An important question, asked by Ryan Lanham.
Ryan Lanham:
“A thoughtful essay in the American Scene, on democratic citizenship, by James Poulos, got me thinking…
That’s not least of which because I was lucky to have a course with J.G.A. Pocock and read his Machiavellian Moment closely at least twice in my life, once while in his seminar. I recommend it for those looking to find out something about the rise of American styled republics and their institutions.
More to the point, I wonder, along with James Poulos to some extent, if p2p is inherently anti-institutional. I know that it is decentralized and anti-hierarchical–or wirearchical as Jon Husband says, but can decentralized and institutional stand side by side? And what, if so, would that look like? Can we pre-describe the social landscape of a mature p2p society?
Increasingly I find that institutions are unsustainable because they are either plundered by leaders or captured as agents by principals with no principles. It’s hard to put together a dynasty of moral leadership. One sees this as much in corporations as in governments. Perhaps it will come to pass in NGOs and civil society organizations as well. If this difficulty of normative sustainability is pervasive and increasing, and p2p is the main flavor of the future, then we must envision some form of chaotic-to-self-ordering linkage that can easily replace the role larger organizations play. Will we be able to see such order in real time, and couldn’t we then manipulate it? I wonder how we defend against successive regimes of rapidly developing tyrannies of the quick and aggressive. You’ve got to really trust that something inherent to p2p is protective. I’m not sure I see what that is.
All this evolution away from the institutional norms of old wouldn’t happen at once, either. It would unfold. It might be characterized by severely punctuated equilibriums where the punctuations are quite violent. Is the current financial crisis one such punctuation? If it is, we should be looking for what sorts of trends replace shattering institutions of old.”
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:04 am
It’s important to define what we mean by “institutions”, I think. If they are large hierarchical organization, then decentralized and institutional standing side-by-side is inherently very difficult. Reinforcedly so by virtue of he core assumptions about what “performance” is, and how it is motivated, monitored and managed.
For any organization of size to begin a path to capability in any decentralized fashion, a long hard look will need to be taken at job evaluation methodologies and the attendant hierarchical organizational “skeleton” that methodology provides, how performance is defined and what performance management philosophy and schemes are brought into the picture, which reward / remuneration philosophies and practices are chosen and used, how work is designed, how ‘talent’ is recruited, acquired (wrong word) and nourished, etc.
Notwithstanding all the current Enterprise 2.0 brouhaha, there’s an enormous of amount of de-structuring that must occur before and restructuring might occur with respect to the imagined possibility of a substantially decentralized institution. All or most of the ROI and metrics discussions about the use of social media . link-driven collaboration platforms are asking the wrong questions, in a sense, because they are seeking to shoehorn a fundamentally different way of working at using and building knowledge into a mental model that relies upon siloed, segmented, sequential and hierarchically driven-and-approved tasks … still deeply Taylorist.
So, I think that those discussions will continue on until there are (or may be) enough examples of organizations that measure with a light touch but clearly out-perform on issues like flexibility, time to market, innovation, customer-and-market responsiveness that the ROI becomes less of a conceptual obstacle or hurdle.
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:06 am
This:
de-structuring that must occur before and restructuring might
… should read:
de-structuring that must occur before any restructuring might …