Social Leadership Fragments: Permeability

The impact of social and collaborative technologies has been to make many boundariesmore permeable, with a range of impacts. Legacy boundaries have fallen away, such as those between ‘work’ and ‘home’ life, between ‘together’, and ‘apart’, and between ‘owned’ and ‘accessed’. This permeability has encroached on the personal, whilst also diversifying and enriching our sense of connection. It’s fundamentally altered our relationship with knowledge, with structure, and with each other.

I have always described the Social Age as illustrating a broad pattern of change, and hence requiring a holistic pattern of adaptation. Not one change to fit into a new space, but the ability to constantly change to remain in motion within a new, broader, landscape. Hence why we can ultimately frame the challenge not simply as leadership, technology, learning, or change, but rather in terms of organisational, and broader social structural, design. How will our organisations evolve, how will our structures of education, law, security, and belief, change?

Permeability almost inherently impacts power, when parts of our legacy frameworks of power have relied on physical space, the control of that space, on infrastructure (housed within that space), and money, all of which are facing challenges as economies broaden (into social currencies), organisations transcend mere infrastructure, become infrastructure free, and rent, borrow, or otherwise contract what they need, with great fluidity, and the ‘space’ of the office has become an outdated and contentious burden (in some, if not all, contexts).

If not paradigmatic, it is at the very least pre-paradigmatic, and should indicate that we inhabit a time where we need to be rapidly prototyping our ideas, and experimenting as a precursor to actual change.

In this, our certainty can be an enemy, acting as it does as an island upon which we must necessarily stand: the context of the Social Age erodes that island, but ultimately it is we who must take the decision to plunge into the water. To relinquish our certainty, and to create systems which can hold higher levels of ambiguity, as well as the sense making structures to do something with this previous commodity.

In terms of leadership, as we ‘lead’ – at least nominally – in an ever diversifying number of spaces (through both formal and social authority), we will likely need to take a more multi modal, and multi dimensional perspective. Not simply collective leadership, but contextual leadership, which will again challenge legacy structures of power, pride, and organisational experience.

The worst is yet to come: probably we will have to consider the further disaggregation of task, role, and job, with associated managerial structures, which makes sense as so much of this has it’s roots in the long gone industrial heritage.

Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate permeability from simply a leak. Adapting our Organisations will be a monumental and costly task, not simply in money, but at the cost of our certainty, our power, and sometimes our pride. But the potential, to pioneer a more contemporary view of leadership, is a worthwhile prize.?