Disruption of the Social Age: Infrastructure, Belonging, Reward

Tomorrow i deliver a keynote at the NATO Training Technology Conference, around the context of the Social Age, and the notion of a Socially Dynamic Organisation. I’m using it as an excuse to build out some of the ideas shared in the book a couple of years ago, and to develop my own understanding and storytelling around it. This illustration, which i will talk around, focusses on three aspects: ‘Infrastructure’, ‘Reward’ and ‘Belonging’.

Take Infrastructure: historically it tended to be expensive and complex, formally owned, and acted as a significant inhibitor to new entrants or competitors. Infrastructure also has a finite lifespan and high cost of maintenance and risk during replacement, and hence tends to be layered and interconnected. It never fully goes away.

But today, we see Organisations that utilise almost totally externalised, or subscription, infrastructure: the ‘infrastructure-less’ Organisation will operate in a disaggregated and diversified environment – it may even move away from a notion of uniformity and ownership to a diverse ecosystem approach, focussed more on core data. It may procure technologies that are inherently disposable, rather than persistent. Distributed – disposable – diversified. Infrastructure held lightly and for purpose, not as monument.

We see reward diversifying into more layers than before: or perhaps we should say that marketplaces have strengthened around other economies of reward, such as reputation that may now be held in social collaborative spaces (like LinkedIn) or even quantified in Blockchain technologies. Reward may be transferable and hence moderated in currencies that are not controlled by legacy Organisations – currencies such as trust, pride, belonging, belief, all of which can act to exert influence or pressure on real world contexts, just as much as money does, and yet which are not controlled centrally.

Indeed, we could describe that the ecosystem of Organisational reward has diversified into increasingly broad spaces, with the role of a ‘central bank’ significantly diminished, and trade increasingly within the Community (both internal, external, and through the walls).

Our third aspect is ‘Belonging’ – to be honest i could have chosen from a whole range of ideas, but this one has been a theme of my recent research, and seems pertinent. The Social Age challenges many of our legacy structures of belonging, which tended to be geographical and determined or moderated by limited technologies, whilst today we are ‘effortlessly’ connected across time and space, more synchronously and more broadly. Our tribal structures (trust bonded) may no longer be local, our citizenship structures may no longer be national, and our community structures may be diversified and more typically socially moderated than formally so.

As is the pattern with the Social Age, it’s not one defining feature, but rather a pattern, across a broad landscape: our relationship with infrastructure speaks of how we redefine the building blocks of Organisations (alongside a whole host of other features in this space as well), our new landscape of reward broadens and diversified our marketplaces of connection and social value, and our sense of belonging is deep, but perhaps less deeply connected to structural entities.

All of this work is shared as part of #WorkingOutLoud as i explore the context of the Social Age.