Disclaimer: I work in Google's Policy Team, developing multistakeholder cooperations for internet governance & policy themes, hence I want to point out that all the opinions and ruminations on this blog are mine, not Google's.


Monday, July 25, 2011

Harnessing the complexity perspective to better understand internetworked companies


Especially in turbulent and tempestuous times like now everybody has a natural tendency to revert to traditional and conservative practices, because even though they are not as progressiv or "cool", they have proven their worth. Especially many successful internetworked companies have undergone several evolutionary phases, and while some companies managed to maintain a decisively progressive and unconventional culture, with stunning growth complexity has grown to a point that is intimidating not only for new employees but also for veteran knowledge workers who observe that these organisations' startup approach needs to evolve so it can scale to global operations. 
In the field of complexity sciences researchers have found patterns and insights that can help individual workers, teams and organisations as a whole to frame and harness heterogeneity and decentralization. Wisdom of the crowds, peer-production, community driven development, crowdsourcing are just some phenomena that can be explained and trained for using the complexity perspective.

Taking this new perspective will not only change the way how you see things but also what you see.

Also, if you want a much more elaborate perspective on how the complexity perspective can be applied to internet policy making i highly recommend Rick Whitt's thinking:

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