social

We evolved to work well in small groups. Within our natural structures we were never able to scale communication or memory. During the industrial era we developed tools and processes that scaled collaboration well in a static context, and when creativity was only required by a few. A market economy of negative reciprocity held that profits are taken out of transactions for re-investment, but it doesn't foster trust. Trust, of course, happens, despite our structures, because we have abundant desire to share. With gifts we add value in the act of giving beyond the good to the good itself, yielding positive reciprocity. In sharing, we find new structures that meet the needs of an information era. We find new tools that help us share control to create value, scale communication and memory.

Part of this is a new design. When you look at an enterprise as a large complex adaptive system, it is all too tempting to over-design it. The complexity has always resided in the social network, not in the assets of the firm. Traditional enterprise software tries to solve for complexity by taking it out of the social network and putting it into the software. Social software, however, keeps the complexity in the social network, and attempts to augment it with very simple rules to foster emergent behavior.