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Long ago, when the world was local, trust enabled our primordial ancestors to cooperate and overcome overwhelming odds. As our world became more globally interconnected, technology trumped trust. But as the world continued to shrink, a strange thing happened: Interdependencies began to grow and trust was again recognized as the missing link in free-trade agreements, civic-engagement initiatives and financial markets. Trust has been missing in action because we haven't been able to build meaningful, collaborative structures and performance metrics to ensure its sustainability. That's our job today.
No one disputes that the world is shrinking, as more and more people connect with each other through technology. As every connection is made, interdependencies extend from local to global, and so the social fabric or "network" is rewoven. A network is the nonrandom aggregation of these human connections and is both nuanced and nuclear in its collective power. Until September 11, 2001, organizational theorists largely ignored networks.1 But networks are ancient tribal structures and permeate even the most familiar organizational forms we embrace as markets and hierarchies.
Networks do more than just connect us as individuals to each other. They connect our different institutions together in organic organizational sprawl. This mega-state of networked or connected hierarchies is known as heterarchy. There is no archeological precedent for heterarchy that we know of, largely because the world and our institutions have never been this interconnected.
"I'm a Prisoner of War in My Own Organization."
A three-star admiral told me, "I can lead men and women into battle, but I am a prisoner of war in my own organization." How does this happen? Governance is a morphing process that incrementally builds on the skeletal remains of past mistakes and policies such that the organizational structure becomes a great barrier reef.
The resulting labyrinths of processes can be difficult to thoroughly chart and, if not monitored, will alter the ecosystem in which the organization thrives. These "bureaucracies," as we have come to know them, inspire both anxiety and awe. Anxiety comes because they demand constant tending and feeding to be sustained; awe arises because they are mercurial, magically summoning power from unknowable depths to kill an innovation or destroy a career with aplomb.
The Jong list of quiet failures that beset...