Organizational Principals That Live and Die in the Tech Industry

When I read about ideas like Xpertweb (actual quote: “The economy we are used to is simply an Operating System with protocols for collecting money and describing obligations. Every feature and requirement has been invented one rule at a time over the last 5,000 years”) or Wirearchy (another actual quote: “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”) I cringe a bit.

There are many ideas that come out of the tech industry and pseudoscience that have no business being proposed as revolutionary economic and social mechanisms. Go to your local bookstore’s technology non-fiction section (it should be next to the books on “complexity theory for business management” and “the cultural history of the concept of zero”). You’ll find dozens of books by people who watched geeks doing their thing and decided that was the way everyone should be doing things. Last year the universalizable trend was open source, and the hype still lingers in endless and vague calls for things like"open source government." Today it’s blogging, which will apparently give anyone with an idea, a hope, and a dream a publishing platform for the whole world to see, never mind the costs and technological barriers.

Undoubtedly, right now, someone, somewhere, is observing a closed system that probably relies on a couple of other closed systems and is thinking that the behaviour of said system is the be- and end-all of social organization. The key word is “closed.” But tell that to the Wirearchy folks, who insist “[t]oday’s rapid flows of information are like electonic grains of sand, eroding the pillars of rigid hierarchies.” Well, those are easy pillars to erode when they were built on the quick in Silicon Valley twenty years ago. Obviously there’s something to be said for new organizational techniques, and they can be implemented fairly well in small, progressive organizations (I’d like to think that via my father, who works in the Knowledge Management field, I know of what I speak). But older and more established business, governmental, and military chains of command need ideas with more real-world integrity to be improved; the desperate problem is, they need improvement, and they needed it yesterday.

Disasters like the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger or the irresponsible and fatal production of the flawed Ford Pinto are essentially the results of hierarchical chains of command that excluded the right decision makers. Right now few of these self-styled “revolutionary” organizational principals take into account any ethical grounding amidst their tech buzzwords and hype. Not only are these ideas operational only in the aforementioned closed system of the tech industry, they don’t contain one of the key elements tragically missing from modern organizational structures. Hesitate on the moral and human element – not to mention plain old viability – before someone tries to sell you on “peer to peer economics” or whatever tomorrow’s organizational hype is. You just might find it changes the way your decisions get made.