Future Here Now: Hives over Hierarchies
Signals
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Yesterday we explored the idea of hive-style organization, as opposed to the old hierarchies that so many of us have taken for granted. Today’s Signals explore that sea change through a whole range of perspectives,
Can I be myself at work?
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/41-of-american-job-seekers-cant-be-themselves-at-work-79-fear-discussing-certain-topics-302169974.html?
Hierarchies discourage being yourself — the power of a hierarchy manifests in its ability to make you fit into a desired mold. But as this survey from last June indicates, the value of allowing employees to be themselves is increasingly articulated, but not particularly acted out:
Around three-quarters of hiring managers (76%) say their company places a great deal/moderate amount of priority on encouraging employees to be authentic (i.e., bring their whole selves) at work.
A key part of the whole self of an employee is their mental health — and three-quarters of hiring managers say their company also promotes positive employee mental health (77%). Yet digging deeper, only around 2 in 5 say their company places a great deal of priority on authenticity (39%) and promoting positive mental health (40%), perhaps leaving room for improvement in these areas.
An inability to discuss topics openly at work could hinder some employees from feeling welcome to share and add their unique perspectives at the company.
The majority of hiring managers (70%) say there are topics employees are discouraged from discussing at their company — including politics (38%), salary/wages (38%), religion (35%) and their health (both physical and mental) (24%). Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (12%) and family (12%) are also off the table at some companies.
As we noted yesterday, discouraging discussion of things like salary and health within the hierarchy increasingly just indicates the system’s irrelevance, since employees can find plenty of ways to share information on those and other topics, within and without the company, in ways that managers can’t see.
The power of the hive-assisted whisper
https://theconversation.com/whisper-networks-thrive-when-women-lose-faith-in-formal-systems-of-reporting-sexual-harassment-196630
This article should make every organization leader think twice: even if you are determined to sweep sexual harassment under the rug, news of those doings are spreading farther and faster than you can imagine. The power of broad and sometimes anonymized hive systems to bring such behavior to very wide knowledge begins to profoundly shift the old power balances between abuser and abused. Even if the hierarchy protects you, the hive makes sure everyone knows.
The hive as business
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/pathways-to-democratic-business-what-two-co-op-networks-can-teach-us/
Cooperative business models might represent the ultimate in hierarchy to hive transformation. This article does a good job of introducing you to how cooperatives work, and the systems that make them possible today.
Cooperatives and similar decentralized business management models are developing across all types of locations and business sectors, and they require everyone in them to very profoundly shift their view of themselves within their business. Transitioning to a cooperative takes an enormous amount of training, trust-building and investment of energy, if nothing else, and whether or not a cooperative business succeeds appears to depend as much on participants’ willingness and ability to shift their mindset as their collective knowledge of how to run their businesses.
The power of the hive (even an unexpected hive) in a VUCA world.
https://mashable.com/article/layoff-recovery-community-network-support
Thanks to my childhood seat at the first wave of the Industrial Era implosion, the word “layoff” still sounds like a death sentence. Obviously it’s not, but with the explosion of access to a variety of hives, the ability to find support and new opportunities might be easier for the hive-minded than it’s ever been. Consider this from the article:
One of the best examples I've ever seen of a community coming together to support one of its own was in a Discord server for Black gamers I was a part of. After dealing with office politics and microaggressions, one of our community members found themselves unexpectedly let go from a job for which they'd recently relocated and signed a fresh lease for their apartment. The server's entire community of more than 1,500 members got together for a job referral drive that successfully helped the person affected find a new job within a week.
How wild is that? Fired on a Friday but hired by the next Thursday? It's almost unheard of, but it happens — people love to help out those they like, and you never know what kind of network a fellow community member has access to.
My father thought he had a network when he decided to leave the company that his dying firm had been sold to. He had nothing resembling this.
The flip side of this, however, is that people who are not plugged into such well-equipped hives are perhaps more at a disadvantage than ever — and whether or not people have access to an effective hive has been most closely connected, historically, to the socioeconomic status that you were born into. But if a gaming Discord can provide the same kind of hive power, that might indicate that the historic elite lock on effective hives may be breaking.
The Hive comes for Big Tech
https://theconversation.com/decentralised-social-media-offers-an-alternative-to-big-tech-platforms-like-x-and-meta-how-does-it-work-podcast-249758
I have a hunch this will become one of the most long-term important stories of 2025 (providing no implosions/nuclear war/impeachments/etc., which ….eh.).
Despite the tech trappings, the usual social media platforms operate on a pretty Industrial Era model — command and control, monopolize, optimize, centralize. Basically Rockefellers and Vanderbilts in hoodies. But as those priorities have become more clear than ever in recent months, a strange thing has happened:
Open source platforms. Systems whose foundations aren’t under anyone’s control, and which anyone can build an application on without permission or navigating ownership (think the Apple Store, but the opposite). Not only is BlueSky, the Twitter alternative, built on an open source platform, but an alternative to Tiktok is in beta testing after little more than a month, thanks to being able to start from the same base systems that were developed for BlueSky.
In the early -mid 2010s, I thought that open source systems were on the verge of taking over software development, and perhaps business development systems. I didn’t anticipate how hard the Big Tech nouveau Rockefellers would push back. But even in the years since then, open source has never gone away — and it has spurred all sorts of new value creation in tech.
So perhaps the virtual hive that was promised might actually come to pass.