This is part of my manuscript for a session with Keen Bull on how additive manufacturing will impact the world, at this years DIF-festival.
We believe three things are happening with organizations at the moment..
First, advantage of scale has given far more of us increased material wealth, access to mass education, longevity of life increased social complexity and so forth.
The mass production system has enabled us to grow as human beings
. But as we grow we have also come to demand more from the business organizations we depend upon for consumption and employment (1).
This hasn’t been a part of the organizations toolbox.
Organizations have had a blueprint that was tailored for mass efficiency — but not meaningfulness, identity, belonging and individualization.
These elements, which are now essential to the output and progress of an organization were deemed problematic and irrelevant in the old system.
So there is a conflict at the moment between a new generation of employeeneeds and what the current organizational tools can offer.
The second thing is that there is an increase in market complexity and uncertainty
. We are in an era where digitization has led industries to converge and mutate.
So this system of certainty and predictability which was built for stability in certain times. Is suddenly finding itself in uncertainty. Unable to control for the asymmetric relationships that are appearing betweentheir customers and new organizations.
The only thing certain becomes uncertainty.
Thirdly the iron law of industry — advantage of scale itself — is being disrupted.
In fact scale is turning into a disadvantage due to the massive cost of producing non-standardized parts.
Scale, which once was a barrier to entry for new companies has turned into a barrier for incumbents to answer the demand patterns of the market.
As advantage of scale breaks down every scaffolding around it seems to shake or go down with it.
When the iron law of efficiency — which has cost individuals, ideas, talents and meaningfulness so much — comes crashing down we are GIVEN the opportunity to redesign how we organize and create together.
And advancements in Additive Manufacturing is on a path to softening one of the hardest kernels in the midst of the industrial corporate landscape — the industrial machine.
With Additive manufacturing we are envisioning an ability for the industrial landscape to start delivering on the emerging demand in the market for identity and individualization.
As we are moving from this organization designed and trained to make as little friction as possible, where people are situated into narrow compartments with clearly and precisely defined roles and goals — to an organization where friction, creativity, outliers have no added cost
. They are in fact what is needed in order to be aligned to the needs of the market. We are imagining a radically different organization designed to output today what wasn’t even imagined yesterday.
We are entering a highly flexible world demanding highly flexible organizations.
The organizations are not linear, they are not based on hierarchies or chains of command and centralized decision making.
In this new world we have decentralized teams making autonomousdecisions
. Smaller companies (because there is no advantage of scale) with local niches and the ability to turn around swiftly as demand patterns aremanipulated by new impulses.
(1)
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. Shoshana Zuboff, The Changing Content of Capitalism, http://www.180360720.no/?p=5112
