The Future of Work

A new intelligence permeates the workplace. It augments the human brain in some cases and replaces it in others. When wired to robots of various types, it takes over the muscles of humanity, moving packages in warehouses, answering support calls with customers, and even telling us what products and pictures those customers are likely to be most interested in.

The questions now arising from diffusion of this new intelligence through our companies, government agencies, and other organizations is this: what will we do with the bounty of our new found power? Down one road lies more of the same, a steady extraction of wealth from our organizations and communities, as our technology marches to the beat of the siren of “shareholder primacy.” Down the other road is a much brighter future, one marked by more meaningful work, work that connects us, work that ensures the well being of all stakeholders and work that helps to heal the world.

Organizational Learning Platforms

Platforms Are the Future of Intelligence, So Let’s Not Make Them Parasites

As we organize human work and learning at fantastic scales, let’s strive for something inspiring. Through our relationship with machines, humans are building a new, synthetic intelligence. Organizations are the home for this part-human, part-machine intelligence. The topic to which we now turn is the role organizations play in coordinating the immense scale of work […]

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People platform cooperating

This Is How We’ll Survive After Robots Have Taken Our Jobs

This article originally appeared in YES! Magazine and was then picked up this morning by AlterNet where it is now featured on the homepage. It’s about addressing the threat of technological unemployment (the large-scale loss of jobs to automation) by expanding who ‘owns the robots’ — i.e. who owns the companies that are doing the automating.

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Are Organizations Alive? A Different Take on the Evolution of Technology

With each passing year, organizations act more and more like living entities thanks to the evolution of technology. The notion that organizations might be a form of life is a radical perspective. It is useful as metaphor, but through this and future articles, I hope to persuade you that an “organization as life” perspective is

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Invest in People – with Deliberately Developmental Organizations

You may have never heard of “Deliberately Developmental Organizations.”  I hadn’t, until yesterday, but it’s an idea that’s worth understanding because it appeals to some very basic human desires and because it fits nicely the idea of “regenerative business,” which I occasionally write about on this site. What is a “Deliberately Developmental Organization”? Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey

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It’s Time to Shift Perspective on Our Organizational Boundaries

Many of us who have worked in organizations fool ourselves into believing something that just isn’t really true. We think of organizational boundaries as something real, when in fact, it’s just a concept. Sure, boundaries matter from a legal point of view, but that perspective also creates a distortive field that obscures a more important

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What Is Network Density — and How Do You Calculate It?

“Network density” as a measure of network health and effectiveness. I think network density has important ramifications for the way business works and for making the world a better place. To better understand what it is, this article will show you how to easily calculate network density. The goal isn’t to get you calculating the network

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“Nemawashi”

“Nemawashi” I took a year off in college to go work and study in Japan and went back again in grad school for an internship with Fuji-Xerox (who had some of the very first graphical user interface workstations … remember it all came out of Xerox PARC). While living and working in Japan, I learned

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The Biology of Organizational Intelligence – It’s People

We can learn a lot about organizations from biology. In my last post, I wrote about how the membrane of the cell provides a new perspective on the way organizations connect with the world around them. I closed that piece by noting that the “intelligence of the [cell’s] membrane is a metaphor for something very specific and very real…something

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