We live in a world where people are more likely to engage with affinity-based networks and groups than formal structures based on reporting lines. This is how things get done in the real world. Trust is cheaper than control, if you can achieve it.
Co-ordination, rather than top-down management, is often a better way of influencing outcomes in complex systems, and requires its own special leadership skills.
On the ROI of Social Computing
Do you know of any organisation that has tried to and succeeded in measuring how it performs at building market intelligence? Or that has succeeded in measuring how efficient and effective the communication within a project team is? For example, do they measure how much communication it takes and how long time it takes to delegate a task to a team member? Do they measure the effectiveness of this communication - if the right decision was made or the right task was carried out in the right time?
I’m all ears.
“No business case will sell social software to a firm that doesn’t already value collaboration in its culture…If the ROI is needed to convince an organisation that collaboration is a good thing - then ROI is the least of your problems…”
Larry Hawes
Think about the relationship between two people, A and B. This relationship actually consists of two relationships – AB = A’s perspective of the relationship and BA = B’s perspective of the relationship. In the world of mathematics AB=BA, but not in the human world.
“Success stories are subjective and not easily replicated. I’m glad it can’t. If success can be replicated, success loses its value. It becomes a commodity. That’s not realistic.”
Why people are different from ants
1. We never make decision based on rational grounds
2. Human beings have multiple identities
3. Free will
Stephen Billing said, on August 27, 2009 at 13:34
Self-organization defined « Bas Reus’ quest on self-organization and online collaborative spaces
I see self-organization as a dynamic of all organizations, however they might be designed and managed from a formal standpoint. Outcomes emerge from this process - both locally and globally. Emergence locally takes the form of jointly improvised ways of thinking and acting. And globally it can be seen in such things as the idealized designs of the formal organization; the informal coalescing of people around particular agendas; and the widespread ‘patterning’ of taken-for-granted assumptions about the organization, which creates a generalized tendency for people to think and act in familiar ways.
- Chris Rodgers (comment 6)
“Most businesses are so oblivious to their own machineness that they have no resources responsible for the overall health of the machine (shoving food into your mouth — ala. a stream of financial capital — just to keep you alive is hardly a well-rounded life). Then there’s the whole dimension of the psyche — for which many organizations are schizophrenic (due to the competing nature of the ‘parts’).”
- Paula Thornton (Rotkapchen)
http://basreus.nl/2009/07/27/self-organization-defined/#comment-59
