I’m delighted I’ve finally been able to hear and meet Jon Husband of wirearchy.com.  Jon is one of the few, very few, people working with organizations to help them evolve their organization structures to support the collaborative technologies and resulting work behaviours.  In most organizations there is this horrible disconnect between the hoopla about “working collaboratively” with “social networking tools” and the management practices, reporting relationships and performance expectations. As Husband says, the fundamentals about how we design work (& I add here, how organizations design themselves) hasn’t changed in 50 years. 50 years. Shesh. Organizations can talk the talk about “collaboration”, but to effectively implement collaborative tools and work behaviours they have to walk the walk of new organization structures, management practices and employment expectations and compensation.The hierarchical structure has been based on the belief that knowledge is arranged vertically. But this is no longer the case — now knowledge flows horizontally and chaotically (he didn’t use that term, but I think that’s an apt term — chaos isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all — out of chaos can come new thinking.)

Ok, so what does this mean for organizations? Well, it means that they will work “ok” for the time being, but until this issue is really addressed, the true benefits of all these technologies and people working collaboratively will not be realized. Husband says he’s bored with this. Me too. He also says that this issue will be addressed during the next ten years. I agree.

Continue reading So what happens when the organization structures don’t match the collaborative practices?