An Organisation of Marketplaces

As part of my #FutureWork series i have been exploring the idea of Organisational Marketplaces: an evolution away from pure allocation and control towards a model of investment and opportunity. In this piece i will explore two manifestations of this, both of which are being explored in Organisations today, and both of which offer a significant evolution of traditional models of experience for employees.

In an Opportunity Marketplace, we see that skills and capabilities are connected up beyond formal domains and existing jobs. We experience opportunities to volunteer skills, but also we see technology deployed to create taxonomies, based on legacy activity, as well as current conversations. Opportunity marketplaces offer a significant opportunity for Organisations to become more Socially Dynamic, because they start to disassociate ’capability’ from ‘role’, hence fracturing a central tenet of legacy design.

In a Learning Marketplace, we see an overall democratisation of learning: so instead of it being organised by formal pathways, it’s instead scaffolded around socially moderated and engaged ones. So more learning is available to more people, and everyone has the opportunity to both learn, and share. The model brings access to the tacit, tribal knowledge that we access through Social Learning approaches.

It’s no surprise that we see the emergence of Marketplaces right now, for two reasons: firstly, the technology is either mature, or widely emergent, and secondly because Organisations are broadly exploring an evolution of the core design principles, to see where they can go in their next iteration (fuelled further by the Pandemic). The adaptation they will be forced to experience will take place with restricted budget, against a backdrop of evolved ecosystem, hence their desire to unlock ‘more from less’, to unlock existing capability in broader and more connected ways.

Over the following articles i will consider some of the factors that will support success, specifically ‘Technology’, ‘Enablement’, and ‘Regulation’.

This work forms part of my #FutureWork series, so is incomplete, fragments of thought around our evolution and adaptation as we move away from known structures, through experiment and prototype, into emergent ones.