Wiki Management by Rod Collins

Author:Rod Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AMACOM Books

NETWORKS OVER HIERARCHIES

For more than a century, human organizations have been built upon the assumption that the smartest organization is the one with the smartest individuals, and for all that time, this notion worked remarkably well. This explains why, when it comes to organizing the work of large numbers of people, we have invariably built command-and-control structures. The fundamental premise of hierarchies is that by giving the smartest individuals the power to command and control the work of others, we make average employees work far more effectively than they would if left to their own judgments.

However, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, Google, and Goldcorp are challenging the continued wisdom of this longstanding assumption. Wikipedia and Goldcorp, which at first blindly followed traditional hierarchical thinking, learned painfully the limitations of chasing supposed experts. It was only when they radically shifted gears that they each stumbled into a new way of thinking far better suited for a world suddenly reshaped by accelerating change. Amazon, eBay, and Google—all of which were formed after the advent of the Digital Revolution—deliberately eschewed hierarchical structures in building their new companies. All of them discovered that the key to extraordinary performance was learning how to harness the wisdom of crowds. Today's best-run companies fully appreciate that in a hyper-connected world, the smartest organizations are those that know how to aggregate and leverage collective intelligence.

As we continue to transition into the Digital Age, it will become obvious to more companies that no single individual or even an elite cadre of star performers can adequately process the ever-evolving knowledge of fast-changing markets into operational excellence in real time. Star performers are inadequately equipped for the task of organizing large numbers of people in fast-changing, complex markets. When technological advances make networks smarter and faster than hierarchies, self-organizing teams of workers with diversified skills consistently outperform those whose work is organized and directed by persons in authority.

The increasing superiority of networks should not be misconstrued as repudiation of individual intelligence. Quite the contrary. Individual intelligence is vital to the aggregation of collective intelligence. The conditions of diversity of opinion, independent thinking, and local knowledge that Surowiecki defines as critical ingredients in collating collective intelligence are all dimensions of individual intelligence. What distinguishes networked organizations from their hierarchical counterparts is that, while hierarchies leverage the individual intelligence of a selected few, networks leverage the collective intelligence of the many smart people spread throughout their organizations.

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