There was a most interesting thread on Twitter today. Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) in a series of tweets, said [paraphrasing several]: “Senge’s five disciplines provided instant utility for learning to organizations in 1990, yet learning organizations remain rare to this day. Hierarchy kills all learning. Our social systems are not designed to cope with complexity. Organizational learning is fundamental change. Today’s organization is not fit for organizational learning. Therefore, we need total redesign. Social and transformational architecture encompasses complexity and emergent change.”

In wither the learning organization, I linked to a paper on Why aren’t we all working for Learning Organisations? [PDF]. The authors, John Seddon and Brendan O’Donovan, open with a reference to W. Edwards Deming’s commentary on Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline (1990).

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university.

On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”

After explaining how double-loop learning gets managers to focus on the system and away from controlling people, the authors conclude:

Our argument is that Deming’s statements in his 1990 review of Senge’s work continue to hold true: it is the dominance of the command and control management thinking which, 20 years on, still prevails and prevents the development of more generative learning. It is only by studying an organisation as a system and creating double-loop learning that we might finally see Senge’s ‘learning organizations’ stop being the exceptional and instead become the norm.

Double-loop learning requires an understanding, and a constant questioning, of the governing variables and of course this is where learning abruptly comes up against command & control. Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility, but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking [double-loop learning], and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a multi-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

The BetaCodex Network advocates first reducing hierarchy, and then making work independent of the formal structure, in order to increase the value creation structure. This makes sense, but who other than an enlightened CEO is going to make these changes? People like Semler are still outliers in the business world – “On his first day as CEO, Ricardo Semler fired sixty percent of all top managers.”

According to Charles Green this is how large-scale change happens:

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

We have the ideas (and some examples) on the great work that needs to be done at the beginning of this century – create new organizational models that reflect (and actually capitalize on) our humanity. We also have technologies that enable and support collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and connecting on a human level. The major obstacles seem to be that there are not enough good examples and that these organizations are not influential enough to change the dominant business ideologies.

To spread these ideas may require more than just mavens, connectors and salespeople to reach a tipping point. We may also need to identify the “Doer”s inside more organizations and find ways to help them become double-loop learners. We should engage the trustworthy, those people with strong intimacy skills who get things done.

Perhaps we have been focused at the wrong level. I know that my most successful consulting engagements have not been at the very top, but with people who are doing the work. If we can create a mid-level groundswell, without giving up on finding enlightened executives, we may get somewhere.

Unless the dominant command & control management ideology is replaced, then most organizational change initiatives will just be tinkering at the edges. I can see why some people could become jaded over time with every successive new management system that still does not produce real change. The democratization of the workplace has been my guiding mission for the past decade. Democracy is the foundation upon which the likes of  Enterprise 2.0 or the Social Business need to build, in order to foster double-loop learning organizations that can thrive in complexity.

In The 3 Structures of an Organization, the BetaCodex Network covers the weaknesses of our existing management and organizational models and shows a better way to design more network-centic businesses. For example, the authors state that the average modern organization expends about 20% of its energy on value creation, while the best may spend 50%. This still accounts for a significant amount of wasted energy. Organizations should dedicate 70% of their energies toward value creation.

These value creation structures have to be externally (market/customer) focused and are the most important parts of the business. Modern work is increasingly dealing with exceptions, which is complex and cannot afford the rigidity of centralized control systems. Informal networks have to be recognized as they provide the glue that keeps the organization together. Formal structures are the least important and only serve to support value creation, the opposite of centralized, top-down hierarchies.

Formal Structure, as can solely serve the trivial purpose of external compliance, should be subdued to or coherent with [the] Value Creation Structure, in which the work is done and where [the] organizational periphery is in charge, not bosses.

This is the kind of world without bosses I referred to in my last post.

The guiding principles make a lot of sense, and reflect what I have seen in organizations. Real change does not begin until you change the formal structure.

Eliminate Formal Structure, as much as possible, by fully aligning it with value creation and by allowing it only for external compliance. Make the work independent of formal structure.

Focus all organizational energy (e.g. with regards to learning and mastery) on the first two structures – not on formal structure, which is trivial. Approach Informal and Value Creation Structures with a systemic mind-set.

Support the positive effects of Informal Structure through high levels of transparency, investment in self-awareness of teams, radical decentralization of decision-making towards the periphery, and also through bonding rituals, and strong, shared values and principles.

This presentation is part of an ongoing discussion at BetaCodex. If you are interested in how these principles might apply to learning and development, here is an excerpt from a draft white paper (in development):

Never, ever, attempt to manage individual performance, though, as individual performance does not exist.

You cannot and need not develop people. People can do that on their own. An organization, however, can create conditions for self-development, getting out of the way by not trying to control or contain it.

Individual mastery is the only viable problem-solving mechanism in complexity … We usually tend to over-rate talent, and under-rate systematic, disciplined learning.

No training budgets, but on-demand learning resources.

I wholeheartedly agree with these recommendations!

Other BetaCodex papers can be accessed from: www.betacodex.org/papers

How is work different in a networked economy? We know that a lot of traditional work is constantly getting automated, from bank tellers, to lawyers to stock brokers. We also know that any work that can be outsourced will go to the place of cheapest labour, wherever that may be. The main reason behind this is the interconnectivity of the Internet. I can easily find freelancers or software as a service to take care of my more routine tasks. Organizations do this all the time.

Known Problems

Let’s look at a knowledge worker and how things can get done in such an interconnected environment. Any situation can first be looked at from the perspective of, “is this a known problem or not?” If it’s known, then the answer can be looked up or the correct person found to deal with it. That answer may have been automated or even outsourced.

Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management (KM) help us to map it. We can also create tools, especially electronic performance support systems (EPSS) to do work and not have to learn all the background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how simple and complicated knowledge continuously gets automated.

Exceptions

But if it’s a new problem or an exception, then the knowledge worker has to deal with it in a unique way. This is why we hire knowledge workers, to deal with exceptions. Complex, new problems need tacit knowledge to solve them. Exception-handling is becoming more important in the networked workplace. While the system handles the routine stuff, people, usually working together, deal with the exceptions. Exceptions require collaborative approaches to solve.

Once an exception is dealt with, it is no longer new. It is now known. As exceptions get addressed, some or all of the solution can get automated, and so the process evolves.

The challenge for organizational design is to make it easy to move new problems into the knowable space. This is where three principles of net work come into play:

1. Transparency
2. Narration of Work
3. Distribution of power

We cannot know what is known unless the organization, and the entire business ecosystem are transparent. We need to be able find things fast, which is the main benefit of using social media: increasing speed of access to knowledge. Social media enable us to be transparent in our work but transparency is not enough. Each knowledge worker must also narrate his or her own work. For example, just adding finished reports to a knowledge base does not help others understand how that report was developed. This is where activity streams and micro-blogging have helped organizational learning. We see the flow of sense-making in small bits that over time become a flow and later patterns emerge. We humans are very good at pattern recognition.

Exception handling is complex work, which requires passion, creativity and initiative. These cannot be commoditized. This is where the main value of the networked business is created. It’s a constantly moving sweet spot. Today’s complex work is tomorrow’s merely complicated or even simple work. But with complex work, failure has to be tolerated, as there are no best practices for exceptions (that’s why they’re called exceptions). Narrating work also means taking ownership of mistakes. Transparency helps the organization learn from mistakes.

Finally, power in the organization must be distributed. Distributed power enables faster reaction time so those closest to the situation can take action. In complex situations there is no time to write a detailed assessment. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted to anyway. This shared power is enabled by trust. Power in knowledge-based organizations must be distributed in order to nurture trust. “One of the big challenges for companies is that unlike information or data flows, knowledge does not flow easily – as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships” ~ John Hagel.

Power-sharing and transparency enable work to move out to the edges and away from the comfortable, complicated work that has been the corporate mainstay for decades.  There’s nothing left in the safe inner rings anyway, as it’s being automated and outsourced.

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage.

Ewen Le Borgne has an entertaining post on Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement. This humourous look at the various parties that try to support engagement in the organization is well worth the read. He discusses the three main branches of the family: Communication, Knowledge Management, and Monitoring & Evaluation. There’s even good old PKM:

The little brother PKM (personal knowledge management) was not taken seriously for a long time but he is really a whiz kid and has given a lot of people confidence that perhaps his branch of the family is better off betting on him, at least partly. He says that everyone of us can do much to improve the way we keep our expertise sharp and connect with akin spirits. To persuade his peeps, PKM often calls upon on his friends from social media and social networks (though these fellas are in demand by most family members mentioned above).

What all of these family members (disciplines) have in common is they are focused on some aspect of communicating, connecting and collaborating and they all think they have a unique perspective. But they share another commonality. They are all blind, as in the story of the blind men and the elephant.

“In various versions of the tale, a group of blind men (or men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement.”

You see, the [real] elephant in the room is the Network. We are all examining how best to get work done in a networked economy, because the Internet has changed everything. This is most evident today in publishing and increasingly so in how we manage work without geographical boundaries. We are all learning how to work anew.

In a lot of cases, knowledge workers now own what these specialties used to provide. Individuals are becoming their own information curators and sharing widely, self-managed communities constantly spring up, and social media are breaking marketing channels. Perhaps the age of specialization is over in the Network Era.  As I’ve said before: Knowledge workers of the world, Collaborate, You have nothing to lose but your Managers! With efficient networks and powerful cognitive support tools, the Engagement Family may have to rethink its structure and hierarchy. You cannot manage engagement if no one needs to be managed.

One of the great difficulties in shifting an organization from a hierarchical, command and control structure to a more networked wirearchical one is that you have to work both ends at once. Strategic guidance and high level models are rather abundant; for instance we generally know that organizations should be flatter, information should be democratized and risk & failure should be made more acceptable. Examining a business and looking at how it can be more social, innovative and agile is not really that difficult. From both inside and outside the organizations, most gaps are easy to identify. But the main challenge is what to do about them. Consultants, and even key internal staff, can often identify the problem (at the time) but then they move on to the next problem before much change has happened.

Complexity theory tells us that complex problems need to be probed through action before any sense can be made of them. Changing to a social business is complex. Dave Snowden has operationalized this with the Cynefin framework (Probe-Sense-Respond in complex environments).

But, as Dave has reminded me, over half of our probes will fail. That means we cannot create a plan for the organizational shift and then implement it. It has to be designed as a work in progress, or really a series of works in progress.

My experience, especially this past year, is that social business is just a different organizational culture. But you cannot directly change it or implement it. Culture is an emergent property of the many practices that happen every day. Change the practices and a new culture will emerge.

Communities of practice are often where work practices get developed. Even without formal approval, communities of practice exist and have a great influence on the organization. They can be a bunch of workers in the lunchroom or the CEO’s inner circle. They learn from each other by modelling behaviour. We may not even realize we’re modelling (and adopting) behaviours, but it happens all the time; like keeping your mouth shut when an executive says something really stupid.

So how would you re-focus an existing organization? First you need the frameworks and new ways of talking about business in place. These are based on the concepts Steve Denning, Gary Hamel, John Hagel and others talk about (radical management, management innovation, edge perspectives). Then you need to identify Probes, or what Dave Snowden calls safe-fail experiments. These are designed to be not so large that failure would seriously damage the company.

Next comes the trickier part. These probes have to be supported. How do you take a team that has never narrated its work and tell it to “be more transparent” or “share knowledge with customers”. New ways of doing things have to be practised, modelled and developed in a non-confrontational environment. It takes time. Not an inordinate amount of time with good support, but it doesn’t happen in a matter of weeks; more usually months.

For example, we’ve worked with distributed groups who are focused on improving collaboration. Everyone is onboard at the onset. But after an initial week or two we notice that nobody is sharing information. They say there’s no time to do it, but this is not a lack of motivation, it’s a lack of skills. However, developing these types of social skills require much more practice than theory.

During one of these probes, there can be lengthy periods of time coaching, cajoling and modelling, but at some point, things click with someone. This person sees how these new ways of working are really helping get work done. Someone else gets positive feedback from people outside the team. After a period of time there is no more need for outside help and the team becomes a model for the new business behaviours such as taking initiative in delighting customers. Ideas are supported, not shot down. People build on others’ ideas. One other thing; the end result of a probe is never what we thought it would be.

Like learning a new language, getting access to the right knowledge is only a small part of the solution. The best curriculum and best designed courses will have no effect if people do not practice. Formal instruction, or lecturing, is minimal in any of these probes. People need to do in order to understand. It’s social. Individuals practising on their own will not get the entire organization functioning in the new language either. It has to happen cooperatively. Getting feedback from experienced people, while engaging in peer learning, will help develop next practices in social business. But it requires time, effort and patience.

I’ve been told that you know you’re in a real community of practice when it changes your practice. It’s a good measuring stick.

There is no doubt in my mind that you need to work both ends at once: develop a flexible, contextual strategy but also practice new behaviours through a continuing series of probes. Supporting these probes and learning by doing are essential. Engaging in probes where failure is an option can be an extremely valuable learning process. It can even be transformational. Developing a strategy and then following the plan is just another 20th century “change management” process. It is backward looking, based on a plan that is outdated the moment it is published. In the 21st century, the aim is not to manage change, but understand and embrace change. It’s shifting to an acceptance of life in perpetual Beta.

In the TechCrunch article, What if this is no accident?, Jon Evans looks at the current boom in software engineering jobs in comparison to the lack of jobs elsewhere. He wonders if this is how the new economy will look for a while.

It’s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, in which a small minority reaps most of the benefits of technology that destroys more jobs than it creates. As my friend Simon Law says, “First we automated menial jobs, now we’re automating middle-class jobs. Unfortunately, we still demand that people have a job soon after becoming adults. This trend is going to be a big problem…”

I’ve been saying for a while that simple and merely complicated work will continue to get automated and outsourced (read this post if you don’t believe it or look at this example of legal work getting automated). To keep a job in the creative economy (with core skills of Initiative, Creativity & Passion) one  must become an indispensable linchpin in the organization.

I think more opportunities are being created than destroyed, but our institutions and our cultural mindset still are not ready for this change. Politicians continue to think in terms of jobs. Universities still have job fairs, hinting that such a thing as a career will exist in a hyper-networked world. Parents push their children into undergraduate programs that cost more than graduates can ever repay. Laws are structured so that corporations create wealth in return for indentured servitude, where employees own none of the intellectual property they generate. In such an environment, why would workers try to innovate? The indicators that the underlying nature of work and wealth generation have changed are everywhere.

I’ve questioned the rationale of continuing practices such as:

• Mass training with standard performance objectives for everyone. What two people really have the same job any more?
• Limited  options for part-time work at the control of the worker.
• Standard HR policies that drain the initiative out of people.
• Banning access to online social networks at work and disconnecting workers from their social safety nets and innovation sources.

The future should be networked, writes Jeremy Rifkin in The Third Industrial Revolution. He sees the next industrial age, one bridging industrialism to continental collaboration as the most feasible post-carbon future. This era of networked energy will be based on 5 pillars, all essential for a successful transition:

1. shift to renewable energy
2. shift buildings to become local power plants
3. deploy energy stores locally, especially hydrogen
4. use the Internet to create a smart energy-sharing grid
5. shift transportation to plug-in & fuel cell power

Europe is leading the way and Rifkin spends a good part of the book setting up a narrative and understanding for an American audience. There’s lots here on how power is created, controlled and regulated. I was most interested in the way Rifkin connects so many perspectives together. The first part talks about energy but the book continues with sections on economics, politics and education. There is a good review of how many of our current institutions were forged at the beginning of the second industrial revolution, around 1890 – e.g. corporations, schools, utilities.

He discusses how bureaucracies are an outdated form of control. This resonated with me after my presentation on social media to federal assistant deputy ministers only a few weeks ago:

Still, systemic thinking is a difficult task in a bureaucratic environment where there is a strong drive to hold on to turf and protect domains. This is what leads to what I call the DG (director general) abyss – the process by which big-picture ideas, agreed to at the ministerial level and even higher at the head-of-state level, lose their heft and become increasingly smaller and more narrow in vision and scope as they descend down into the departments and agencies, finally ending up as a shadow of their former selves, languishing in the minutia of countless reports, studies and evaluations, whose purposes become increasingly obtuse, even to those tasked with managing them.

The institutions we created to mirror the dominant energy producer of the 20th century, big oil, are a large part of the problem:

The oil age from its onset has been characterized by gigantism and centralization. That’s because harnessing oil and other elite fossil fuels requires large amounts of capital and favors vertical economies of scale, which necessitates a top-down command and control structure. The oil business is one of the largest industries in the world. It’s also the most costly enterprise for collecting, processing and distributing energy ever conceived by humankind.

As the Internet economy has shifted to a distributed and collaborative model, so too must the energy economy. It will be a battle between centralized and distributed energy and how easy it will be for localities to participate and profit. Rifkin provides great detail on how this can be done by 2050 and his model has already been adopted by the European Union while the US and Canada lag behind. The younger generation already understand this model, as the President of Spain noted, “For a younger generation growing up on the Internet and comfortable interacting in social media, the hierarchically organized flow of authority and power from the top down is old school.”

Rifkin includes a good analysis of the education system and its issues, with a section entitled, The Biosphere becomes the Learning Environment. Though I found the first part a bit slow going I really enjoyed the second half and the synthesis it provides on much of my professional work. Near the end, Rifkin summarizes the fundamental communications shifts we’ve experienced, echoing Marshall McLuhan:

All forager-hunter societies were oral cultures, steeped in mythological consciousness. The great hydraulic agricultural civilizations were organized around writing and gave rise to theological consciousness. Print technology became the communication medium to organize the myriad activities of the coal- and steam-powered first Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago. Print communication also led to a transformation from theological to ideological consciousness during the Enlightenment. In the 20th century, electronic communications became the command and control mechanism to manage a second industrial revolution, based on the oil economy and the automobile. Electronic communication spawned a new psychological consciousness.

Today we are on the verge of another seismic shift. Distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a third industrial revolution. In the 21st century, hundreds of millions of people will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on-site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen, and share electricity with one other across continental grids that act much like the Internet. The open-source sharing of energy will give rise to collaborative energy spaces, not unlike the collaborative social spaces on the Internet.

The third industrial revolution paves the way for biosphere consciousness.

The Dachis Group’s latest XPLANATiON of the attributes of a socially optimized business is a pretty good answer to the question, “What is social business?”

Looking just at the key differences in the info-graphic, I’d like to dig into “Why” these differences are necessary:

Greater acceptance of risks & failures: This is how complex problems are addressed, and all businesses are dealing with more complexity. As I mentioned in leadership emerges from network culture, a Probe-Sense-Respond approach is necessary. Dave Snowden underlines the fact that over half of your probes will fail and hence the need to have a culture where failure is an option. It’s what Dave calls “safe-fail”: “We conduct safe-fail experiments. We don’t do fail-safe design. If an experiment succeeds, we amplify it. If an experiment fails, we dampen it.” Failure is not just an option, it’s a common occurrence.

Clear guidelines allow everyone to speak openly on behalf of the company. That’s because hyperlinks have subverted hierarchy. Everyone is connected. In hierarchical organizations, workers are more connected when they go home than when they’re at work.  the inside. This is a sure sign of the obsolescence of many management control systems.  The Internet has changed everything.

Democratization of information: User-generated content is ubiquitous and much of it is very useful. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity will change traditional power structures, though the full effects of this are not yet visible.

Leaders and experts can easily emerge: It takes different leadership, or leadership for networks, to do the important work in complex work environments, which is to increase collaboration and support social learning in the workplace. If the main point of the internet is to remove “barriers to socializing”, then shouldn’t leadership in a networked, social business strive for a similar objective?

Team-oriented, much flatter, exists beyond the org chart: This is another result of a networked society but I’m not sure if team is the best term for social business and I would use collaboration instead. This is the objective of Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

Greater business visibility, info flows vertically and horizontally: There are emerging patterns and dynamics related to interconnected people and interlinked information flows, which are bypassing established traditional structures and services. It’s part of wired work.

Comfortable with outward facing communication: Most of the action in business is moving to the edge and a greater percentage of the workforce will be customer-facing.

Note: this post is in early Beta.

Is leadership an emergent property of people working together (social capital) or is it something delivered, in a top-down fashion by an individual? I was asked about this recently, and immediately thought about the Apache nation that had only situational leaders, Nantans, who were in charge as long as warriors were willing to follow them. Because of this decentralization, they were able to fight the Spanish for a long time, regrouping as necessary, ultimately destroyed by a “benevolent” United States.

Looking at my outboard brain (my blog) I’ve reviewed some thoughts on leadership, which has not really been my focus, but is perhaps more of an emergent property after almost eight years. These are some of the ideas that still resonate with me.

Let me begin with this quote from Peter Levesque, which I picked up in 2004, showing how digital  interconnectedness may change our view leadership:

I suggest that the leaders will be found among the aggressively intelligent citizenry, liberated from many tasks and obligations by technology freely shared; using data, information and knowledge acquired from open source databases, produced from the multiples of billions of dollars of public money invested through research councils, universities, social agencies, and public institutions.

But an aggressively intelligent citizenry needs access to its own ideas. This in an ongoing battle with the established powers. Open information and access to our common knowledge assets seems to be a required part of any new leadership model.

Leaders may be required in hierarchies but are they necessary in wirearchies? The great work of our time may be to design, build and test new organizational models that reflect our democratic values and can function in an interconnected world. Leadership today may be more of an architectural task, or one of setting up the right systems.

We’re now at the stage where we have some new ideas for work (wirearchy, natural enterprises, workplace democracy) and some new technologies (social, nano-bio-techno-cogno). The next step in this evolution is for a new organizational model and that conversation has already started. The ideology will come later.

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

Does ridiculously-easy group forming mean that leadership can now emerge when people get together for collective action? What kind of leadership is there in mass, decentralized, social movements, like the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street movements?

Warren Bennis wrote that hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust. With open systems, trust emerges.

Knowledge workers, collaborate, you have nothing to lose but your managers. This is a statement I made a bit in jest on Twitter, but the truth behind it is that management is less useful to the interconnected, professional, concept worker. With fewer managers and hyperlinks subverting hierarchy, will a different breed of leadership emerge?

It takes different leadership, or leadership for networks, to do the important work in complex work environments, which, in my opinion, is to increase collaboration and support social learning in the workplace.

I haven’t really answered my own question whether leadership is an emergent property of net work, but I have little doubt that we need different kinds of leadership (more open, transparent & diverse) and people with these attributes may emerge as their peers allow them to lead; for the time being.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Robles at Innotribe and his recent post on It is Time to Evolve, got me thinking and making some connections. Dan starts with the big picture:

How the world really works

The Internet and social media have shifted the factors of production away from land, labor, and capital to a higher order of human organization.  This is what we need to be talking about.  People today produce things with knowledge – social, creative, and intellectual knowledge.  These are the factors of production for that 99% of the value that exists on Earth.

Dan goes on to say:

How can we expect to create any type of fair and rational economy from a bunch of invisible stuff milling around the parks?  There is no escape from Market Capitalism and no path to Social Capitalism without a Knowledge Inventory, period.

The knowledge inventory link above takes you to a video which discusses the three factors of production in social capitalism:

1. Intellectual Capital (ability to collect, retain & share information
2. Social Capital (ability  of people to work together)
3. Creative Capital (ability  to combine diverse ideas)

Generally, Mavens exhibit the greatest intellectual capital; Connectors have the most diverse (creative) networks and Salespeople get things done (action). I wonder if this metaphor/model would help to get social capitalism “across the chasm”. Identify sufficient Mavens, Connectors & Salespeople (you need all three) and then build up to the 10% critical mass necessary to effectively spread ideas:

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”