Foros del IV Congreso de la Cibersociedad

The organizers of CyberSociety 2009 asked me to post my “Permanently Beta” paper (co-authored with Gina Neff), and to make some additional comments.  That paper was written some years ago; but the ideas remain compelling to me – so much so that they were the launching point for the concluding chapter (“Reprise”)  of my recent book, The Sense of Dissonance.  The themes of the book concern innovation, which I think about as a peculiar form of search – an open-ended process when we don’t know what we’re looking for but will recognize when we find it.  This concluding section steps out from my ethnographic studies of specific organizational settings to reflect on the larger issues that arise when permanently beta features are generalized to a permanently beta society.

The dissonance is incorporated in all processes and everyday discourses. In organizations, the same technology that was the presupposed of freedom, today it controls, excludes and isolates the human. In the organizational hightech, the work was in the journey to home or to business. It would be predicted?

La disonancia se incorpora en todos los procesos y los discursos. En las organizaciones, la misma tecnología que una vez fue supuesto de la libertad, hoy controla, excluye y aísla al hombre. En el mundo de la organización tecnologica, el trabajo está en el camino de la casa o del negocio. Sería previsible?

La disonancia es un arma de doble filo. Todo tiene sus pros y sus contras. En materia de educación no conviene inclinarse demasiado hacia ninguno de los polos, en mi opinión es importante saber mantener el equilibrio. Ahí radica la dificultad y el éxito de los proyectos emprendidos.

Renato dijo:

The dissonance is incorporated in all processes and everyday discourses. In organizations, the same technology that was the presupposed of freedom, today it controls, excludes and isolates the human. In the organizational hightech, the work was in the journey to home or to business. It would be predicted?



La disonancia se incorpora en todos los procesos y los discursos. En las organizaciones, la misma tecnología que una vez fue supuesto de la libertad, hoy controla, excluye y aísla al hombre. En el mundo de la organización tecnologica, el trabajo está en el camino de la casa o del negocio. Sería previsible?

The relationship between the level of diversity of an organization and its ability to tackle higher complexity landscapes is a very important insight of David Stark works.

As it seems, the higher the uncertainty of the environment where an organization has to operate the more advantage it gets from being diverse. That is, to give response, to anticipate and to adapt to a wider range of possibilities. Not only this, probably it is also able to generate a wider and more diverse range of new responses.

This has implications both for the inner structure of the organization as well as its own definition. Gaining fluidity in innter structure and permeability at its boundaries gives the organization access to a wider repertoire of information and knowledge that can be combined in more creative ways than in other types of organizations.

This reminds me in part of some insights by Michel Bauwens when discussing about the relative advantages of companies that also are able to manage other permeable forms to access new information, knowledge, ideas, and processses because they co-operate with open networks of cooperation and innovation. These networks are managed with different types of agreements of the level of access to and distribution of co-created knowledge (open source, peer to peer, etc.). Bauwens remarked that companies that are able to "open themselves" have a strong advantage in front of other that stick to closed modes of operation.

Some say that this advantage also is true for other types of organizations, not just for companies that operate in the market: schools, universities, etc.

My question is if this is true, than how can we start this type of transformation in organizations? How is it possible to morph a company, an organization from closed modes to open modes? From uniformity to diversity? From "consonance" to dissonance? What are the personal values, attitudes, skills that have to be changed or acquired for all the people involved in the process? Do you know of specific illustrative cases of such change processess?


My feeling is that there are deep aspects operating here at personal and group level that are not easy to steer successfully.

I would say it is a pressing need for many organizations to get to know how to pilot this type of change. And that the abilities that are needed for individuals are difficult to acquire in current learning environments. How can we identify the appropriate set of personal skills, cultivate them, and promote them? For example, I guess that the people that can live and prosper in dissonant environments have a core set of attitudes and skills that let them not only survive in uncertainty but to embrace uncertainty, enjoy it and make the most of it. They can also deal easily with ambiguity and lack of control. This seems to be very far away from current teaching, training and educational environments, for example. What do we need to attain a critical mass of people endowed with this attitudes and abilities?.

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La relación entre el nivel de diversidad de una organización y su capacidad para hacer frente a paisajes de mayor complejidad es una visión muy importante de los trabajos de David Stark.

Según parece, cuanto mayor es la incertidumbre del entorno en el que una organización tiene que operar más veantaja obtiene de ser más diverso. Esto es. más capaciad de dar respuestas, de anticiparse y de adaptarse a una gama más amplia de posibilidades.
Esto tiene implicaciones tanto para la estructura interna de la organización, como para su propia definición, de sus límites como organización. Conseguir la fluidez en la estructura interna y la permeabilidad de sus fronteras da a la organización acceso a un repertorio más amplio de información y conocimientos que se pueden combinar de una manera más creativa que en otros tipos de organizaciones.

Esto me recuerda, en parte, algunas ideas de Michel Bauwens al discutir sobre las ventajas relativas de las empresas que también son capaces de gestionar otras entidades permeables al acceso a la información, conocimientos, ideas y processos porque cooperan con redes abiertas de cooperación e innovación. Estas redes se gestionan mediante diferentes tipos de acuerdos respeto al nivel de acceso y distribución del conocimiento que co-crean (de código abierto, entre pares, etc.) Bauwens señaló que las empresas que son capaces de "abrirse" tienen una gran ventaja frente a otras que se mantienen en modos cerrados de funcionamiento.

Algunos dicen que la ventaja que se obtiene con esta organización también es valida para otros tipos de organizaciones, no sólo para las empresas que operan en el mercado: escuelas, universidades, etc

Mi pregunta es si esto es cierto, ¿cómo podemos iniciar este tipo de transformación en las organizaciones? ¿Cómo es posible transformarse de una empresa, una organización cerrada a otra abierta? De la uniformidad a la diversidad? De "consonancia" a disonancia? ¿Cuáles son los valores personales, actitudes, habilidades que tienen cambiar o que deben adquirir todas las personas involucradas en el proceso? ¿Sabéis de casos que ilustran estos procesos de cambio?


Mi sensación es que hay aspectos de fondo aquí que actúan a nivel personal y de grupo que no son fáciles de dirigir con éxito.

Yo diría que es una necesidad apremiante para muchas organizaciones llegar a saber cómo poner en marcha este tipo de cambios. Y que las habilidades que se necesitan para los individuos son difíciles de adquirir en los actuales entornos de aprendizaje.

¿Cómo podemos identificar el conjunto adecuado de habilidades personales y cultivarlas y promoverlas? Por ejemplo, creo que la gente que puede vivir y prosperar en ambientes disonantes tiene un conjunto básico de actitudes y habilidades que les permiten no sólo sobrevivir en la incertidumbre, sino a aceptarla la incertidumbre, disfrutarla y sacar el máximo provecho de ella. También pueden tratar fácilmente con la ambigüedad y la falta de control. Esto parece estar muy lejos de lo que se cultiva y aprende en los entornos educativos actuales, por ejemplo. ¿Qué necesitamos para alcanzar una masa crítica de personas dotadas de esta actitud y habilidades?.

Sabéis de estudios que hayan trabajado el perfil personal a fondo en este tipo de organizaciones?

Creéis que la dinámica de mayor complejidad, mayor incertidumbre sólo es debida a la irrupción del ?modo de producción de internet? en la economía y la sociedad?

Ramon's comments go directly to the core issues of the organization of dissonance. As he notes, the greater the uncertainty facing the organization, the more it is that diversity within the organization will make it possible to develop successful strategies.

Imagine an organization that finds the ?one best way? to be adapted to its environment. To be allocatively efficient, it puts all its resources in this form. It finds the perfect fit to its environment. That might be viable where there is little or no uncertainty. But what happens when the environment changes? Perfectly adapted, it lacks the requisite diversity (a kind of organizational gene pool) to generate new forms in response to the changed environment.

Imagine now an organization that is willing to sacrifice some allocative efficiency because it sees that adaptation is less important than adaptability. It will be open to competing principles (some of which are decidedly not the ?one best way?) because this will provide more variety for recombination.

This goes directly to what it means for an organization to be ?open? ? a key point in Ramon?s comments. In my view openness is not just about being open to the environment; perhaps even more importantly it means being open to diverse values and performance criteria inside the organization itself. And, if they are truly different, than there will be disagreement. Hence not simply diversity but dissonance.

Bill Gates has recently promoted the notion of a ?frictionless capitalism.? But even if it were other than a myth, it would not be a good idea because it would mark the end of innovation. Friction can be productive when it helps us to be reflective about what we have taken for granted. Innovation occurs when generative friction stimulates reflexivity to recognize new recombinations.

Ramon asks about the attributes, the personality structures, the working styles of the members of the dissonant organization. He suggests one important feature: tolerance of ambiguity. To this I would add another: dissonance must be principled and not debased to petty, personal rivalries.

Finally, Ramon asks the really tough question: How do organizations move from closed to open, from consonance to dissonance? I?d like to give this more thought, perhaps especially after more participants join the discussion.