The G-G combo has long been key to my thinking about organization 2.0. I don’t quite agree with the way you’ve characterized those terms, but then, who can really translate opaque German sociologists into English easily? My own shorthand way of remembering which is which is to think of gemainschaft as ‘organizational left brain’ and ‘gesselschaft’ as organizational right brain. Of course, all the flaws of the left/right dichotomy are inherited, but this is metaphoric, not literal.

Within this model, I don’t think you should attempt to shove one into the other. They are in yin-yang relation of dynamic tension. The dichotomy is unstable, but useful, and each contains the seed of the other, but you should NOT attempt to unify them. Instead you should maintain that dynamic tension and make it the source of creative-destructive innovation in your company/ecosystem.

If you don’t like abstractions, the practical implication is that you should let social media in the enterprise remain, to a certain extent, an untamed and ungoverned wild-west around a core of sensible enterprise “tamed” defaults. The boundary between the two should be allowed to be both porous and dynamics, organically expanding or shrinking over time, growing less or more permeable as the situation demands.

This model is anathema to risk averse corporations of course, but is one of the 3-4 models that will work going forward.

Teaser: this is one of the ideas in a book idea I am developing, based on some work we’ve done at Xerox that I recently presented at a conference. If anybody would like to know more, get in touch via my blog .

By the way, I recommend to the entire Wikinomics/New Paradigm team that you read Gareth Morgan’s “Images of Organization” very carefully, if you haven’t already done so. If you have, reread in light of Wikinomics A few of the recent posts on this blog have seemed a little on the ‘reinventing the wheel’ side…you guys are rediscovering some ideas from the wikinomics perspective that have been around in more fundamental forms for quite a while…Clockspeed by Charles Fine is another book that needs to be on your bookshelves, given your apparent mission.

Thanks Venkat.

Dr. Fine has done some work with us in the past.

Great guy. Brilliant thinker.

Thanks for the insightful comments (as always) Venkat. I admit to a weakness in translating German sociologists . I do like the left brain / right brain approach.

I will have to ponder the ying – yang notion a little bit more… I see where you’re going with it, and I think I like it, but I’m not sure I’m ready to give up on the idea “one can be shoved into the other” in some sense.

Sounds like I should be an interesting book – and now let me clear up another oversight and add you to our blogroll!

The book project, tentatively titled “The Shadowlake Doctrine” (named after the project I led last year to help catalyze Xerox onto an enterprise 2.0 trajectory) is basically two parts: a doctrinal part, in the form of a set of organizational design principles (of which this wild-west/sensible defaults is one candidate in my notes) and a speculative capability-maturity model (CMM), based on what we learned. Speculative because no company today has gone to the end of the scale I am making up. The design principles are consistent with, but not the same as, the ones in Wikinomics (I go deep into a single company/ecosystem view rather than ranging broadly across the whole economy). A preliminary view of the material is in this presentation I gave last week at the IRI Annual meeting, on the theme of ‘Macrotrends’. The PPT is not very comprehensible without the voice track, since I tend to use very compact, almost Lessig-like slides these days, but the idea should be roughly clear. The recorded version is available for a fee from IRI. I basically talk to the material around a set of what-if capability maturity possible storylines.I’ll eventually create a YouTube version if I actually can clear the bandwidth to pursue this. The slides don’t have the CMM part, which I am still refining for our internal use first.

Right now, I am evaluating options for the right journal/magazine to publish a short article-length version of the material, and if that works out, I’ll consider the full book-length project. The candidate draft structure of THAT project is actually a comic book format, like Dan Pink’s recent ‘Johnny Bunko.’

The project is still in ‘if’ mode rather than ‘when’ since I have so many other darn things on my plate, but I am working it at the pace I can…suggestions based on these teaser notes welcome.

I believe I mentioned this tentative project to Don and Joan Bingham in an email almost a year ago…at the time it was just a twinkle in my eye. Still not clear whether the baby will grow up, but at least it is born now

Venkat

p.s. Thanks for the blogroll include. I spell it ribbonfarm (lower case, one word) though.

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