Lindsay Tanner: Digital Disruption – Adapt Or Perish
The Last Australian-Grown Frozen Veg Manufacturer To Go?
February 25, 2014Social Enterprise Awards Applications Open Till 28 March
March 5, 2014Lindsay Tanner always made sense to me. He and Martin Stewart-Weeks are quoted in The Australian (17/02/14) saying:
“Our institutions are relatively closed, exclusive and linear, exercising authority from a combination of longevity and distance from the lives of ordinary people…instinctively resistant to scrutiny.”
Yes, this sounds accurate in my experience. BUT, they say…
A New Open, Networked, Agile Institutional Model Is Emerging
Is the ‘deal’ between institutions and the communities they serve being renegotiated? Lindsay and Martin say it is now much easier to supervise and manage the various parts of a complex process without direct ‘institutional command’. This allows specialisation and lower costs.
Ziggy Switkowski talks about companies being ‘disintermediated‘
“gradually morphing into a network of outsourcing contracts with service-level agreements behind a branded, user-friendly interface”.
Institutional Disruption From Digital Innovation
An Economist Intelligence Unit report gives some examples:
- Aurora Fashion has a single inventory and stock pool shared across 1300 stores in 33 countries
- Shell uses social networking to improve informal flow of information across the company changing the way its hierarchy works
- Companies like Macquarie Bank and the Commonwealth Bank are redesigning workplaces to provide physical workplaces compatible with networked technologies.
Crowd-Sourcing Is Changing The Dynamics Of Everything
One Australian example is Airtasker – an online marketplace for people and businesses to outsource everyday tasks.
AND, Political Engagement Is Changing
Citizens are using Avaaz, GetUp! and Purpose.com as new tools to promote change without the need to create formal institutions, hierarchies and connections.
A New Organisational Principle In A Digital World
To survive and prosper in the new world we are entering we need ‘power to the edge‘, to move away from traditional centralised command-and-control and ‘nurture the seeds of innovation and improvement that lie at the edges of organisations’. External stakeholders are a vital source of information and innovation.
Read About It
Changing Shape: institutions for a digital age – Lindsay Tanner and Martin Stewart-Weeks
“In this book, we explore the different ways in which digital technologies are changing the shape of many of the core institutions of government, business, education, and civil society. We think that will help us understand better how that interaction is creating new institutional forms to improve the way we tackle the big risks and opportunities – growth, sustainability, jobs, poverty and inequality, new infrastructure, better services, and stronger governance based on rising trust and legitimacy to name just a few – that will determine how we live, and how well we live, into an uncertain and volatile future.”
Fascinating stuff
