You’re right … empowerment of employees related to more open communications and greater involvement with respect to responsibility and accountability has been around for four or five decades at least, and ids embodied in core OD principles and socio-technical systems theory and practices.

It’s just that many of today’s pundits are too young or relatively ill-informed, and so think that all the brouhaha about “social” business and “social” learning is completely new.

It’s not .. what is new is the interconnected interlinked infrastructure and easy-to-use tools and services that make the promise of empowerment seemingly more accessible and tangible.

That empowerment remains one of the most difficult aspects of moving to higher performance is also not new (ask someone like Chris Argyris), and is relatively unchanged since oh, several decades ago .. and that has a lot to do with the current (and dated) models of organizational structure.

The Shingo Prize for Organizational Excellence has been awarded to companies since 1988 that exhibit high caliber continuous improvement practices, including the empowerment and involvement of employees. This thinking is not new.

Yes .. and the evidence that such changes are non-negotiably necessary seems to be available everywhere, if we just look around .. no ?

What I think is interesting in this era is that there’s more trust and credibility in peoples’ personal (first- and maybe second-degree) connections. Those attributes are what hold the networks together and keep them functioning.

There’s a ‘scalable” lesson in there somewhere, as well as an ‘architectural’ principle for larger organizations, as Dunbar’s Number(s) come into play.