“Organizations of the future” are not the future of organizations!
A lot of this thinking has been a rabbit hole around the idea of ”Decentralized Autonomous Organizations”, which are enabled by blockchain and cryptography, but I uncovered a much larger space and I want to share a bit of my thinking around them so you can, in turn, bounce back ideas and examples. Please, share your thoughts ;)
It’s not a secret that homo sapiens’ most unique ability is to collaborate. Groups of “us” can gather and work toward a shared goal.
In that regard, every technology can be seen as a driver for collaboration. Language is a way to transfer knowledge, which leads to better collaboration. The invention of writing breaks the barrier of synchronicity, which means collaboration can now happen at a much broader scale between people who live at different times, or very far from one another.
Similarly, the invention of money and markets have fostered the ability to break down work between people, allowing for specialization and expertise, pushing forward the limits of our collective knowledge and skills. Much later, the progress of legal systems has also considerably “re-risked” the cost of doing business and collaboration.
With each new technological leap, came new kinds of organization.
Yet, as the XXth century is by far the most prolific when it comes to technological progress, it seems that very little 0 to 1 innovation happened in the way we are organized. Corporations, governments, churches, armies, and unions have all existed for centuries in a form or another. It’s almost as if techniques have outpaced the organizations themselves. Among many other things, the COVID-19 crisis has shown the limits of governments around the world to efficiently stop the spread of a virus through policy. It has also shown the inability of our production systems and supply chains to massively scale and distribute masks and tests all around the world. Our knowledge-sharing systems (the media!) have been under attack for almost 2 decades now because of badly aligned incentives between creators, consumers, and platforms…
We have just started to see the slow emergence of completely new ways to collaborate. They are “networks”. The internet, as well as progress in miniaturization, batteries, and user interfaces, means that we are now “connected” to every other person on the planet, all the time. This enabled new kinds of collaboration, both inside existing organizations, but, more excitingly for me: new organizations!
When I started to dig, I actually found dozens of examples of new kinds of organizations that were enabled by the internet. Here’s a laundry list, as I am working on some kind of classification.
The Open Source movement
As a software engineer, an obvious network is the advent of Open Source. Engineers from all around the world, with very different backgrounds, who have often never met each other, collaborate on code which ends up running on millions of servers and used on daily basis by billions of humans. As I noted a few months ago there are lots of challenges but I am confident we’re seeing new organizations emerge on that front.
The “gig-economy”
Let’s talk about one: the so-called “gig economy”. The barrier between Uber employees and Uber drivers is blurrier than ever, but, if you remove the Uber company from the picture (and the technologies make it possible, see Lazooz), you can imagine a network of drivers and riders collectively working around making transportation efficient inside of cities. You can imagine the same thing for Airbnb: a collective of hosts working together to provide hospitality to travelers. Airbnb themselves probably realized that hosts were “collaborators” and even tried to reward them with stock options.
Social Networks
Social networks are networks. It is just that they are currently owned by a small number of a corporation that controls them (and us). There is Facebook Inc, the corporation which provides the infrastructure and feeds itself from our interactions and facebook.com where we share pictures, ideas, and memories. To some people, the distinction may not be obvious, what’s facebook.com without Facebook Inc? I believe the technology exists to decouple the two (the indie web and federated social network movements are building this), but I also think that there is a world in which users of the networks could actually be represented inside of Facebook Inc, in the same way, that unions have a say in the governance of corporations.
Collaborative creation
Among the strangest examples, I want to mention the social experiments that Reddit has been fostering, such as The Button and, my favorite, Place, which I believe was the first global-scale collaborative art project.
The Reddit team set simple “governance” rules and millions of users collaborated to make art. What’s really exciting is not just the final picture, but the process itself (play the video). For example, check the “fight” between the French and German flags which ends up being a European flag!
4Chan, Anonymous, LulzSec…
One of the earliest uses of the internet has been Bulletin Board Systems (also called online forums). 4Chan has been one of the most widely famous because of its anonymity and frequent controversies that emerged from them. At its core, members collaborate to share knowledge, culture, and more. From there, the Anonymous hacker group emerged. The group, still in operation is probably the most famous hacktivist organization. Its members collaborate to perform cyber attacks against governments, institutions, corporations, or even cults.
Bitcoin
Some of you may roll their eyes here but in my opinion, this is one of the most significant examples. It’s not easy, but put aside the environmental consequences or the toxic hold-my-bag memes, and you’ll find what appears to be the most “valued” non-organization on the world. A fairly small piece of code running on hundreds of thousands of machines voluntarily operated by people who share almost nothing in common but an internet connection and the willingness to “secure” a ledger of their balances. Of course, Bitcoin built on peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent, Napster, and others, but reached levels of decentralizations that did not exist before. It is also the trailblazer for other blockchain or related technologies such as IPFS where tens of thousands of computers collaborate to provide a file system for the internet.
A lot of these early new kinds of organizations first appeared on the “outer boundaries”. They seem to emerge from practical needs which could not be met previously, as well as some kind of rejection of mainstream culture or established norms. We will see even more shifts in the way we organize as existing organizations evolve, embrace but also fight these new organizations. For example, corporations will have to adapt to remote work. Governments and political organizations already have to adapt to the evolution of what we call borders: people in 2 capitals are often more culturally alike than a townsman and a countryman from the same country…
These new organizations will eventually re-shape how we collaborate and what kind of progress we made. Conway’s law states that “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” I am tempted to say that the other way is even more true: the communication structures are shaping the organizations through which we collaborate.