The Future of Management In a Radically Different World

A hundred years from now, when economists, sociologists, and historians recap our progress throughout the twenty-first century, two major influences they are likely to cite are the rapid proliferation of the Internet and the extraordinary growth in our knowledge of networks. These learned scholars will probably reference how a steady stream of innovative digital technologies revolutionized global commerce at the start of the century by creating unprecedented capacities for businesses to quickly access collective intelligence, facilitate expeditious organizational learning, and build an effective, shared understanding among large numbers of geographically dispersed workers. They will likely enumerate how mass collaboration reshaped every social institution as the world was rapidly transformed into both a virtual and physical global village. These scholars will also highlight how breakthrough advances in the developing network sciences spawned a dramatic revolution in the assumptions and design principles for building more highly evolved social organizations that are more human and effective.

For the last 150 years, the machine mindset has assumed a socioeconomic world that follows the laws and principles of reductionistic science. Because the primary task of the Industrial Age business has been to leverage machines and maintain stability, the mechanistic paradigm of classical physics worked. However, as we continue our transition into the radically different world of the Digital Age, business leaders need to come to terms with the new reality that the mechanistic assumptions of an outdated mindset no longer fit the more complex challenges of a rapidly changing world. They need to think differently and recognize the world is not a machine; it is a complex adaptive system where the essential attribute that separates the winners and losers is the ability to adapt to rapid change. Thinking differently means embracing a new organizational paradigm that resembles a complex adaptive system, which is best accomplished by designing organizations as self-managed, peer-to-peer networks.

Melanie Mitchell, the author of Complexity: A Guided Tour, defines a complex adaptive system as “a system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution.” This is also a good definition of a self-managed, peer-to-peer network.

Self-managed, peer-to-peer networks are the future of management because they are better suited for solving the problems of an increasingly more complex world. Leveraging collective intelligence, engaging in iterative discovery, and building shared understanding by integrating the strengths of different points of view into mutually acceptable agreements is the new framework for how organizations solve problems. In the fast-changing times of the Digital Age, organizations are most efficient when large numbers of workers have the necessary tools to self-organize their work within a collaborative infrastructure. In this new world, business leaders need to leave control of the details to those who do the actual work. They need to understand that an organizational design's primary focus is no longer expanding control. It is now about the expansion of consciousness by overcoming the natural unconscious biases of individuals and the limitations of the single human brain. It’s about abandoning coercive power over people and embracing synergistic power with people. There is a better and more human way for us to organize our work and our world. The choice is ours.

To learn more about the future of management, see my new book Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody: Why Self-Managed Teams Make Better Decisions and Deliver Extraordinary Results.