If we take an integral view of social change, then it is clear that we cannot have a technologically deterministic view that technology alone is changing the world. Rather, it changes the world when it is taken up by powerful social forces that use it to change their life situations. This means it is also necessary to look at subjective change (what kind of people preferentially take up a particular technology and in what way), but also at ‘inter-subjective’ change, i.e. at the ways in which we do things together: are their ways to increase peer to peer literacy?.

Dave Pollard echoes the important of new facilitation techniques in his review of a Art of Hosting get together:

“By contrast, practitioners of this new set of facilitation or ‘hosting’ techniques aspire to nothing more or less than to enable more effective conversations leading to peer-consensual decisions and self-selected follow-up actions. If the participants do not have the complete freedom to decide and to do what they in their collective wisdom know is right, then the responsible facilitator will simply refuse the assignment up front as a fraud.

It is hard to overstate how radical this is. It is a reassertion of democratic principles, personal responsibility, true empowerment and the wisdom of crowds. It is a rebuff to the infallibility and ‘greater wisdom’ of executives, managers, consultants and ‘experts’. Practitioners of these techniques can be catalysts for important and truly revolutionary change, and in large calcified organizations, public and private, it may well be the only way to bring about significant change at all.

It is a recognition that the vast majority of actual work that gets done in organizations, the vast majority of value actually created, is the result of bottom-up decisions, workarounds and changes (often hidden from management for fear of retribution for violating official policies) made by the thousands of individual workers on the front lines. Those of us who have worked with large organizations recognize that they are substantially incapable of innovation, and that they drive their mavericks, bright thinkers, and imaginative people out, while absurdly over-rewarding (and over-punishing when things go badly) their senior executives. The potential ‘facilitated re-democratization’ of previously hierarchical organizations could reverse this brain drain and reverse their creative stagnation, to staggering effect.

I think the people who are doing this groundbreaking work realize the power it has, and that’s why they have embraced it with such passion and have been relentless in urging their customers and potential customers to use these techniques to set their employees (and in a way their customers as well) free, free to do their best work.

As our world enters a period of unprecedented challenges and uncertainties, the success of these people to spread this new way of learning, decision-making and acting could well be pivotal to our economy’s and our civilization’s ability to cope, improvise and perhaps even survive.”

While Dave Pollard defends an alternative way of doing business through natural enterprise, it is interesting to see a similar take by John Hagel, who takes the point of view of wanting to strengthen the position of traditional corporations.

The current crisis he says, shows the dark side of ‘financial leverage’, which does not create new value. Instead, companies should focus on both capability leverage, the ability to mobilize complementary resources of other corporations, but more importantly learning leverage.

Reading the whole article here is strongly recommended.

He explains that:

“Learning leverage seeks to build relationships with other companies that help each company get better faster by working with others. Rather than treating existing resources as fixed, learning leverage recognizes the value for everyone in finding ways to continually push the performance envelope for all participants. In rapidly changing global markets, learning leverage provides a powerful approach to increase value delivered to customers. Learning leverage introduces a powerful compounding effect – not only does the value delivered increase with the number and diversity of participants, but more value is created by each participant over time.”

Then he compares the 3 forms of leverage:

“Here’s one way to look at the three forms of leverage. Financial leverage magnifies returns, but does not increase the value delivered to the marketplace. Capability leverage increases the value delivered by flexibly connecting resources that otherwise might not be accessible to customers or that might require great effort by customers to assemble on their own. Learning leverage adds even more value by enabling individual participants to deliver higher levels of performance to the marketplace as they learn more rapidly from each other.

Capability leverage and learning leverage amplify value in times of economic prosperity, but they are even more valuable in times of margin pressure. Rather than requiring one company to bear the brunt of this margin pressure, these forms of leverage make it easier for the company to focus on investments that can enhance differentiation while relying on others to deliver complementary value to the customer. In contrast to financial leverage, these forms of leverage alleviate and diffuse pressure during economic downturns, rather than magnifying pressure on the leveraged company. “