What’s this all about?
“Socio-techtonics” is a principle I coined many years ago by combining “socio-technical” with “tectonic“. Perhaps as a result of moving to California back in the 80s, I began to notice how organizational stresses can behave a lot like earthquakes, building slowly usually without visible effect until at some point they are triggered into erupting in sudden crises often serious out of proportion to their nominal cause. These crises can be as devastating as any 6.0 shake on the San Andreas or Cascadia Faults, at least for those they surround.
In retrospect, it’s usually clear how these crises result from various socio-technical imbalances that have been bottled up and suppressed by the organization for what seemed like good reasons at the time. Once such a crisis has erupted, it’s usually much more difficult to find an acceptable solution or solutions than it would have been to attend to the building stresses. Managers walk a fine line between “fixing what ain’t broke” and waiting for socio-techtonic Armageddon.
In theory, we ought to be able to do better than the geologists. Our raw material should be easier to observe, and certainly moves at a faster pace. But we don’t understand any better than they do why something suddenly slips sideways or under something else, bringing the whole thing suddenly crashing down. And our retrospective explanations are seldom either much more appreciated or useful in the next situation.
Our new Medium publication called Socio-techtonic Change is intended to be a forum for thinking creatively about how these kinds of stresses build up and, if possible, how they might be averted or at least predicted. I want to encourage contributions by all those who want to consider how good socio-technical thinking might reduce or alleviate socio-techtonic crises in organizations. I hope we can explore the value of this metaphor in as many circumstances as possible.
I’m taking the liberty of seeding the publication with a few of my own thoughts on the subject, but I really hope that we can attract a critical mass of contributors as quickly as possible. It’s perfectly okay to be speculative and/or indirect in your submissions. We’re not going to publish nonsense or wildly off-target material, but imaginative extensions of the metaphor can be appropriate. One test of a good metaphor is its ability to suggest new things about both new and familiar phenomena; it’s those interesting insights I hope we can capture.
As self designated acting editor of this publication, I’ll be happy to respond to questions, ideas, thoughts, reactions, suggestions, and anything else you’d like to share. The test of publishability in Socio-techtonic Change isn’t whether or not you agree with me, but whether your contribution advances the dialogue. We are semi-formal. This is hardly going to be a professional journal, so a degree of informality is quite acceptable, but we value good writing and effective communication. I’d like it to be a place where you can share ideas that are not necessarily fully formed, in the hopes that dialogue can advance the conversation. Priority will always be given to submissions that creatively engage the ideas of others, either published here or elsewhere.
I’ve thought for a long time that some kind of semi formal publication like this might fill a useful niche. Medium provides a great vehicle for this kind of idea sharing — open enough to be interesting; curated enough to be worth reading. If you’re interested in appearing in Socio-techtonic Change, please feel free to contact me through any of the channels below about becoming one of our authors..
I’m not trying to supplant any established professional publications in the sociotechnical area, nor am I under no illusions that we will go viral anytime soon. But I do hope that we can accumulate something approaching a critical mass of socio-techtonic insights and through creative use of the metaphor encourage new ways of thinking about these problems. It will work only if the sociotechnical community takes the idea seriously enough to share in this forum. I’ll do all I can to help it along, but it’s your ideas that will make it a success.
Please join me by becoming a Socio-techtonic Change author and contributor! If you want to put a little time in it, you can even become an editor!Let’s try to do some good and perhaps have some fun while we do it!
