Weaving the future of organization — Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash

Remote work is highly disruptive!

In 2009, Clay Shirky published the book “Here Comes Everybody”, in which he shows how social media and collaboration tools radically reduce transaction costs for coordination, resulting in the emergence of new ways of organizing human interaction, which defied traditional organizational concepts. Early examples he looks at are Flickr and Wikipedia.

The technology that enabled those platforms also made remote work possible.

Today, we can collaborate with people with whom only a few years ago we would have never managed to keep in touch easily, much less work together on a daily basis. Taking advantage of these new possibilities, organizations create more and more complex organizational structures requiring employees to work in cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary teams spanning many time zones, and regional realities.

It should be clear by now that remote work is here to stay, and I would go one step further. It will drive a lot of change in all markets as well as inside many organizations in the coming years.

Let’s look at remote work through the lens of Peter Diamandis’ framework of the 6Ds of tech disruption:

1. Digitized: As mentioned above, collaboration technology is making it possible to manage relationships and create structures that previously relied on “analog” in-person exchange.
2. Deceptive: Remote or distributed work has been a reality for a few years already. It is deceptive because many larger organizations deploy matrix structures and have become complex project organizations without realizing that they are creating a remote work reality in the process.
3. Disruptive: Since we are working remotely most of the time, why do we still need physical offices? Why meet in person? Distributed organizations can grow and change much faster than traditional ones because they do not need to find more physical space and build infrastructure before starting something new or changing course.
4. Demonetized: Building an organization is costing less and less. High one-time investments are needed less and less. Even companies, which produce physical goods can now lease assembly lines instead of building their own.
5. Dematerialized: FROGS! We will see them outmaneuver traditional companies very soon.
6. Democratized: To me, this will have the biggest impact on our organizational landscape because it will affect how organizations are run. In a distributed work context leaders cannot guide each of their employees in every step of their work process anymore because complexity and distance make that simply impossible. This new way of working gives the individual remote worker a lot of freedom, but in return requires a high level of self-management and will require organizations to adopt more and more horizontal structures. Whether organizations will make this shift successfully or not, will highly depend on the strength and depth of the relationships that make up the organization and the trust people have in one another.

In sum, remote work and distributed structures will disrupt not just the markets they are in, but will also radically change how we get work done within and between organizations by incentivizing self-governance, transparency, and inclusion. What remains to be seen is when we hit the tipping point that reveals that we are indeed witnessing exponential change, and who the powerful actors in this new scenario will be.

Are you and your business ready?

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First Published on LinkedIn on May 2, 2019