I’m part of the cluetrainplus10 project, where I was asked to write about Thesis #7 Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy. It’s in Chapter 5 of the cluetrain manifesto. It’s funny, because in a way, I’ve already written about this when I talked about building a small powerful network.
This thesis, which deals with the hyperlinked organization, is a way of suggesting that orgs restructure and break out of being silo-driven. It also reminds us that there is a web of connections, not individuals standing out of context or connectivity. Ten years after the manifesto was written, I feel that the businesses currently weathering the storm of this economic downturn are those who have taken this idea into the organization and executed on it.
Successful freelancers think this way. They consider the world as a web of resources that they can tie together in different ways to make projects happen. Gathering resources into a useful configuration is how the web functions. Businesses can take advantage of this train of thought by considering how to build their executions from a project-minded perspective, and by considering non-employee business relationships to be part of the resource chain.
I’m torn when I write all this. I’m inclined to say “we’re already doing this!” But I’ve been to several large organizations over the last many months, and they’re not. They’re still operating from paradigms that were cast together in the 1950s and 1960s. These, coincidentally, are the same businesses that are having a tough time in the current economic situation.
If you think of your business as a collection of “what you need to accomplish” versus “what processes and resources you have,” this kind of thinking starts to make sense.
The picture in this blog post doesn’t exist on my servers. I’ve put it there via links. The links in this blog post, which point you to resources like the online text of the cluetrain manifesto, are pointing you to resources that don’t existing on this website. I’ve built a compilation of resources that I needed to pull together to tell this story exactly the way businesses can build projects out of multiple resource sources to accomplish a goal.
Has this changed in the 10 years since cluetrain was written? Yes. I’d say that many people have learned to build on this paradigm, at least in the forward-minded companies, and that others will follow.
Twitter has an ecosystem of businesses that prove this. Facebook integrates with several other platforms. Google Maps allows thousands of mashup projects that exist outside of hierarchies.
We think this way. It’s exactly the way humans are wired. We build resonance this way.
And now you. What do you find? What will you link to? Where will the next wired projects take you?
This is part of the cluetrainplus10 project.
photo credit Jared