Smartocracy: a case for collective decision making in the digital age

Few weeks back my boss was shooting for a TV interview and one of the topics discussed was around how the workplace of the future may look like. While there can be a multitude of creative concepts that can come to one's mind, the exactness of it will depend purely on the adoption of the experiences created by a combination of few rapidly scalable & economical technologies. For now it looks like the future will be highly virtual, flexible, collaborative, analytical, real time and participative. If you think about it right after watching a sci-fi movie, you may imagine holograms and touchscreens at your home to interact with your colleagues, robots instead of humans, availability of any information in real time, thought enabled operations etc.

Now all of this might not be distant. I lack the clairvoyance to see what a workplace of the future will look like but I see an apparent rise of communities, work groups and connectedness. We've all seen the rise of social media first and then how it's slowly but steadily coming to the office environments with Facebook@work or Microsoft's Kaizala or Slack or other similar products. But the biggest thing that I see happening is the value we are beginning to give to an individual voice. What this means is that as an individual I've the power to influence certain decisions of the company, even though I may not be directly involved or have the official authority to do so. This means a rise of participative management. Be it the selection of food in office canteen or the choice of new CRM or the way in which company choses its CSR partners or decides the go to market strategy. Any individual in future will and should have a voice in making decisions.

Industrial democracy, which is the involvement of employees in the running of a company, till now has been more theoretical than practical. Though there are a few examples but it could not become a popular practice. Historically we organized ourselves to hierarchies to make things simpler and organize better. One took the decision and many followed it. Why? Because it was too time consuming to ask everyone for their opinion, then analyze and then use the results for decision making. So the rise of the ‘one’ was necessary in most setups to get things done quickly. This happened because then we did not have the tools for real time information, communication and analysis. Now we do. And this should change things. Management decisions within a company can be more democratic now and should be.

Simultaneously, there's something else happening. Companies are no longer functioning in the way they used to. Many employees are now contractual, they work at will, they work for your competitor and often they don't even meet you. There's a global rise of the startup ecosystem. The boundaries of organizations are getting fuzzy. Someone once said, 'A nation is a vision’. Very much like a nation, in future, a company will be a vision and that vision will sustain if everyone associated with it shares it and has a say to govern it; in other words, if everyone can participate in its management. Otherwise new boundaries can be sketched quite easily. For the future organizations to exist or the ecosystem to remain sustainable, the idea of economic democracy will have to be adopted. By definition, economic democracy is a philosophy that proposes to shift decision-making power from corporate managers to a larger set that includes workers, customers, suppliers, partners etc.

So when organizations transform themselves into a network of microcosmic smaller groups that are interconnected digitally, who will decide whose welfare is to be maximized? How will collective good be reached? Now that organizations are unbundling, and rebundling with other groups, startups and larger organizations, how will the decisions of a company be made in the future; who all decide?

Ecosystems will be sustainable when their governance mechanism is properly structured. So how can it be formally implemented? The concept is called ‘Smartocracy’, a term coined for social networks for collective decision making. Usually enabled by a web based social software system for collective decision making. Smartocracy uses a problem-solution model where individuals pose problems (i.e. issues, questions) to the Smartocracy community and propose potential solutions (i.e. options, answers). Given a particular problem, any individual in Smartocracy can propose a potential solution or vote for a proposed solution. It’s not as simple as casting your vote and taking a decision based on highest votes. More than often voting may not be the right mechanism to make a decision. I will not go as extreme as the Arrow’s theorem but then there are few algorithms to enable the right decision making. Effectively, smartocarcy can give a voice to all and make collective decision making possible..digitally.

I think that the way we have organized ourselves into structures and hierarchies need to change and that the time for Smartocracy has arrived. We are in the digital age. We are changing. Let’s all change together.