Feb/Mar 2002
A New Contract With The Planet
Healing
After Terror
Michael Lerner
Indifference
Don Kyhote
The
Globalization of Poverty
Antonia Juhasz
World
Bank President's Secret Plan For Argentina
Greg Palast (Available after Mar. 1)
The
Trade Towers Without Tears
John Darling
Passcode
"Redwood:" Keeping Repression in Perspective
Starhawk
The
Uncooling of America
Kalle Lasn
Frankencorn
Fight
Ronnie Cummins
Oil
Company Advisor Chosen to Represent U.S. in Afghanistan
Patrick Martin
The
Next Technology Revolution
Steve Wallis, MA
Man
of Occasional Two Braids
Antoinette Nora Claypoole
The
Ecology of Community
Jesse Wolf Hardin
Love
and Leadership
Michele LeBien
Fearful
Feelings
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
The
Next Technology Revolution
Steve
Wallis, MA
The telecom revolution is faltering. The Internet revolution has lost its momentum. There may be a few surprises waiting in the wings, but lets face it; these industries are no longer “revolution-ary.” Now, they can take their place in history with other revolutions that have played their part on the socioeconomic stage such as the agricultural, the industrial, the electrical, the nuclear and the computer revolutions.
What’s next? Biotech promises a lot, but many of those advances will be mired down in moral dilemmas and debate. It’s hard for a technology to change the world if there is significant social opposition.
What technology is ripe to create the same kind of world-shaking changes wrought by electricity and the Internet?
All the technologies I’ve mentioned so far have been “physical” technologies. They are based on the art of making something solid that you can hold in your hand. I suggest that the next revolution will not be about something that you can hold in your hand, yet it will be a profound tool for improving all of our lives. The next technology revolution will be a change in social technology. It will be a change that is vast in scope. It will touch every aspect of our lives. When it is done, our world will be so much improved that we will look back on human history and wonder what we ever did without such advanced social technology.
Advanced Social Technology (AST) will make our work lives easier and more productive. AST will simplify learning. Dealing with kids will be less frustrating and more rewarding. Personal relationships will be smoother, all because of the sweeping improvements of AST. The best of times are yet to come. When I say “revolutionary” change, I do not mean that there will be rioting in the streets, any more than the sale of cheap computer chips caused rioting. I simply mean that the improvement will be unbelievably significant.
How do we define “social” technology? Simply put, it is the way we work together to get things done. It involves connecting and communicating with other human beings, the process by which decisions are made as well as the way we understand our families, our work, our communities and ourselves.
At the community level, the differences in social technology will be striking. For example, when primitive social technology is employed, there is dominance and despotism. No one would suggest that we return to these methods of government. Higher up on the social technology scale, there are oligarchies, limited democracies and representative governments. Still higher on the scale are collaborative methodologies that can bring together thousands of participants to engage in meaningful dialog and decision-making. Communities that have used these methods experience powerful results.
Conventional wisdom, some may argue, says it is impossible for a large number of people to work together to make good decisions. Those who make this argument are mired in the past of a primitive social technology. These techniques have been used with great success … and their use is growing. AST allows hundreds of people to work smoothly together to create and implement effective plans.
Over two hundred years ago, our nation pioneered a new social technology and discovered that England’s oppressive monarchy was no match for our representative democracy. While we tout our democracy as the greatest social system on the planet, we should be humbled to realize how primitive a system it really is. Remember, the ancient Greeks had democracy and that was two thousand years ago!
Yet, history has a way of helping us to evolve. In the thirties, the effects of the great depression caused global unrest. Entire nations experimented with fascism and socialism. While these experiments failed, social technology advanced. In the United States, we weathered the great depression because we developed new social technology, primarily in the area of economics. Our new understanding of the way money works gave new understanding to our social structure. This, in turn allowed us to maintain greater social stability. The advancement of social technology saved our nation. Advanced social technology, available today, can carry our nation and our communities through the turbulence of this new millennium. Recent advances by a number of gurus, from all over the country, are paving the way for significant improvements in the way we all live our lives, run our businesses and collaborate in our communities.
Advanced social
technology starts with people having a better understanding of their world.
Peter Senge’s’ Fifth Discipline, for example, provides a wide range
of tools for understanding how we can improve our lives for both short and
long term situations.
Weisbord’s Future Search technology allows whole communities to come
together and create dynamic and powerful futures for themselves in ways that
keep people involved, allow them to get more done as a community and have
better lives.
Other techniques of AST include: personal empowerment, organizational analysis, team building, group decision-making, diversity, sustainability, coaching, facilitation, strategic planning and others are all powerful tools that have successfully improved the lives of workers and members of the community while increasing productivity.
Indeed, the manager or public official who understands and uses the most effective advanced social technology will be far more successful than those who try to use more primitive methods such as intimidation or propaganda. An increasing number of studies are showing astonishing improvements in a wide array of businesses.
Here are a few statistics:
In Arizona, the state trains and facilitates workers to meet a vision of improved performance. Overall the OEG has achieved a 13 to 1 return on their investments.
Seventy eight percent of Fortune 500 companies have used some form of Re-Engineering.
One firm spends about $700 per employee per year on education. This education covers a wide range of business and non-business topics. With this small investment, their sales have doubled in the past four years and turnover is 1%.
A study by the American Society for Training and Development found that companies’ return on their training investment ranged from 150% to 2000%. For companies implementing behavior based safety initiatives, reductions of 50% to 80% in severity, frequency rates, and/or workers compensation claims are common. In a study looking at OSHA-reported accidents in seventy-four workplaces over five years, there was a 27% decrease in the accident rate in the first year. By the fifth year, the average incident rate had dropped by 69%.
At an agricultural chemical plant in Canada, Ciba-Geigy boosted productivity 30% by having the employees do much of the technical and organizational redesign work.
These are clear and obvious benefits of using the techniques of Advanced Social Technology. For these companies, the social technology revolution has already arrived. Why would they want to go back to disempowered workers, top-down management, constricted communication, poor training and limited analysis? It would cost them too much.
Community: Today and the Future
Advanced Social Technology is already practiced at a wide range of larger corp-orations. Managers who leave those corporations (to work in the community or start their own businesses) bring with them the values and techniques of Advanced Social Technology. They realize that implementing AST wherever they are, is every bit as important as buying the latest computers (and it usually doesn’t cost as much).
Because of this movement of managers, AST is spreading throughout our society. As a result, there is a geometric increase in the number of people exposed to, and benefiting from, AST. The seeds are growing in our communities as well. More and more frequently, towns and cities that are faced with difficult problems hire facilitators to guide them through the process of collaborative analysis and self-improvement.
The best examples
of this are seen in the use of the Future Search process. This AST builds
involvement and commitment to community improvement—even among neighbors
who have been in conflict. This process has been used to:
• Find common ground among conflicting participants.
• Build commitment and create a clear plan in a county service agency.
• Bring out a wide variety of ideas that are rapidly coordinated into
clear action in a corporate setting.
• Increase attendance in a church by 50% and open up taboo topics for
discussion and resolution.
• Build a sense of community and cooperation in a school district where
before they were faced with conflict and entrenchment.
• Open up topics for discussion and improvement in a government agency
where previously such topics were uncomfortable because the individual participants
believed that improvement was not possible.
The stories of clear and compelling benefits go on and on. Also, each time a community engages in one of these events, it teaches the participants how to use advanced social technology thus setting the stage for even more improvement in the future.
There are an
increasing number of professional organizations that support the coming revolution
in social techn-ology. Among them are:
• American Society for Training and Development, www.astd.org
• Future Search Net, www.futuresearch.net
• International Society for Performance, Improvement, www.ispi.org
• International Organization of Facilitators, www.iaf-world.org
• International Coach Federation, www.coachfederation.com
• Organization Development Network, www.odnetwork.org
• The Natural Step Organization, www.naturalstep.org
The people of this nation clearly value the increases in productivity, retention, enthusiasm and involvement that advancements in social technology can provide. The positive results of AST speak directly to our core values of democracy, community and personal improvement. The revolution in social technology is coming, and it will be the most peaceful and enjoyable revolution history has ever seen. Those who do not participate will fail to evolve. The non-participants will be the social Luddites of the 21st century; living lives of stress and socioeconomic obscurity.
The computer and telecom revolutions made a few people very rich. Most of us just got shiny new high-tech toys to play with. The revolution in social technology will be different. We will all need to participate to make it happen. Look on the web, check your phone book, ask your friends. Become a player in the AST revolution. The benefits will be amazing, they will change your life even more than the Internet did. You have the option to be a participant. Make it so.
Steve Wallis
is an organizational theorist, dynamic facilitator, depthful coach and insightful
analyst. His firm, Integrative Solutions, collaborates with organizations
of all sizes to facilitate creative, sustainable and meaningful improvement.
Contact Steve at steve@myideahamster.com or visit http://www.myideahamster.com.
