Talk
free the battery humans
An historical perspective on modes of organisation, and why humanising organisations is good for business, society and the rest of us
Freedoms we take for granted can dissipate unless they are codified in policy, process and organisational structure. Modern C21st organisations still bear the imprint of the industrial revolution and mass production. How will current social computing ideas and technologies change the organisation, what will they mean for the future of human-powered organisations, and why does this matter?
Many of the freedoms we take for granted actually tend to emerge in specific historical bubbles that can easily disappear unless they are codified in practice. In politics, this usually takes the form of legislation, and in organisations this takes the form of policy and process; but technology plays a more important role than we realise in defining and manifesting social freedoms and controls.
Over the past couple of hundred years, the nature of states and international bodies has changed a great deal; and whilst the power of the state has waned, non-state actors such as corporations have become more powerful with respect to both individuals and the state. To a large extent, the development of modern organisations has been made possible by advances in communication technologies, but these technologies have typically strengthened old models of hierarchical control.
In the consumer realm, we have enjoyed a bubble of new technological freedoms in recent years, but the opposite has happened inside large organisations, where many people operate in pockets of early C20th management thinking, governed by outdated and inefficient communication technology.
We now have an important opportunity to both improve the working conditions of people inside these organisations, and make them more effective at the same time, because the most efficient and value-generating technologies of the current era take the idea of networked individualism as their starting point, rather than the organisation or the collective. Just as previous major innovations such as the factory, the telegraph and the printing press have shaped the structures we create for collective action, so too can the current crop of communication and knowledge sharing technologies play a key role in establishing a new relationship between the individual and the collective in modern organisations.
Humanising the enterprise promises to make organisations more people-friendly workplaces whilst simultaneously making them more efficient and responsive to change. But in a wider context, this also has the potential to socialise large organisations to a greater extent than ever before, making it more likely that they behave as good corporate citizens.
This talk will contrast the current state of enterprise and consumer technologies in terms of the organisational structures and cultures they embody, and sketch out possible futures for the role of technology in organisational design.
