2018-04-04
First, assume that “there is a limit to the number of people with whom humans can communicate.
If one president tries to communicate with a large number of people in this situation, he or she will need someone in between to “get the word out”.
In the figure, one person only interacts with a maximum of three people, but a total of 10 people are communicating.
The larger the organization, the more people are in the role of “getting the word out”MiddleManagement
On the other hand, if the information transmission from the president to employees is limited, it is possible to communicate to a large number of people without using this method.
- Even before the Internet, the president could gather employees in the square and speak to them in high places.
- The Internet has made it possible to communicate at any time of the day without restrictions of place and time.
Technological advances and new information transfer mechanisms will create new forms of teamwork.
- Above is a story about how the president’s ability to disseminate information has increased, making it easier to create an organization with a shared visionGroupware
- The creation of a collaborative editing mechanism called a wiki led to the creation of a distributed and asynchronous lexicographic organization called Wikipedia.
- Many open source communities have been created by the ability to send source code revision diffs via email.
However, this “communication of information from the president to employees” is a one-way process, and if the reverse were simply done, the president’s information processing capacity would be insufficient and he would get a flat tire.
Since conveying the president’s words is “making one into many,” it could be easily accomplished by the easy to reproduce nature of digital data, with a computer system in between, but “making many into one” is not yet technically feasible.
Of the “conveying voice” functions of middle managers in hierarchical organizations, the part of listening to subordinates’ words, summarizing them, and conveying them to the president has not yet been mechanized, and if this becomes technologically possible, there will be another major change in the way teamwork is done.
On the other hand, teal organization seems to think that the “information needs to be gathered by the president,” which is the implicit assumption here, is an unfounded assumption due to the success of hierarchical organizational structures to date.
2023-05-08
Of the “conveying voice” functions of middle management, the part of listening to the words of subordinates, summarizing them, and conveying them to the president has not yet been mechanized, and if this part becomes technologically feasible, there will be another major change in the nature of teamwork.
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