Leadbetter. We-Think

'Welcome to the world of We-Think. We are developing new ways to innovate and be creative en masse. We can be organised without an organisation. People can combine ideas and skills without a hierarchy. (...) The guiding ehtos of this new culture is participation. The point of the industial-era economy was mass production for mass consumption - the formula created by Henry Ford. We were workers by day and consumers in the evening or at weekends. In the world of We-Think the point is to be a player in the action, a voice in the conversation - not to consume but to participate. In the We-Think economy people don't just want services and goods delivered to them. They also want tools so that they can take part and places in which to play, share, debate with others.



The collaboratives change the way in which people come up with new ideas. Innovation and creativity were once elite activities undertaken by special people - writers, designers, architects, inventors - in special places - garrets, studies, laboratories. The ideas they dreamt would flow down pipelines to passive consumers. Now innovation and creativity are becoming mass activities, dispersed across society. Largely self-organising collaborations can unravel the human genome, create a vast encyclopedia and a complex computer operating system. This is innovation by the masses, not just for the masses.



My book We-Think is an effort to understand this new culture; were these new ways of organising ourselves have come from and where they might lead. They started in the geeky swampland - in open-source software, blogging and computer gaming. But they are so powerful that increasingly they will become the mainstream by challenging traditional organisations to open up. They could change not just the ways in which the media, software and entertainment work but how we organise education, healthcare, cities and, indeed, the political system.

(...)

We are still told that for order to be maintained someone has to be in control. Yet these collaborative activities seem ordered precisely because no one seeks to be in control, so people have to exercise their sense of responsibility - adjusting to one another, sorting out disputes as they go. The order comes from within, not from the top.



To get complex tasks done reliably we have assumed that we need a clear division of labour. Yet in these non-organisations people seem voluntarily to find their own niches and distribute themselves to work as and when it needs doing.

(...)

The irresistible force of collaborative mass innovation is about to meet the immovable object of entrenched corporate organisation. We-Think is about that coming conflict and what will emerge from it.'