The Age of Decentralized, Distributed Knowledge

The “Information Age” is dead. Long live the Age of Decentralized, Distributed Knowledge.

What is new and noteworthy is the connectivity and the sharing of information that are growing at an exponential rate. Not only is an overwhelming amount of information more or less freely available, but we are required to make sense of it in our personal and professional lives – literally every day. Just to survive.

By the very nature of our brains, each bit of knowledge we encounter seeks connection with other bits of knowledge. This is a foundational principle of learning.

Learning is a drive to try to make sense of information (data). This is a process of collecting more dots (of information) and making connections grow at an exponential rate between those dots. All this happens in our brains whether we are aware or not.

Shouldn’t we be more aware? How are we, as individuals, and as a society, going to be able to keep up with the challenges that accompany the exponential changes in technology? We are not used to changing at that pace. All of us resist change, to some degree, in some aspects of our lives. Do we even know how to adapt quickly enough? What might happen if we don’t try?

The history of societal evolution has followed the invention of new tools. When we faced tasks that were beyond our physical capabilities, we built machines to do what our bodies could not. We instructed those machines very precisely: “Do this, don’t do that.”

The next step was to invent machines that could perform mental tasks that we understood how to do, but could work orders of magnitude faster than human minds. We still instructed those machines precisely.

Up to the late 20th Century, the evolution of education followed a similar pattern. Starting hundreds of years ago, relatively small numbers of highly educated and knowledgeable people created organizational structures where specific individuals in certain positions controlled the flow of information. Information was housed in a centralized model and was distributed through defined channels.

What has happened to education and social structure in the last 30 years? Developing countries proudly rate themselves by the increasing numbers of people with high school and university degrees. In the Old Economy, that translated to workers who could do more than manual labor. What happens when significant portions of a population learn to think and ask questions, especially about authority? How do authoritarian dictatorships respond to this sign of intellectual growth? Remember the book burnings in Alexandria, Nazi Germany, and in the Chinese Cultural Revolution? What are those, if not attempts to destroy the free flow of information and thought, legitimized in the name of preserving social structure?

Today, social, economic, and governmental structures are again feeling ambivalent about the explosion of information. On the one hand, it represents progress. On the other, knowledge allows disruptive elements to gain power and influence.

For example, the mainstream media, and, we hope, government leaders, are finally beginning to realize and acknowledge that members of the Islamic State (ISIL) are skillfully using social media and other Internet resources in remarkably sophisticated and powerful ways to recruit tens of thousands of followers and inspire them to wreak havoc across the globe. The Power of Decentralized Knowledge.

This situation illustrates a new challenge in today’s corporate environment: leadership now is being directed to follow the flow of information. Organizational structure no longer dictates flow, as has been traditional. Leadership must be flexible, adaptable, and contextually-defined. Teams are defined by the information they need to work with and share. Typically, some team members are not even formal employees and may not be subject to traditional lines of authority. How can we manage people when we can’t control what they know and when we can’t fire them?

Especially for Agile Innovation initiatives, work groups need to be trained as “high-performing teams” where leadership is a dynamically shared responsibility focused on data-driven outcomes. This concept is critically important as such efforts always encounter a major challenge in the form of resistance to change.

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Resistance will be found within the team itself and in various pockets across the entire organization. In fact, the issue extends to all stakeholders in the ecosystem. For an innovation to be successful, its value must be acknowledged by all the stakeholders, especially competitors.

How can the team prepare the ecosystem to accept the changes that are part of the innovation package? They must leverage the connectivity and knowledge shared by many people across the ecosystem. This approach will be effective only when everyone embraces individual and collective accountability for outcomes.

Isn’t this the real meaning of Decentralized Knowledge? How might such a direction be a sign of positive social evolution?