The Social Age: a map for 2016

This is a #WorkingOutLoud post, so forgive the scaffolding and dust sheets. I’ve spent today redrawing my map of the Social Age. I do this each year, expanding and evolving it as my own understanding and interest evolves. It’s bigger this year because we did a lot of exploring in 2015! Through the rest of this week, i’ll expand on it: i like to have one reference article that provides a current outline of the Social Age that i can link back to each year (this is last year’s one).

Many of the things we had last year are still here: the evolved Social Contract, the new Nature of Work, the rise of Social Collaborative Technology and the need for Social Leadership. They are not going away. But some areas have more depth: i explored further ideas around equality, fairness and trust last year, as well as more granular aspects of Social Authority, Reputation, Responsibility and so on. Community continues to be at the forefront of all things ‘social’, but i wrote widely about co-creation co-ownership, part of the work on change and also on narratives, so they have an island to themselves.

You’ll still see the dragon: ‘here be dragons’ being what medieval cartographers used to indicate that they had no idea, but suspected it might be dangerous…

It’s a sketch map: i’ll continue to explore and expand it, within this community, throughout the year.

Some working illustrations below…