Digital Humans: Thriving in an Online World

4Add-app-ability

The architect must not only understand drawing, but music.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

This chapter is about a radical shift in the way work is organized. Digital humans can engage in work and in society in a highly modular way, orchestrating our lives through a curated collection of digital tools and apps. We are able to participate in the world around us like musicians in a jazz band: free flowing and inventive – ready to improvise and adapt. For organizations, they will operate less like highly tuned, classical orchestras and more like fluid, combining multiple tools and apps as part of a dynamic operating model that responds quickly to strategy change.

We introduce the concept of add-app-ability, describe how this idea will define the digital organization in the future as well as how to put add-app-ability into practice.

The Vitruvius Within Us All

Beautiful and complex buildings have been constructed from simple modules since antiquity. Even now, more than 2000 years later, we are surrounded by the classical forms of architecture that we inherited from the ancient empires. For example, the Roman classical architectural system that we still use today was first fully described by Vitruvius, an engineer who originally specialized in designing siege weapons for the Caesars before turning to civil construction.

In his Ten Books on Architecture (De Architecture) (Vitruvius 1960) written in the first century BCE, Vitruvius argued that all buildings should follow ...