Leadershipat the End of the

Age of Information

David Weinberger Ph.D.

Harvard Berkman CenterSelf @ evident . com

LeWeb 2008The information age has been formative of our basic idea of who we are as individuals and

together. Now that it!s drawing to a close, it!s a good time to look at what leadership has meant

and is coming to mean,

The End of Information?

Not the end of information

After the stone age, stones didn!t go away, and neither will information. But the way info has

affected our view of the world will change.

Bits

Information

Sociality

Meaning

Understanding

But for years, we!ve been going down the stack of significance, getting really good at

managing information and bits.

Reduce

Standardizemachine-processed

manage

Info reduces what we know so it!s manageable. And it standardizes it so it can be machine

processed.

Bicyclist

Loves

museums

Teaches

parrots to

talk

Last name

First name

ID number

Pay scale

Start date

Department

Troublemaker (Y/N)

We!ve all known this. The person in the next cubicle is unique. But In the informational view of

the world, what we know about someone we work with is pared down to what the database is

prepared to accept. There!s great utility in this, of course, but the Info Age has required us to

throw out most info.

xxxx

In the age of the Web, this person looks like this. At her page at her social networking site

there!s not only more information about her, but, more important, it!s all linked. Without plan or

coordination. And each link adds to what we know. This is a much richer view than we got

during the age of information.

Hyperlinks are the opposite of information. Increasing, contextualizing, uncontrolled.

Bits

Information

Sociality

Meaning

Understanding

We had been going down the stack. Now we!re going up.

samsnet@flickr.com

The result of this architecture of links is abundance. Abundance of good and of crap. If an

abundance of crap is worrying, the abundance of good is terrifying. The abundance of the

good -- good ideas, good info, good people willing to pitch in -- challenges our traditional ideas

of leadership.

Scarce leadership

In part this is because leadership has been all about scarcity.

Leaders are themselves scarce -- Jack Welch (ex CEO of GE) is one in a million, or so. Most

people are followers, by definition.

Although leaders are at the top of the informational pyramid, with access to every scrap of intelligence in the organization...

... they lead by keeping information scarce.

They!re overwhelmed with information, of course. They think they process information the way

computers do and come to decisions the way computers do. But they -- and we -- give too

much credit to the role information plays in decisions. We give too much credit to information.

We!ve come to accept the computer model of making decisions, which says GIGO, garbage

in, garbage out. Good information leads to good decisions. That!s true enough for computers,

but leads to a sense that good information causes good decisions. In fact...

...making a decision means deciding which inputs to accept. In making the decision, you

decide to accept this report as valid, but not that, this piece of legal advice as worthwhile and

not that. Good info doesn!t cause good decisions. Making a good decision is the process of

deciding which info is good, so good information cannot cause good decisions. The causality

of information-based systems, that is, of computers gets it backwards when it comes to how

humans make decisions.

The final scarcity of leadership is the scarcity of other people. In English, the cliche is that it!s

lonely at the top. And that!s true because of the way we!ve structured leadership. We try to

make this into an heroic thing, but it!s really just a structural flaw.

The real question is why we drop leaders down the long dark tunnel of isolation, by

themselves: One person to master the complexity of the world. How lonely!

Leadership in theAge of Abundance

What happens to leadership when we embrace the abundance we!ve created for ourselves?

Decides Has Vision & Strategy

Communicates

Coordinates Is accountable

Here are some of the characteristics of a traditional leader. A single person is supposed to do

all this. I!m often amazed when I meet CEOs at the range of stuff they!re expected to do, from

product visionary to financial wizard, and many of them do it amazingly well. But it!s a lot to

demand.

Crowd-sourcing leadership

It!s different when you don!t start with a leadership structure based on scarcity. For example,

the Open Source movement disaggregates the skills of the traditional leader and spreads

them across the network -- one person is the coordinator, a bunch may be visionaries, another

may be the communicator. It would be insane to think that one person could do all of that, now

that a crowd can do it.

Decision-making is a failure of leadership

In such an environment, decisions only reach the top when the community can!t resolve an

issue. So, Jack Welch prides himself on being The Decider. He makes a decision and it rolls

down through the pyramid. But, if a decision reaches Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, it probably

means the process has failed. The community is too evenly divided. And that means that The

Decider is really more like the coin tosser.

Strategies impose scarcity on the future

Strategy -- another traditional role of the leader -- actually imposes scarcity on the future. Our

futures are abundant. That!s the difference between the future and the past. We only have one

past (This email is the extent of Linus Torvald!s “strategy” when he started Linux

development.) As we!ve learned, on the Internet, flexibility and responsiveness is often a far

better strategy than having a strategy.

Traditional leaders pride themselves on being realistic. But how far would realism have gotten

us with wikipedia, linux, or the Web itself. Realism is over-rated.

A hard, manly realism aims

too low

Leadership is a property of the

network

When it comes to decision making, disaggregation of roles, and emergent strategy, it!s no

surprise that leadership in a networked world is itself a property of the network.

Abundant governance

Let!s look at the effect of this on governance

The irony is, of course, that now we in the US have a strong, decisive leader of the traditional

sort. But one of his strengths is his reliance on the network.

You can see this at the campaign site, my.barackobama.com, which used social network tools

to let supporters connect with one another and with the campaign.

The day after the election, the Obama team had already created a public site for the transition.

It!s not a great site, but it!s getting better...which is already a sign of the Obama team!s comfort

with how the Web works: Put it up and then make it better. It encourages us from the

beginning to connect.

Leaders

Citizens

So let!s say Obama wants to set up a social network. (Let me stress that I am totally making

this up. I have no insight into what the Obama admin will do.) The issue is scaling

conversation. There are lots of ways of doing this. It!s an issue faced by every large site. But

because this is a social networking site for citizens, we want people not just to talk, but to

enable those conversations to move up toward our governmental leaders. So, since I!m just

making this up, let!s say they use a model that combines Facebook with DailyKos, which have

mechanisms for surfacing interesting conversations.

Leaders

Citizens

So, you have millions of small conversations and some mechanisms for making the more

interesting ones more public. And you hope that the appropriate government officials will

notice and engage.

Leaders

Citizens

PolarSky253

Simon Willis

Reputational

Democracy

As a conversation becomes more public and noticed, it might be that spokespeople emerge.

Let!s say PolarSky253 emerges as the spokesperson for a discussion of global warming.

PolarSky has therefore become quite important, because she!s representing the conversation

to the person from the administration who is listening in. What we have here is new layer of

democracy. She hasn!t been elected. It!s Reputational Democracy, as Simon Willis has called

it. (Of course it will turn out that PolarSky is a 15 year old girl somewhere.) Also notice how

sensitive this is to small changes in the software. A switch from a star rating system to a

thumbs up system could change who becomes the spokesperson and the qualities of those

people. This puts democracy in the hands of software engineers … but if done correctly, it will

be sensitive to our needs. That!s what it means to say that leadership is a property of the

network.

What will leadership be?

We!re still going to have leaders...

Power

Collaboration

Realism

Ego

Institutions

Money

Myth

generational change

Tradition

What will leadership be? There’s no way to tell. Many forces are at play. It’s not simply a matter of inventing something new because this is occurring in a real world with lots of interests, some of them deeply entrenched. Ultimately, it is a political question -- the political question -- that can only be resolved by living through and struggling. But ultimately,...

The old style of leadership needs to be toppled from its mythic position. There are great leaders. But they are no longer the only leaders we need. We need leadership to take on the best properties of the network, becoming more about connection, more human and more comfortable with our inevitable human limitations.

Because, ultimately, the light at the end of the tunnel is us. Or, as Obama says, we are the

ones we!ve been waiting for. Us, putting ourselves together. Overflowing every obstacle to

connection. Alilve in abundance without end, the abundance that is each of us. In other words,

we now need fewer old leaders, and more love.

Thank you.

David Weinberger Blog: www . JohoTheBlog . Com

Email: self@evident . com