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SMALL PIECES LOOSELY JOINED
The Internet is the largest manmade thing ever, but it is not owned or managed by anyone. Why not tap into this power and apply the same principles at work?
What has made the web successful is the way it allows lots of small things to work together, without overt or centralized management, to achieve wonderful things. On the face of it, it shouldn’t work – and yet it does. In fact if you were to try to “run” the web using conventional management approaches it would grind to a halt. At its core there are certain things – standards – that, unless rigidly adhered to, would make the whole thing stop working, but so long as you stick with these standards there is enormous flexibility in what you can do.
How would it be if you took the principles that appear to have allowed the web to work and applied them more widely – in general management for instance? What if you had a few, very rigid, but really thought out rules at the core of your processes – and then gave people lots of flexibility as to how they applied these rules? Instead we try to control everything, and the more complex the environment the more rules we feel we need. Dave Snowden once said “If you want to try to manage a complex environment with complex tools, you end up with a mess. The only way to manage complex environments is with a small number of simple, universally understood rules.”
What does this mean in reality? Well, take corporate social media policies. Many of them try to cover ...
