In the late C19th the blacksmith, tailor, leather tanner, coach builder, etc were all bit players at the centre of a cluster of activities that defined a complex social organisation. In the early C20th all that changed as Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor created the mass-production system which quickly became the prototype for organisations as we know them today.
In 2020 a new organisation forming. We can see it. We can touch it. We can profit from it. We can change our lives if we come to understand how it works. We can define it [see photo].
Ford and Taylor curated an organisation around the notion of "value adding". Each person in the organisation became a "value adding" robot. From the workshop floor, through brand identity, and into the Boardroom each participant is defined by a system that focuses on the notion of "value adding". This system has been remarkably successful in delivering material wealth, health services, educational proficiency, political tribalism, etc the past 100 years. Over that time we have come to accept that this system is based on human effort which is trained to collaborate. However. The sure and certain sign this "value adding" organisational system has come an end is the current fragmentation of the collective into warring tribes.
The new organisation forming in 2020 is based on "use value" not "value add". This is fact presents us with an unprecedented challenge because the loci of "use value" shifts around in both time [when] and space [location].
For example, by 2050 the "use value" of your organisation might be tasked to deliver edible food to visitors on an unmanned space platform within is cruising around the Earth in low orbit. The scope of the challenge here is instantly grasped when one considers that these 24 hours tourists will be travelling at about 17,000 miles per hour around a globe as it, in turn, moves from day to night and back again. One type of organisation that might best be able to deliver the food to these tourists one based on an integrated network of clusters. One cluster will be information based working through a cluster of onboard AI. Another cluster will be will the people who need to be fed who have a time-based set of needs. As you might suspect this new organisation must be completely different to the linear "value adding" one we have all come to reply upon throughout the C20th. It must be dramatically different because it must deal with instantaneous expressions of individual need not pent-up demand as signalled by collective wants. There will be no "value adding" capacity within this open system which must be self-organising in ways that can instantly address on demand needs for a set of humans while they glide through space at around 17,000 miles per hour.
The new organisation will be a network of clusters that light-up when there is a genuine purpose to be met. There will no capacity to store needs-based supply as was common in the old system where wants were treated as unfulfilled demand that could be met by access to the stock rooms. There will be no stock rooms because these clusters form and dissipate in accordance with need-based demand. I am not sure what the algorithms will be that can produce a meal in low-orbit space on demand. And I am not sure if the ingredients for each meal will be carried onboard by the visitor [and the waste taken back to Earth with them] but there will be an automated "on demand" process that can and will meet that need. This onboard system will be designed to meet that purpose even though this event can take many different forms and come "alive" at very different times . On this platform the clusters for information, algorithmic processing, and meal delivery to a hungry tourist will be complex and so I imagine that they will evolve from one 24 hour time cycle to the next.
Or something like that.....
Richard.
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