A team of people consists of between 3 and 30 members.
A village consists of between 30 and 300 people.
A township contains around 300 to 3000.
A city/state contains something like 3000 to 300,000.
A Nation can have between 300,000 to 300,000,000.
The Google web-page count is over 1,000,000,000.000
The world has 6,783,421,727 people.
Most of us mere mortals find it hard to relate effectively to more than 300 people.
We are fundamentally village people.
We carry a village of people around in our heads, in our phone directories and our address books.
A township is a collection of villages.
A city/state is a collection of villages.
A Nation is a collection of villages.
The world is a collection of villages, 22,611,405 of them to be exact.
Organisations are also collections of villages.
The largest Pharma Organisation, ( by revenue ) has 137,127 employees.
That’s 457 villages.
How do they all work together?
Divided We Fall?
Well traditionally we break large organisations up into manageable bits.
We call them Sections, or Divisions, Departments, Sectors, Precincts and Partitions.
The Management Village, the Administration Village, the Marketing Village, and so on.
And then we expect them all to fit seamlessly together to produce a combined effort that is greater than the sum of the parts.
So what could hold an organisation of that size together? What creates the coherence, the cohesion, the intimacy, the culture and the identity of the village.
Some think it’s a sense of Shared Vision.
Others say it’s Shared Values.
Many claim that Extraordinary Charismatic Leadership is required, there are about as many theories as there are villages.
Academics, Management Scientists, Consultants and Bloggers, have all provided the answer.
To name but a few:
- Shared Vision - Dr Andrew O’Brien
- Shared Values - Badovick and Beatty
- Barriers vs Boundaries - Tony Richardson
- Differentiation-Integration Theory - Lawrence and Lorsch
- Shared sense of Propose – Deming
- Systems Thinking – Senge
- Function/Parts Redundancy – Emery and Trist
The list is endless.
Do you have the answer?
The reality is that large organizations don’t appear to work very well. They seem somehow to manage to complicate how to manage effectively, and they keep making terrible costly mistakes.
But there may be a way of thinking about the organisation of large systems that works really well.
It’s a way of thinking that’s happening right now, right under our noses.
It’s called Social Media, and it is breathtakingly simple.
It capitalises on the power of Reed’s Law, which recognises the potential value of networks increases by 2 to the power of 90 (Yes Ninety!) every time the network grows by a factor of ten. That’s a big number.
Social Media allows huge numbers of people to work together in ways that it is impossible to imagine.
It gives people identity and localisation, security and trust, allows full participation and builds effective relationships.
Sounds too good to be true?
Those organisations that are able to get their thinking around the dimensions of Social Media and can adapt their business models to capitalise on those dimensions, Can and Will thrive.
Those that can’t May or Will die.
Small numbers of big organizations will thrive
Big numbers of large organizations will pass into oblivion.
Goodbye General Motors.
(Tomorrow’s Blog: What’s Your Story?)
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