Future Here Now: Hives over Hierarchies
Insight
I’m running a little behind this week due to some unexpected deadlines.
First, I hope you’ll join me on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook on Thursday at noon for a very special Future LIVE. I’ll be talking with Marco Cannon of Studio 107, who is building a hive business like what I’m describing today, Stay tuned for details in tomorrow’s newsletter. I think this one will blow your mind.
I also have a special video for full subscribers coming out Friday or Saturday. Are you a full — that is, paid — subscriber? If you’re not, you can fix that and get a dose of additional insight and resources for pennies a day. Check it out here -
We live in Hives, not Hierarchies, now
For most of the Industrial Era, and before, we were governed by hierarchies. From nations to households, we lived with the expectation that Someone would be The Boss/King, and a few additional people would have a ton of power derived from The Boss/King, and the rest of us would do what they told us to do.
This organizational model promised security and efficiency in exchange for some form of protection, security, predictability. Lords ruled over fiefdoms, demanding loyalty and crops in exchange for a promise of protection from invaders. Women were expected to do what husbands and fathers told them to do, and in exchange they were supposed to be protected…mostly from other men.
And as the Industrial Era took hold, owners and managers and other types of bosses claimed a similar role, exerting the power to tell you what to do and how to do it during your working day, and increasingly beyond. In exchange, you were supposed to get a similar kind of protection — protection from unemployment, secure income sufficient to survive, health care, some level of respectability, and so on.
It’s not news to any of you that Boss/King side of that deal is breached more than upheld in a whole host of situations, from abusive homes to toxic politicians to companies in virtually any business sector that expect Organization Man behavior but give only a sliver of the old benefits.
This trend, added to the near-frictionless access to communication and information, is transforming how we work together, in virtually any context. A big piece of the power that hierarchies rely on — and especially Industrial Era hierarchies — is control over information. The lower you are on the pyramid, the less access you traditionally had access to. But when I can Google my company’s financials, or compare my salary to others in similar positions worldwide via a subReddit, or when an anonymous hacker group can bust open my companies’ shady human resources behavior… and when I can organize direct action with my peers without union power brokers… then a big piece of the hierarchy pyramid suddently stands on quicksand, instead of solid ground.
The kinds of alternative organization we’re seeing might be best compared to a beehive. Bees constantly, constantly share information — their whole existence depends on communication and coordinated action based on that information. Scout bees share information on food sources and threats with other bees who travel out to harvest pollen or fight off invaders, nurse bees share information about the hundreds of eggs and larvae in their care. When needed, information flows near-instantly and the whole hive springs into coordinated action, as when they swarm to move to a larger or better location. And all of this happens independent of the queen or drones. The bees that we think of as the leaders, or the royalty, or the bosses, have almost no role in the collection and dissemination of information. Their only job is to keep making new bees.
Businesses of all types are already operating in this kind of decentralized, information-rich, intensely collaborative manner. That’s not only a profound change from the old command-and-control systems, but it’s a quantum leap in terms of the complexity of the organization — and the systems, and social and mental skills, needed to make it work.
In tomorrow’s newsletter, we’ll explore some Signals of how our Hives are developing. And Thursday’s FutureLIVE will let you look under the hood of how one business is doing just that.