Bill Fischer, Professor of Innovation Management at IMD Business School in Lausanne. Bill co-founded and co-directs the IMD program on Driving Strategic Innovation, in cooperation with the Sloan School of Management at MIT and also authors a regular column for Forbes.com entitled “The Ideas Business”.

In this Boundaryless Conversation we explore with Bill how incumbent organizations are likely to respond to pressures like plummeting transaction costs and the need to extend organizational models across boundaries, digging into the cultural, organizational and leadership resistance that this transformation may encounter. The ability to curate relationships among insiders and outsiders is key to organizational transformation that embraces platforms-ecosystems thinking.

We talk a lot about Haier Group in this conversation, a world-leading pioneer embracing a culture of entrepreneurship and ecosystem enablement. Haier’s revolutionary organizational model Rendanheyi is exemplar in three key aspects: i. it is part of the old economy rather than a lean startup; ii. It’s large in size, with over 80,000 employees; iii. It shows “unimaginable” persistence in the commitment to organisational transformation: it’s been doing it for 35 years.

From our podcast: Leadership as Architecting: Transforming Organisations into Thriving Ecosystems.

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Lisa is a long-term advisor and original co-founder of Boundaryless and is not only a seasoned entrepreneur, investor and environmentalist, but was also a protagonist of the early days of the internet revolution. She was there during the iconic demise of Kodak in the wake of digital photography; unfortunately mostly as a Cassandra whose recommendations went partially unheard.

In our “checkpoint” conversation, we talk to Lisa Gansky about what we’ve been discovering so far in the research for the Whitepaper and get her valuable take focusing on the role of incumbents in adapting to a fast-changing world. She talks about the emerging space between the “no more” and “not yet”: an in-between space where most of the potential to re-invent organizing seems to lay, with many still unanswered questions in the “not yet” space, and with ecosystems appearing as the prime candidate driver of transformation for incumbents.

We also talk about the potential of “not yet” to build models that leverage on existing tools (e.g. DLTs, commons protocols), but which also uses a process of empathetic listening and are able to hold diversity and complexity. There is a fine dance here between finding global trans-cultural standards while respecting cultures that are inherently different from Western modernity.

From our podcast: Ecosystems: Between the "No more" and the "Not yet”.

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Indy Johar is architect and co-founder of Project 00 and most recently Dark Matter Labs. Indy is also well-known from his role as non-executive director of the WikiHouse Foundation and has - on behalf of 00 - co-founded multiple social ventures like Impact Hub Westminster and Impact Hub Birmingham and serves many different advisory and teaching roles. Indy
is really a great thinker when it comes to going beyond “corner shop size” social transformation initiatives to explore the next generation of institutions living at the edge between public, open and private.

In our boundaryless conversation, we explore what he thinks will happen to organising, institution-building and human potential, as we move beyond an information age towards an era where building capabilities for antifragile institutions is key. As bureaucratic failures in the Industrial and Information ages have been driven by near-zero transaction costs, where autonomous technological development has taken over human-led managerial processes, existing governance models are left with no capacity to “govern complexity”. Indy posits that we need a new human development thesis and institution-building mechanisms, which depart from the failure we’ve seen in the past decades and which gives us the capabilities to: deal with risk, be creative, be emotionally intelligent, be collaborative and to learn.

With Indy, we ponder on how the political landscape is going to see tension between dissent and consent. In our current macroeconomic thesis focussed around a labour market, we have created precariousness that uses dissent as an operating and power-shaping tool. Instead, new politics need to be able to create multitudes of conversations that can evolve towards building consent as the core operational engine.

From our podcast: Redrawing the Human Development thesis for the 21st Century.

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Tomas Diez is a Venezuelan Urbanist specialized in digital fabrication and its implications on the future of cities and society. He is the co-founder and director of Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and is a founding partner of the Fab City Global Initiative. His research interests relate to the use of digital fabrication tools to transform reality, and how the use of new technologies can change the way people consume, produce and relate with each other in cities.

In our boundaryless conversation with Tomas, we explore the democratization of the production of goods, mainly through technological progress and open knowledge sharing, and how this might affect the evolution of platform-enabled ecosystem driven production. We ask Tomas — through the lens of this transformation — what new subjectivities and constituents are empowered to organize in ways that are different, whether synergistic or integrated, with current globalization and digitalization trends. Of course, we cannot avoid touching on the changing landscape of risk and policy-making, as we connect with Tomas in the midst of the global pandemic. We also talk about the future of education and the need to reconsider Western-centric values and ways of knowing.

Tomas invites us to look back on historical points of convergence and realise that we might be witnessing a new convergence around the access to knowledge, which started already before the coronavirus outbreak. This convergence drives the ability to become “fab citizen”, empowered to produce what we need when we need it, rather than resorting to consumerism of industrially produced goods. Because of the availability of digital fabrication, production can become democratized and localised anywhere at any time.

From our podcast: From Fab Cities to Fab Citizens: remaking organising.

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John Robb is the owner and principal analyst for the monthly Global Guerrillas Report, that covers the intersection of War, Politics, and Technology. Its goal is to provide people with the frameworks needed to make sense of our relentlessly chaotic world. In other words, John helps people think clearly at a time when that kind help is in short supply.

In our Boundaryless Conversation with John, we explore how the rapid power shifts we’re witnessing towards open source, and self-organizing networks are going to change the way we organize society and the economy. To build local resilience, local constituencies need to find ways to connect to the global system “on their own terms”, but still have enough local capacity to survive short- to medium-term disruptions.

We touched upon the fact that the emergent future of organizing may not disrupt or obsolete the existing markets, but rather coexist, such as Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks (like in David Ronfeld’s TIMN framework). There’s no way we can get away with ignoring the question concerning technology as society literally “becomes a technological artifact” as John said. The next frontier of this techno-social and entrepreneurial shift is likely the virtual reality space.

From our podcast: Beyond markets: sense-making and organising, in a world of open networks.

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Michel Bauwens is founder and director of the P2P Foundation, research director of CommonsTransition.org (a platform for policy development aimed toward a society of the Commons) and a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group. Michel is a real lighthouse when it comes to collaborative, commons-based production models and works tirelessly since more than a decade in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property.

In our boundaryless conversation with Michel Bauwens, we explore both the epistemological and political/regulatory layers of the transition from the “old” to the “new” ways of organising society. Michel ponders that we will see the emergence of trans-national institutions that connect local constituencies globally and virtually and which are able to protect planetary boundaries. He suggests that the political and regulatory space need stronger commons-based institutions and governance protocols, where the nation state becomes a “partner state” and you have a public commons protocol, like for example in the Bologna regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons in Italy.

We also talk about the fact that we’re moving towards a mutation of consciousness where Western countries are increasingly questioning modernity/progress paradigm, while many Asian countries still think they can get capitalism right in terms of the relationship modernity-nature. Nonetheless, the fact that we’re currently consuming five times our planetary resources to maintain the capitalist economic model might indicate that we’re moving towards a next “pulsation”, or regenerative reaction, to a period of unsustainable extraction.

From our podcast: Commons-based peer production at the edge of a chaotic transition.

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Stowe describes his calling as “the ecology of work and the anthropology of the future”. He’s founder of Work Futures, where he explores critical themes of the future of work, and top writer in Economics, Leadership and Futures on Medium. He also writes extensively about work technologies and serves as a Gigaom editor.

In our boundaryless conversation, we talked with Stowe Boyd about how platforms contribute to changing the relationship between consumers and producers. The conversation helped us understand what this means for re-shaping organizations, as firms optimize for a low transaction cost economy and allow “outsiders” in.
We also talked about fairness and the importance of distributed governance to be transparent and reliable, allowing the players in an ecosystem to operate without constantly “covering their backs”, and that enterprising should not be equated with capitalism, since entrepreneurial intent can vary.

From our podcast: Ecosystemic Organizations and the Future of Work.

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Arthur Brock is Chief Architect of Holochain, an alternative to blockchain for running fully Peer-to-Peer distributed applications and is shaping the social dynamics of our emerging post-industrial economy. Arthur has created more than 100 designs for multi-currency systems, and his software company has built and deployed dozens of those systems.

In our boundaryless conversion, we cover the concept of “Unenclosable carriers” and how new technologies that are more inherently contextual and agent-centric — instead of universal and global consensus-based — may open up new possibilities for coordination and organising, enabling governance through feedback loops.

According to Arthur little energy and time will need to be invested in incumbents and how they adapt to the transition: they will be inherently slow. Instead, energy should be put into figuring out the question of social coherence through the protocols that coordination through “Unenclosable carriers” enable.

Arthur pictures technological tools and consciousness develop in tandem, using the analogue of a ladder: one side of the ladder is consciousness - the story, the vision, the mythos, the ways that you think - and the other is the embodied practical physical tools.

From our podcast: Rewiring the technology to rewire the way we organise.

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Ana Andjelic is Strategy Executive and Doctor of Sociology working on business strategy, marketing, and organizational transformation. Ana has worked with top global advertising agencies, and on the brand-side as a chief marketing executive. In the context of the collaborative economy boom of early 2010, Ana wrote thoughtful reflections on the Guardian and other news outlets. She writes the brand new newsletter “The Sociology of Business” where she explores the transformation of retail, modern brand building, and how new social and cultural patterns impact business.

In our boundaryless conversation, we talk with Ana about the changing relationship between brands and consumers, what role culture plays in this transformation, and how technology can help — but never fully replace — human interaction. Our conversation also included in-depth reflections about how brands are reacting to the current context of Covid-19 and about the increasing need for empathy and social responsibility in these turbulent times. Artificial Intelligence can help brands to understand their communities, but the last mile will always be human.

We also debated how status and consumption are decoupling, through a witnessed trend where peer pressure and social contagion reflects a broader behavioral change towards values focussed around lifestyle and sustainability choices. Niches “layered” on top of horizontal/globalized conversation allow people to have different niches and taste communities to express their aspirations.

From our podcast: Brands in Transition: The Sociology of Ecosystems.

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