The Progress Towards The Collective

The collective is simple to conceptualise. It is difficult to organize because people are so bent on pursuing their interest. The politician makes a living and enjoys power only because of her/his superior ability to organize and influence the collective.

Tom Peters reports 'In Search Of Excellence' that the excellent organizations identified by him took decades to develop the collective cultures that anchored their extraordinary performance.

After crunching three decades worth of data at Gallup, Marcus Buckingham reports in Fast Company (2001):
There is no such thing as a corporate culture. Companies are made up of many cultures, the strengths and weaknesses of which are a result of local conditions.

Buckingham goes on to give us the startling revelation:
US working people belong to one of three categories: engaged – 26%, not engaged – 55%, and actively disengaged – 19%, viz., three out of four people in any organization are not engaged in helping the company.

With such a record human nature appears quite unsuited to sustain constructive collaboration. Achieving collective thinking consistently over time or establishing communities of practice appears more remote, even inconceivable.

Conventional collaboration software may have failed to progress the collective mind but it did serve to demonstrate that the virtual space offered a real 24x7 accessible venue for diverse people to progress towards a consensus. The only hurdle left for forming the collective mind was the conventional wisdom articulated by Drucker that "In knowledge and service work, partnership with the responsible worker is the only way; nothing else will work at all.”

This wisdom is as old as mankind itself. Rewriting it by transforming IT into intelligent energy for organizing and driving the pursuit of excellence, from simply offering tools, viz., passive energy, should revolutionize administration over time. It is reasonable to expect that if we graduate the exploitation of collective ability from just 5% (the prevailing value) to well over 70% (the possible value with rewriting of the wisdom) then society can expect some tremors.

It is an exciting prospect to carry forward into 2007.