There are some major changes underway today that will shape the future world and, consequently, how individuals and companies are going to thrive. The nature of these changes revolves around the changing relationship between the individual and the ‘organization’. It has been hypothesized that there was an evolutionary benefit for humankind in the hierarchical organization. Over that past couple thousand years, this tendency to hierarchical organization has manifested itself in three primary organizational types, religion, government and, more recently, the corporation.

What is happening today is that the need for hierarchical organization, to provide security, to provide order, to provide resources, etc., is diminishing and, with this diminishing, the relationship of individuals to organizations is changing with the individual becoming more powerful, independent and autonomous with respect to the organizations that the individual is a part of, either voluntarily or involuntarily. This change in relationship and power structure can be called the era of agency as individuals act more as independent agents who choose their relationships and their organizations.

As a thought experiment, consider the ultimate expression of all individuals becoming totally autonomous – in other words, there are no more governments, religions, corporations or any other coerced hierarchical group. How would things get done – especially large scale things like building skyscrapers, flying airplanes, paving roadways, creating telecommunications and energy networks etc. In this case, individuals would need to create ad-hoc communities that had the desire, skills and resources to accomplish the desired outcome. Individuals could choose to join these communities, contribute, stay or leave, etc. of their own will.

This new world would require a number of things to become real. It would require would take information, organization, tools etc. …
When one looks at these requirements, one realizes that all of these things are in the process of happening today! The individual is becoming more and more capable, of being their own resource hub. They are more capable of doing more significant and larger things on their own or with just a few others. The raison-de-etre of massive, hierarchical organizations has been the ability to marshal resources to do big things. Without the massive organization, big things couldn’t happen. This is changing, and changing rapidly.

In the era of agency, the individual agent is becoming more powerful than the organization. The individual is becoming more and more capable of accomplishing bigger and bigger things and, consequently, of choosing which things they will do. This is what is behind all of the recent observations of the individual becoming the source, rather than the sink, of power, content, creativity etc. (e.g. look at Times 2006 Person of the year!).

Technology and culture are enabling smaller and smaller units of transformation or change agents. Smaller units are getting more capable of doing significant things. It is no longer necessary to marshal huge organizational resources to get big things done. The enablers of this transformation are technology. Specifically:

• Connection
• Automation – includes software and hardware automation
• Language (human to human, human to machine, machine to machine) including interfaces, standards, software

Agency is occurring on both the production and the consumption sides. This, in turn, is driving the creation of networks – the ways agents interact. In the Keystone advantage, Shapiro and Varian state
“ There is a central difference between the old and the new economies. The old industrial economy was driven by economies of scale, the new information economy is driven by the economies of networks.”
In this quote, they mention the ‘information economy’. Others have called this new economy the experience economy or the creative economy. I think that all of these labels miss the boat on what is truly the underlying force that is causing these transformations. The underlying causal transformation is the change in the individuals relationship with the organization that is enabled but, not just information, but automation and language.

Thinks about a consumer products company in the new world. Instead of a monolithic organization that researches their marketplace to see what new soup people would like to buy, this new company would be a platform for soup creation with the most popular soups being rated by the soup creators and consumers themselves. The production and fulfillment of soup requests would be a virtual network that would contain highly automated facilities but very few humans in the loop and those that are involved would be their for economic gain.

Similarly for virtually all of the things that we buy today, a similar network of production, consumption and creation (of new things) can be imagined. In examining this possible world, it is surprising to realize that all of the technology things necessary to realize this (not the human things) are essentially present today.
There will be a tipping point – the point at which the exponentially accelerating pace of this transformation becomes clear.

What about the issue of integration (evolution?)? More and more integration is occurring. More and more internal complexity. How is this happening? We are learning to ‘encapsulate’ complexity. This means two things. First, we are now not confusing complexity with interface. Complex internals both require and enable simple and human interfaces. This is design!

Second, it is possible, with the new languages, to contain complexity at different levels of granularity. Object oriented programming was the start of this. This has evolved into language-based ‘containers’ that allow the description of what rather than how.