NEW FOUNDATIONS OF PLATFORM-ECOSYSTEM THINKING WHITEPAPER

The Paradoxes of Organising in a fast-changing world: Markets & Networks

Research Update #2

Simone Cicero
Stories of Platform Design
11 min readApr 6, 2020

--

This is the second in a series of bi-weekly research updates to keep everyone updated on our latest progress on the research plan for our 2020 Whitepaper. More than providing full-fledged analyses, the research updates are thought of as conversation starters and hints of where we’re currently focusing our energy. They’ll also make sure one can join the conversation at any point.

This research update is tracking some key insights (mainly) from the first round of interviews for the 2020 Whitepaper, which you can check out in the newly released Boundaryless Conversations Podcast!

by Simone Cicero, Stina Heikkilä and all the team at Boundaryless, the creators of Platform Design Toolkit.

We released the whitepaper on 20 November!

Download it directly from our webpage: platformdesigntoolkit.com/new-whitepaper

The (microscopic) elephant in the room

Though it was always our intention to explore how new risk factors — like the environmental, economic, geopolitical and technological — would impact the evolution of organizing in a rapidly changing, chaotic world we didn’t necessarily expect to be living the real-time of the covid-19 story. Our first round of interviews for our upcoming White Paper, and podcast series, with coronavirus lockdowns as the backdrop of the conversation, left us with the feeling that we could be easily living a ten-years-in-one acceleration.

The current pandemic will change the world in unprecedented ways, as historian Sean Munger eminently explains in this short video. Its global reach and the profound changes in the rules of economics, governance and more means there’s no going back, just faster forward. Industries and supply chains are going to change permanently and we’ll see knock-on effects on several markets like travel, real estate and even insurance as people change their work and living habits.

The situation triggers both deep anxiety and some degree of excitement when thinking about the effect that such changes in habits— or even more profoundly the awareness that massive instantaneous change is technically possible — may have on our chances to address the climate emergency and other imminent threats to humanity.

All our podcast guests of this first round — namely James Currier, Arthur Brock, Tomas Diez, John Robb, Ana Andjelic, Michel Bauwens, Bill Fischer and Stowe Boyd— had extremely valuable takes on how the pandemic changes the landscape of organizing and governance, revealing some of the sweet, and blind, spots of our emerging institutional landscape.

Below we’re trying to capture some key lines of thought on how this translates into changes in our perception of value. We explore the interplay between global and local, between brands, companies and their ecosystem, the governance of the chaotic transition, and much, much more.

A place to be and belong in a global-local world

With a third of the global population in lockdown, profound changes in value perception and salience are happening, and the covid-19 outbreak is, one hand, accelerating them, on the other, forcing people to step out of their normal routines and spend time re-thinking their relationship with other citizens, and fellow humans.

As old institutions grapple with responding to the crisis, the power of networks comes to the forefront. From the P2P lens of — for instance — Michel Bauwens and Tomas Diez, this means riding on the wave of knowledge sharing in the global, virtual space and producing at the local level, through increasingly democratized digital fabrication. A glance of the potential of such self-organizing communities has been given in real-time with makers worldwide coming up with new designs for protective masks and DIY ventilators made available in open source. The promises of a production reorganized locally are exciting though we can’t be naive in underestimating the importance of the interplay between the elements of the productive economy that will be re-localized (everybody is talking about re-shoring healthcare supply or pharmaceutical production capability) and the elements that will likely stay trans-national and global.

John Robb provided a potential framing in his interview: in order to build more resilient societies, local constituencies — and even households — will need to develop partially redundant infrastructures, so to be able to connect to the global systems “on their own terms”, with enough local productive capacity to endure shocks but without creating unbearable inefficiencies.

This leads us to rethink both the way society consumes as well as produces.

The decoupling of status from consumption was already going full steam before the crisis, as Ana Andjelic reminded us in our chat, Covid-19 just made brand-user empathy more important than ever. As we’re all connected globally in overlapped niches the changes in perception of value quickly become “contagious”, and users are able to influence large-scale change in the perception of a brand.

Users are increasingly capable, socially interconnected and this changes the relationship with organizations. Users are ever more involved in embodying the brand itself and collaborative platform based models have surged in the last decade. The years following the crisis of 2008 brought us the giants of the sharing and gig-economy — offering participative business models providing an opportunity for displaced workers — and it’s likely that this crisis will bring up new patterns of organizing where brands will learn to leverage on the entrepreneurial capabilities of a massive number of jobless citizens.

The challenge though will be much harder this time: there’s a growing disillusion with modernity in the west — according to Michel Bauwens in a conversation from an upcoming episode — and the entrepreneurial opportunities that will come up in the context of rebuilding a partially de-globalised society (with less fragile supply chains) will likely be not very glamorous. Indeed what will need to be reinvented is the primary services sectors needed to keep our economies functional in the face of increasing uncertainty: food security, energy, healthcare, education, and the likes.

A messy transition of co-existing structures

In this networked, global-local interplay there will be winners and losers, with simultaneous forces “fighting” to either establish themselves or cling onto existing positions of power and influence.

According to Currier, networks will eventually come through as key patterns in this messy transition because of their inherent ability to expose the math behind society (network effects) and to perfect itself. With algorithms and data making it possible for the aggregators to improve the fittest emerge in every professional market, with non-negligible challenges for institutions as they’ll be left with the need to care for those that are left behind.

Beyond markets, open collective intelligence networks are proving to be more apt than many traditional institutions in responding to the crisis: networks of scientists rapidly worked out new ways of testing and, with time, curing the coronavirus. Social media proved useful to anticipate the awareness of the massive drawbacks of the covid-19 outbreak in the west: information was flowing much faster in some corners of the internet than the traditional governance systems context.

When governments “fail”, there are thus reasons to believe we will see new forms of liquid institutions emerge. That’s why Arthur Brock also thinks that we shouldn’t invest much time in existing incumbents’ adaptation to change, but rather focus our energy on the new kinds of protocols and tools needed for decentralized governance, with Holochain and other decentralized technologies as obvious candidates.

But for as much as old institutions are in crisis, on the other hand, we are already seeing a revival of patriotism and handing over of more power to the nation-state. COVID-19 didn’t just provide an excuse to exert surveillance but also brought people clearer to their ancestral and tribal belonging. In this Q&A with Jordan Hall by Rebel Wisdom, Jordan talks about the dangers in this cultural turn, and the need to embed wisdom in the responses to pandemics to make sure that we create the right space for good solutions to take shape. In another episode, Daniel Schmachtenberger ponders on the changing landscape of geopolitics, with many states and international institutions scrambling to get their acts together, while China seems to gain increasing influence after the seemingly faltering of the early days of 2020.

So while we can see a falling trust in institutions on the one hand, there is also a call to strengthen nation states in order to maintain power balance on the global, geopolitical scale. In this context, the private sector and entrepreneurs — from Walmart to Facebook to Elon Musk — are also stepping in to boost the national response capacity and allow for international aid that helps keep the power balance in check as well. However, Daniel and other pinpoint that rapid sense-making is vital here in order to not let regulatory and data capture free due to hasty decisions.

Looking at these inter-playing and sometimes paradoxical forces, we wonder whether instead of a state transition towards “Game B” (a post industrial, and likely post mechanistic order) we will rather see layers of “old” and “new” overlap and coexist.

Borrowing David Ronfeld’s TIMN framework — Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks — brought up in John Robb’s interview, we are likely to see these elements interplay with one another. In this co-existence, while institutions may be inept to deal with chaos, open-source networks can serve this complementary role, due to the speed and agility mentioned above, somehow transcending the traditional forms of governance we’re currently used to, bringing in others that we can hardly imagine.

Bauwens also believes that rather than a totalitarian regime of either markets or commons, we need to find a combination of elements. Or more like: we need to find what kind of markets and institutions work for the commons — a question that currently remains unsolved. There are some promising examples, like the Bologna regulation for the care and regeneration of urban commons, where the dualism of nation-states and collaborative networks is laid out in terms of a Partner State as an institution able to create state-commons protocols for the communication and inter-work across the two layers.

Corporate states: are we heading towards a cyberpunk world?

In the messy transition, we are going to see organisational evolution play out at scale. Many direct to consumer (DTC) brands are already “getting it” in terms of the need to let outsiders in and actively engage in shaping the brand and its direction. We can also see pioneering companies like Haier group showing the way for how incumbents can become (market)places for learning at scale — the key game-changer for the future of organising. We discussed this with Ben Fischer and Stowe Boyd in the upcoming episodes on the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast.

According to Prof. Fischer, we should not underestimate the role of leadership in this context, which is one of the elements making the Chinese giant Haier stand out. In a similar vein, Boyd suggested that we need to seize the leverage that businesses have to offer in this transition. We may also consider what James Currier pointed out in his interview, about the need for not only charismatic leaders, but for CEOs — he made reference to Mark Zuckenberger — to mantle the role of the statesmen rather than simply that of a corporate figures.

How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables is a book that explores how a city might look, feel and function if the business models, practices and technologies of 38 different companies were applied to the running of cities. The book is co-edited by Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern, and Joe Shaw, and is available open-access. We’ve found it particularly interesting in the context of this research.

On the other hand, what tools do we have — as citizens and participants in this evolution — to hold leaders accountable and to make our own informed choices and steer the world towards a more desirable future? What’s the role of policymaking in this evolving context? Painting a less rosy picture of what it could mean to hand over some essential urban governance and infrastructure functions to private companies, we enjoyed reading How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables, where a selection of speculative fiction and essays by prominent scholars worldwide give an idea of why we may want to proceed with some caution on the “urban entrepreneurialism” track embodied by trends like smart cities.

Some ideas put forward by Arthur Brock and Michel Bauwens would put less power in the hands of single leaders or institutions and more in the role of distributed networks. For example, we may need to consider new accounting systems that make the impacts of all our decisions more radically transparent, as aspired in P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival and laid out by the Reporting 3.0 initiative. In such systems, which account for flows rather than static double-entries, players are incentivized and made accountable for acting within planetary boundaries, something which policymakers are notoriously unable to enforce. But how come that these kind of systems — as they exist— have not been able to gain increasing traction? In Currier’s view, structures like for example platform coops that could help to deal with the distribution of value in the platform economy need to have some real success stories headed by charismatic leaders in order to seriously take off.

Technology in society and the “learning imperative”

On a closing note, we may look into the future following one of John Robb’s insight — drawing on the teachings of Marshall McLuhan— that there’s no way we can get away with ignoring the question concerning technology as society literally “becomes a technological artifact”.

What does this mean for our organizations and organizing more in general?

What we see at this stage is that the question is — of course—closely linked with reviewing our epistemological frames and once again bringing us to the idea of cosmo-local subjectivities, like in Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics as cosmopolitics.

Like Tomas Diez points out in our conversation, platforms and technology cannot be seen as simple “software”. As a counterbalance of the overwhelming power of technology — that is effectively “rewiring us” — we may need to remain attached to cultural roots that are indigenous and embodied at the hyper-local scale, to develop our capacity to govern it.

Similarly, Arthur Brock points out that designing and developing new kinds of organizations will depend on new technological tools that may have a different affordance, and therefore lend themselves to a different type of organising as an expression of a conscious cultural reframing.

This evolving context will put pressure not only on our policymaking and sense-making but also on our ability to foster learning for both current and future generations. This indeed seems to be a recurring theme in many of the interviews, where there appears to be some level of agreement on the fact that while the world is going chaotic and non-linear, most education systems are lagging into a relic of the reductionist cultural frame and linear thinking.

If — as it seems — the future of work may be more about enterprising, organising, co-investing, and co-producing locally while at the same time interplaying with global communications networks, the new set of skills and psycho technologies needed is astoundingly different from that of the XXth Century. From collaborative decision making to designing cooperative co-investments, from digital fabrication to incentive design this gap is rapidly widening and a new approach to education, more likely to serve us in a decade of crisis, stress, and reinvention is desperately needed.

How we’re engaging with all of You: Community

We want the Whitepaper to reflect the rich collective intelligence of our wider community of thinkers, practitioners and explorers and therefore we are currently developing tools to make this interaction more straightforward.

Watch the first community sensemaking call here:

Before You Go!

As you may know, everything we do is released in Creative Commons for you to use. In case you’re getting value out of these reads and tools, we encourage you to click the 👏button and hold down to 20–50 claps as this will help us to get more exposure, and hopefully, work more on developing these tools.

Check out training opportunities: Online and Live Masterclasses and Certification Bootcamps.

Thanks for your support!

--

--

Building the ecosystemic society. Creator of Platform Design Toolkit. www.boundaryless.io CEO Thinkers50 Radar 2020