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This notion that somehow you can increase the network productivity, which is the sum of personal productivities, after all the network alone does not produce anything – it is the persons that do the work, while decreasing the personal productivities is a bit illogical.
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I guess that depends if you think the network productivity *is* merely the sum of the individual productivity.
Of course “productivity” is a pretty nebulous term anyway. Might be interesting to try to measure it, but you’re likely to measure different things in the collective and the individual case.
What you can use as intuition drivers are things like :
– division of labour, clearly co-operating specialists can sometimes outperform multiple generalists.
– iterated prisoner’s dilemma, agents co-operating in the long-term outperform individualist defectors trying to maximize short term score.
– “surgeon” model of high-ability, highly empowered specialist getting support from a team of people focussed on solving specific problems.
Now, what’s *really* the intuition behind Boyd or anyone else looking to bring informal social tools into the enterprise is that the *emergent* system structure and division of labour that comes about from people linking up with others through these tools, will be more effective than some kind of of structure that was imposed by the enterprise itself.
I think that’s quite likely.
Here are some reasons for this :
– the informal network can include people from *outside* the particular enterprise (ie. call on resources which the official management has no access too)
– the informal network is more fluid; can start paying attention to or drop attention to people without the institutional requirements of either a) managers agreeing to share resources, or b) hiring appropriate resources. I “hire” a consultant by DMing a question to her or checking her blog one afternoon.
– the informal network is free-er of a kind of office politics where managers use there resources for personal advantage within the organization.
– the informal network is less likely to be hijacked by “marketing” (ie. less like that you’ll hire consultants from IBM because they’re famous and advertises a lot)
However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t frictions – I still pay attention to people I like even when they’ve stopped being useful to me. There’s still politics (look at all the flame-wars and feuds in the blogosphere). Still naive choices (people might follow Scoble simply because he’s famous and “advertises” a lot). There’s even a problem of lack of focus : I’ll end up thinking about and solving problems that are too general and not the specific ones I’m hired to think about.
One reason I’m using “neo-fordian” is that Ford and Taylor are famous for introducing a far more rigorous formal measurement of productivity. Perhaps the most “obnoxious” thing we can imagine from neo-fordism is a failed attempt to measure productivity that captures the *wrong* thing, a measurement that denies us the pleasure of being social while actually buying us no real effectiveness.
That’s what we’d all have a revulsion against.
If the neo-fordists come up with *real* productivity measurements that are plausible … then it’s down to a straight fight / negotiation (individual or collective) about how much of our sociality are we willing to give up to concentrate on the employer’s task.
It should be a high-price because the social gives *us* individual benefits that go beyond our role with our employer.
In fact, in economic terms you can argue that, as more social tools appear and produce more value, the “opportunity cost” to us individuals of being denied access to our social cloud increases.
For this reason, we’ll want to sell “our focus” more dearly. No wonder the employers hate this stuff.
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When I can concentrate on one task my personal productivity increases. Division of labour increases personal productivity of the team members. The team helps the individuals – but the team does not do the work – the work is still done by the individuals. And this is something well analysed by fordism or taylorism – how can you argument that this is some new phenomenon when it is in fact the base of the industrial production?
The same thing is in all other of your examples – the individual team members have their individual productivity increased by persuing some team process.
And it also happens with the interruptions in the social cloud – when I help someone who interrupted my work I help that person not the whole team – and my help increases that persons individual productivity. My productivity then decreases – but when I am stuck I can also call someone and get help that improves my productivity. -
Measuring “productivity” implies that both inputs and outputs are fungible commodities.
As long as the human is performing the work of a stupid machine, then no learning/thinking is necessary, having a “whole person” involved is just a distraction from chunking out widgets.
But this seems to apply to a shrinking portion of the work world.
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this is why there are different kinds of minds, different levels of consciousness … not everybody can do everything ..
but the collective can do it all … hence the need for conncetion and communication, … coordination happens by itself, if it is everybody all at once everywhere
and zby, there really is no individual person, it is a construct the mind and ego makes to figure out how to drive the body, but if you let that go on automatic pilot, all the rules start to change, and for the better.
and phil jones, nice thinking, and i would ad one pov, that networks are really simply humans functioning from a more subtle awareness, exchanging the mpact of individuality for the higher order funtioning of group consciousness
when that gets embraced, organizations and productivity will really take off…
enjoy, gregory lent
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