the behavior of systems that can be modeled by complex equations where the output of one calculation is taken as the input for the next. These equations are repetitive and iterative.

Chaos theory explains how the parameters in the equations cause patterns in time. These patterns are called attractors. A parameter might be the flow of information or the amount of energy in the system. At low rates the system moves forward displaying a repetitive, stuck behavior. This pattern is called a point attractor. At higher rates the pattern changes. At very high rates of, for example information flow, the system displays a totally random behavior. The pattern is highly unstable. However, there is a level between repetition/stability and randomness/instability. This level is called the edge of chaos. The pattern in time is called a strange attractor. The strange thing with a strange attractor is that the ongoing movement is never the same but always recognizable. The pattern is paradoxically stable and unstable, predictable and unpredictable at the same time. These patterns are spatially called fractals.

Chaos describes a dynamic that is not a synthesis of order and disorder. It is about orderly disorder or disorderly order. The very meaning of these words is transformed.

The weather is normally used as an example of a system that displays this pattern. The overall weather patterns can be (almost) predicted over short periods of time. Over long periods, the behavior cannot be predicted. The long-term behavior of a system like this is determined as much by the smallest changes in the smallest of parts of the system, as it is determined by the laws governing it. The conclusion is very clear. Predictability is always short-term. Long-term predictions would only be possible if absolutely all the variables in the system could be measured with absolutely infinite accuracy. But it is impossible to know all the variables and it is totally impossible to measure all the variables with the accuracy needed.

The smallest overlooked variable or the most minute change can escalate up by non-linear iterations into a major transformative change in the later life of the system. Another conclusion is that from a chaos theory perspective, movement towards equilibrium is always movement towards death. If a system is healthy, successful and alive, it is “at the edge of chaos” where the long-term cannot be seen.

Classical physics took individual entities and their movement (trajectories) as the unit of analysis. Chaos theorists such as Ilya Prigogine, claimed that these trajectories cannot be calculated because of the impossibility of measuring with the precision needed. But there was something even far more exciting going on. Henri Poincaré was the first scientist to identify two distinct kinds of energy. The first was the (kinetic) energy in the movement of the particle itself. The second was the energy arising from the interaction between particles. When this second energy is not there, the system is in a state of non-dynamism. When there is interactive energy, the system is dynamic and capable of novelty and renewal. Interaction creates resonance between the particles. Resonance is the result of coupling the frequencies of particles leading to an increase in the amplitude of motion. Resonance makes it impossible to identify individual movement in interactive environments because the individual’s trajectory depends more on the resonance with others than on the kinetic energy contained by the individual itself.

Every interaction of any particles is thus potentially meaningful and can lead to amplification of the slightest variation. Interactive systems with even the smallest variations take on a life of their own that is under continuous construction. The future form and direction of the system is not visible in the system at any given time. The future is not in the system and it cannot be chosen or planned by anyone.

The scientists at the Santa Fe Institute developed the other strand of research: the complex adaptive systems approach. A CAS consists of a large number of agents. Each agent behaves according to its own intentions and rules for local interaction. Local here means that no agent can interact with the whole population of agents at the same time. No individual agent can determine the pattern of behavior that the system as a whole displays. These adaptive systems display the same dynamics as the chaos theorists found: stable equilibrium at one end of the spectrum, random chaos at the other, and in-between the newly found complex dynamic of stability and instability, predictability and unpredictability, paradoxically at the same time: the edge of chaos.

The conclusions are important for us. Firstly, novelty always emerges in a radically unpredictable way. Secondly, the patterns of healthy behavior are not caused by competitive selection or independent choices made by independent agents. Instead, what is happening, happens in interaction, not by chance or by choice, but as a result of the interaction itself.

The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity and makes possible new enriching variety in interaction. The changed dynamics we experience every day through social media have the very characteristics of the edge of chaos.

The sciences of complexity change our perspective and thinking. Perhaps, as a result we should, especially in management, focus more attention on what we are doing than what we should be doing. Following the thinking presented by the most advanced scientific researchers, the important question to answer is not what should happen in the future, but what is happening now?

Our focus should be on the communicative interaction creating the continuously developing pattern that is our life.

Thank you Stu Kauffman and W Brian Arthur. Based on Ralph Stacey and Doug Griffin.

We have a curious habit of thinking that what we are accustomed to is the way things should be. We are inclined to accept conventional forms as facts, and as meaningful reference points, when facing novelty.

Artists are often the people who want to see the world afresh. It is not easy to get rid of preconceived ideas, but the artist who best discards accepted notions and prejudices often produces the most remarkable works of art. However, a painting that represents a traditional subject in an unexpected way is often condemned. Normally there is no good reason, apart from the work of art just not following tradition.

There have been a few times in history that a great artist looked carefully at what was visible to everybody, but in fact saw things very different from the way others saw them.

Very few artists have caused as much shock and outrage as Caravaggio. A famous story is told about the commissioning of a painting of Saint Matthew for the altar of a church in Rome. This happened around 1600. The saint was going to be represented writing the gospel that was later going to be named after him. As gospels were the word of God, there was also going to be an angel in the picture, giving guidance to Matthew. Caravaggio read the old texts very carefully and tried to figure out what it must have been like when an old man suddenly had to sit down and do something that he had never done, or never dreamed of doing: writing a book, and being guided by an angel!

Caravaggio painted an elderly workingman, seemingly from a poor background. A man with a bald head and muscular legs, writing awkwardly! Beside him was a child with white wings. A young angel was guiding Matthew’s hand just like a teacher would do to a pupil doing something for the very first time. Caravaggio’s painting was a fantastic portrait of a human being in a very, very special situation. But it was also a completely new way of expressing an old topic. The painting was to be placed on the altar of a church in Rome.  This never happened because Caravaggio’s work created a huge scandal. The painting was not accepted because it was claimed that it showed a lack of respect for the topic and the saint! What Caravaggio had done, for the first time in history, was to create a simple expression and give a human face to something that was highly formalized. Caravaggio may have been the first human-centric painter.

People thought that Caravaggio was out to shock them. They also thought that he had no respect for beauty and tradition. In fact, Caravaggio may have been the first artist in known history who was labeled both a rebel and a naturalist at the same time. He was the first painter of the “ugly” true reality. The curious thing is that seeing Caravaggio’s paintings today; one still encounters the same boldness and power that must have shocked people over four hundred years ago.

Caravaggio’s art is very much alive today, although the altar painting described here was never accepted for the altar and was eventually destroyed in Germany during the Second World War.

The question remains whether the human-centric approaches today meet the same kind of opposition as Caravaggio encountered. It is not about challenging the conventions carried forward by the church, or representations of what is holy. Human-centric thinking questions the conventions carried forward by corporate thinking and the idealized representations of leadership/management. The pattern is the same.

Nothing has changed, when it comes to the importance of Caravaggio! Being human-centric is as difficult today as it was in 1602.

Thank you @cshirky

According to simplistic management thinking stimulus and response processes control human behavior: you get what you measure; you get what you reward. This means that people are understood as having no real connection to what they are actually doing.

A somewhat more modern way of thinking states that human beings actively create meaning in life through attempts to understand their own experiences. Intrinsic motivation – peoples’ relation to what they do, the meaning of work – replaces extrinsic rewards. People connect with what they are actually doing.

A new third way of thinking is enfolding. Since we cannot experience everything ourselves, other people become the co-creators of information, experience and meaning. Relations, connecting with others, create a new, networked way of knowing and learning.

As a result, people can now connect both with what they do and with their peers, their network, making them much more knowledgeable than their colleagues who lack these capabilities.

Information is, paradoxically, simultaneously both social and personal, with multiple, variable goals and constantly negotiated premises. Information creators, publishers and curators, are not the traditional verified experts; rather, information is created by a broad collection of reflexive practitioners sharing in the construction and ongoing evolution of a given field.

Information becomes a process of continuous facilitation and networked negotiation. Information networks are a valuable, shared resource making the interactive movement of thought possible.

These networks are the new commons. Sociologists call such shared resources public goods. A private good is one that the owners can exclude others from using. Private has been valuable and public without much value during the era of scarcity economics. This is now changing in a dramatic way, creating the confusion we are in the midst of today.

On the new commons, people with many ties become better informed and have more signaling power, while those outside and with few ties may be left behind. This may be the new digital divide.

Network inequality creates and reinforces inequality of opportunity.

In the age of abundance economics, public is much more valuable than private.

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I gave keynote speeches at two conferences this week. The organizers of the events did not suggest a (#) hashtag to be used by the delegates. There wasn’t any backchannel Twitter discussion going on in the audience. I felt strange.

I wasn’t able to listen and respond to real-time feedback. I was missing the self-regulation and self-organizing that social media make possible. This is what I have grown so accustomed to. I started to ponder on two questions: Is it becoming more common for responsiveness to be the missing ingredient in many communities? And can there be rules for responsiveness that help to create viable communities?

I know that there are problems with two-way communication. There are the people with a pre-set interpretative model. We all know the people who are grinding their axe at the back of the room. They are the know-alls and the one-point-of-view evangelists, the people who insist on bringing all conversations round to their particular issue.

I know that there are even bigger issues: All participants are never visible. Any given conversation on the Web may have a few active participants and several silent ones. This creates a fundamental imbalance in the system and gives the oddballs the opportunity to dominate the space in a way that would be much harder to do off-line.

What I felt at the conferences was a crucial disparity: they hear me talking, but I don’t hear them. The audience was both present and absent at the same time. A conference with a Twitter backchannel creates inputs from the official speakers and responses coming from the audience that is present, but also the online audiences elsewhere. The most important thing is that the primary inputs can then be further adjusted on the basis of the responses from the group. There is real-time emergent self-organizing going on.

Information flows are far too often unidirectional. The audience is present but in a passive, invisible way. The tyranny of the hatemonger results from this one-way flow and scarcity of feedback.

The volume is too high for any single individual to filter out the useless or plain repulsive. There are, however, ways to filter out the irrelevant and the obnoxious, but it requires people to respond. If you are a participant, you are also a moderator.

The quality control has to be handed to the community itself without any single individual being in control. The solution is fairly simple in theory. It is about responsiveness and a mix of negative and positive feedback.

You always rate what you see. The ratings coalesce algorithmically into something that is called karma in Slashdot. If your contributions are highly rated you get karma points. The karma you have earned means that your subsequent posts begin life at a higher level than posts by others. Your ratings also have a higher value than ratings given by people with fewer karma points. Dynamic rating is to posts what links are to websites.

The people worth following, the leaders, raise bottom up. Hierarchies in network architectures are natural and dynamic heterarchies. In fact this is the only way that there can be leaders in democratic systems.

One algorithm tracks the value of contributions; the other tracks the value of contributors.

The Web 2.0 gave the audience a voice. What is happening at the moment is much more radical. It is not about representation but gestures and responses leading to emergence and self-organization. It is not about the message or the media any more. It is more about the rules of responsiveness. In a simplified way, you can express those rules as positive and negative feedback moving the whole system towards a particular direction based on the behaviour of the participants.

The definition of what is quality and what is crap is a result of the responsive interaction. It is not groupthink however, because the ratings of people with high karma points weigh more than the assessments of the average members. The huge problem is that the majority viewpoints get amplified, while minority opinions get silenced.

This is why we need a new category to support quality. It is diversity.

Changing the algorithm to reward diversity of opinion means the emergence of a system that looks totally different. Instead of highlighting posts with high average ratings, the system could highlight posts that have triggered a high divergence of ratings. There are many +5 responses, but also many -5 responses. The posts that inspire strong responses either way, both positive and negative, could then rise to higher visibility. The system can thus reward controversial voices, not only popular ones.

A viable system needs to reward perspectives that deviate from the mainstream.

We need perspectives that don’t aim to please everyone. The oddballs would still be marginalized but the thoughtful minorities who attract both admirers and critics would have a visible place in the ongoing process of creating the future in responsive collaboration.

Thank you Steven Johnson