Comments on: Is P2P anti-institutional? https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-p2p-anti-institutional/2009/04/22 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Mon, 13 Oct 2014 13:04:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Jon Husband https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-p2p-anti-institutional/2009/04/22/comment-page-1#comment-410859 Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:06:41 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=2708#comment-410859 This:

de-structuring that must occur before and restructuring might

… should read:

de-structuring that must occur before any restructuring might …

]]> By: Jon Husband https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-p2p-anti-institutional/2009/04/22/comment-page-1#comment-410851 Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:04:41 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=2708#comment-410851 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.

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