Organizations & Network Swarms | #248

November 24th, 2023: Greetings from Barcelona, and happy thanksgiving to all who celebrate! The past couple of years have been some of the best of my life with the unexpected reaction to my book and the expected arrival of my daughter. I truly feel so lucky that doing words on a screen like this and channeling my raw curiosity seems to feed into my life in positive ways. Today, I’m taking the liberty to riff on something I’ve been curious about for a while, how networks and technology are reshaping organizations. I’ll be continuing to explore this, so would appreciate any ideas or thoughts people have to add

+ Thank you to

Kelly Davis

for hosting a meetup in Lisbon this past week, I heard lots of great things from her about people connecting who are on shared paths

+

Vinamrata Singal

is hosting a NYC meetup on December 6th. So far 25+ people have RSVPd so it should be a good group. Check the details here

If you’d like to get sponsored to host an event, you can make that happen by becoming a paid subscriber and becoming a member of the community, which is 15% off until the end of the month:

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Essay: From CRTs to Network Swarms

In 2004, I arrived at my first internship and was assigned a quite large white desktop computer with a 17” CRT monitor. That computer had like 5 programs on it and didn’t come with access to the internet. As was common, all I could browse was the Pratt & Whitney “intranet.” If you don’t know, P&W is an aircraft engine manufacturer and by the end of my summer, I had consumed far too much information on rotors, torque, engine supply chains, and company history. I ran out and ended up getting to know various company policies, perks, and pretty much any other page I could find on the vast site map of internal pages.

This is like 95% accurate, just with higher cubicle walls

I owned a brick phone and sometimes played Snake at my desk, but otherwise, I had little use for it. The only communication I had with others was in meetings or at lunch with the other interns. My cousin was working at the same company, and we figured out each other’s IP addresses. We were able to hack the command line to send direct alerts to each other’s computers. This is how we coordinated when we were leaving and when we’d go to lunch. When I finally got home around 5, I would go on my own desktop computer, a Dell 4600, and check in on the summer adventures of my college classmates via AIM. I couldn’t wait to get back on campus in the fall and get back to a life of friends, learning, college basketball, and partying. College was freedom before I would have to split my time between work and life.

The modern organization looks nothing like it did twenty years ago. The office building might be the same, but the vibe of work, scripts about what’s high status, the possibilities of making money, and more importantly, the technology are profoundly different.

When I reflect on this shift, three things stand out most clearly.

First, the walls between work and life collapsed. The idea that you would not be able to access information or other people without picking up a phone is laughable. Or that you’d waste time surfing a dull intranet ecosystem or have nothing to do doesn’t quite make sense. If I were in that internship now, I’d open a book, listen to a podcast, or message my friends from the supercomputer in my pocket.

As norms have shifted, the divide between home life and work life has eroded. With the two-year-long proof that remote work was very much possible, it no longer makes sense the way it did twenty years ago. “Work-life balance” is not as popular anymore because the two areas bleed into each other so fluidly that we don’t quite know what the term means anymore. But twenty years ago, you couldn’t really work from home unless you had a second desktop computer, and you couldn’t “live from work” because you didn’t have access to anyone except by a desktop phone.

Twenty years ago, concerns about our relationship with work focused on how work would intrude into our personal lives. Now, company leaders are realizing that the boundary between work and life is permeable in both directions and are starting to regret strongly encouraging their employees to bring their “full selves” to work in the 2010s.

Second, work can happen anywhere, and everyone knows it. While some people still pretend as if in-person office work is a sacred ritual, the technological infrastructure for working anywhere in the world via video, voice, or even hologram is ubiquitous, cheap, and easy. While we proved that remote work was physically possible in terms of where people actually sit when they work, many large organizations were incapable of actually changing how they operate on top of this new tech stack and have settled into the holding pattern known as “hybrid work.” Incumbents may muddle along, but any young company is going to wisely leverage cheap technology to find the best talent and also build operational capabilities that might prove to be far more effective than the office-based work that so many are used to over the long run.

Comparing this situation to my first internship, where I could only work from a specific desk in East Hartford, Connecticut, to now, where I can work with almost anyone in the world and be available for different kinds of work beyond my day job without anyone knowing, it’s a big shift in how we think about our roles in society and in organizations.

Both of these are now hyper-charged by a third shift, organizational communications are networked and real-time via productivity apps. This is the biggest transformation that no one pays attention to. Going from phone calls to e-mail to an open networked platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams is like going from walking to a horse to a networked national superhighway of self-driving cars. Being able to contact anyone at any time within a context where such a thing is a “normal” way to work is a big change from the organizations where I began my career. In those organizations, top-down command and control style leadership was normal, information was on a need-to-know basis, and it was not that easy to connect with people across the company.

At the most basic level, this is changing the social behaviors of people within firms. Instead of having to walk to someone’s desk for an answer, you can send them a chat or tag them in the 100 different channels your company uses for productivity. And forget needing to join the company softball league or to “run into” people in the lunchroom; you can spin up your own weird niche subgroup book club on Microsoft Teams in under a week of joining the company and build a bigger following than half the people inside the company.

And this last point, the idea that a random internal employee can build a “following” inside of a company, all from their laptop located anywhere in the world, bringing their full work and personal identities into the conversation?

This could reshape everything we think about power, influence, and organizations. In fact, we are already starting to see it.

Social Networks Go Corporate

Martin Gurri argues in his book Revolt of the Public” that social media has empowered people to quickly organize and “find the others” who share their views, leading to the rise of protest movements worldwide. However, it is actually quite challenging to find individuals with a similar diverse range of views. While some people do find meaningful connections online, it is a non-trivial process of give and take. Much easier is to find other people that are against the same thing. What do you need to have in common to both be against something? Nothing. This is why, as Gurri emphasizes in his book, this is why protest movements fade as rapidly as they emerge.

In the past few years, I have started to see these same things happening inside companies.

The first one that caught my attention happened in February 2021, when the UK Chair of KPMG Bill Michael, hit the news after making comments about complaints from his employees. Here’s what he said:

“We are in a very lucky sector. I have spoken to a lot of partners and people at all sorts of levels where it almost feels like it (the lockdowns/ covid restrictions) is almost being done to them. You can’t take the role of victim unless you’re sick, so I hope you’re not sick and not ill and if you’re not, take control of your life, don’t sit there and moan about it quite frankly.”

Unfortunately, one of his employees leaked the video and they immediately jumped on the most damning (and clickable) phrases:

“Stop moaning.”

and “stop playing the victim card”:

According to reporting, Mitchell was alerted almost immediately (likely through a chat app) and jumped in toward the end of the call to offer an apology. He then followed up more formally over email, writing:

I am sorry for the words I used, which did not reflect what I believe in, and I have apologised to my colleagues. Looking after the wellbeing of our people and creating a culture where everyone can thrive is of critical importance to me and is at the heart of everything we do as a firm.

In 2010, this would have been good enough and the issue would have been dealt with. Back to work.

But it seems that people quickly aligned against Michael inside the company, and he was pressured to resign in under a week.

If you’ve spent enough time in big organizations, especially big service firms like KPMG, you might be surprised at how easily he was forced to give up such a powerful role.

Two months later, a similar thing happened when 2,000 Apple employees signed a petition to force the company to fire Antonio García Martínez over passages from a book published five years earlier. This seems like a lot of people but was only 2.5% of the total corporate staff of 80,000 people.

I don’t want to go much on the argument for or against firing either person. What’s more interesting is that it’s highly unlikely that these things transpire in the same way ten years earlier. Company leaders wouldn’t have had enough visibility (or interest) in the real opinions of their employees, and even if there was a protest, it would have been easily suppressed due to the siloed nature of organizations and the real authority and control of senior leaders.

The age of network swarms

In the case of the Apple firing, the group prepared a detailed letter highlighting all the grievances they had with his book. And it was enough to convince Apple to fire him within hours. Hours. That’s a new kind of power that employees haven’t had in the past, and I sense it’s going to throw everything off balance.

John Robb

, who has been researching war strategy in the networked age since the early 2000s, offers the best frame to understand this new paradigm of power, technology, and networks. He argues that society shifted into “permacrisis” mode after 9/11, defined by ongoing crises that are increasingly complex and feed on each other over time, making any sort of sustained response to anything impossible. He argues that this leads to three major challenges:

1. No allowance for pragmatism or planned response

2. No time for sound decision-making

3. No room for accountability

Deliberate top-down action becomes impossible in such a state, leaving an opening for emergent open-source networks to pop up and demand action. Robb calls these “network swarms,” which are emergent sets of actors that typically follow three stages:

1. A disruptive event occurs, causing people to look for ways to respond.

2. A simple goal (response) that most people can agree on emerges.

3. Once the goal is shown viable, the network can/will mobilize.

In the Apple case, internal employees organized, found each other (likely on internal chat apps), put together a letter, released it, found support on the broader internet via the media, and demanded the firing of Garcia-Martinez. People knew it was viable, as there have been many cases of public outrage getting people fired, and therefore it was the only time. Three hours later, he was gone.

Typical mental models of organizational leadership don’t really deal with this. Swarms are emergent and don’t have an organizational structure. As Robb points out, “Network swarms don’t have a single point of weakness -- there isn’t a formal organization to target or disrupt.”

The intensity of the swarm grows until the demands are met.

The OpenAI Events May Be a Tipping Point

Last week, an emergent swarm of tech leaders, employees, media, and investors formed in response to Sam Altman’s firing. In four days, the swarm led to his reinstatement as CEO. (I’m not going to recap the events, but if you want a good write-up, (

Rohit Krishnan

does a wonderful job here).

Ten years ago, the Board’s actions would have still upset the investors and other high-level actors, but employees would probably have stayed out of it and the media would not have been as intensively involved in such a real-time way. Labor organizers have been consistently disappointed by the lack of interest among knowledge workers in collective action for nearly 100 years, with the famous labor organizer Samuel Gompers famously saying in the 1920s: “Show me two white-collar workers on a picket line, and I’ll organize the entire working class.”

I worked as a Board & CEO consultant from 2015 to 2017. During that time, I observed what many Boards were up to. While they did explicitly talk about power, succession, control, and related topics, hardly anyone mentioned the role of employees in determining the company’s leadership. However, after this past week’s events at OpenAI, I guarantee that every Board agenda in the coming months will be talking about this new reality. While they may not have the language of swarms, they certainly should be investigating how networks of actors inside and outside of the company may quickly disrupt the status quo.

The OpenAI case is unique because the Board was not as experienced as you might expect for a company valued at $80 Billion. However, we can be fairly confident that while they may have expected some outrage from their investors, they likely underestimated what employees would do (and were capable of) and likely did not expect more than 90% of their employees to turn on them so aggressively and quickly in public.

Breaking down the swarm in Robb’s framework:

1. A disruptive event occurs, causing people to look for ways to respond: A surprise announcement created an immediate information storm, followed by employees, the media, and public figures searching for answers (and possible next steps). I imagine that tons of offline messaging and organizing commenced just as quickly.

2. A simple goal (response) that most people can agree with emerges. “Get Sam back in the company and remove the current Board” seemed to emerge as the clear action step that the swarm could then mobilize around.

3. Once the goal is shown viable, the network can/will mobilize. Many things happened here in public and behind the scenes.

   1. Strong statements of support from Microsoft (49% investor) and Satya Nadella, including the temporary hiring of Sam

   2. Support from Media personalities like Kara Swisher, and many tech and business leaders and investors who seemed to be critical of the Board and questioning their claims.

   3. A letter signed by the leadership team (and Ilya, one of the Board members who flipped, seemed to see the writing on the wall)

   4. Coordinated public support from employees:

After only a few days, the remaining Board members had almost no support and were outnumbered by a MASSIVE network swarm. The action seemed inevitable.

Now could the Board members have done anything to anticipate and stop this network swarm? It’s sort of hard to imagine given the manner in which the decisions were made, but a clear takeaway from Robb’s analysis is that these sorts of things will happen no matter what and we may not be able to stop them.

This case is interesting because the swarm did not form in order to achieve a negative aim, such as getting someone fired, but formed in support of someone. This is probably the strongest kind of network swarm and a kind that people are likely more excited to join. A negative swarm has nowhere to go after it achieves its goal but a positive swarm is fighting for something and I suspect in the case of OpenAI morale is higher than it was two weeks ago.

But this happened because Sam Altman had genuine and near-universal support from his team. He was not just a leader in name, he had followers willing to fight for him.

Many leaders in big companies do not have strong followership. They earned their positions by building alliances with other top leaders and mastering hierarchical politics.

Networked Leaders

This is a completely new game, and I think it’s going to challenge current leaders’ mental models of power and authority. People used to get legitimacy and authority from their title and role and some of that will remain. But increasingly, leaders will have to understand that authority will also need to come from a diverse network of support, possibly including people outside of the organization.

Companies will inevitably develop sophisticated mechanisms to squash these swarms and/or prevent them from ever happening, which means increased monitoring, surveillance, and immediate firing of people who try to organize.

Robb shares his own thoughts on what these trends mean for corporate governance and organizations

“Networked swarms are a significant danger to corporate-run governance. These unthinking swarms, leveraging open-source organizational dynamics, can form quickly to coerce governments and corporations into alignment with their goals. In so doing, they actively negate the “voting” preferences people make through purchasing and employment behavior (the swarm-coerced advertising boycott of Twitter was an attempt to negate consumer choice). Worse, the autocratic absolutism of these swarms, in combination with the inherent amorality of corporate bureaucracies (no intrinsic ability to resist moral coercion from swarms), will result in increasingly draconian action by corporations against a global population unprotected by rights that protect their freedoms.”

While this is grim there is also the positive side of things.

Returns to good leadership and coalition building should increase. While companies will increasingly screen incoming employees and be fearful of their ability to organize, happily replacing the middle ranks of the company with effective AI bots and automation, the best companies will be able to soak up great talent through their reactions to the inevitable crises they will face. In the OpenAI situation, no matter what you think of Sam Altman or AI more generally, it’s quite clear that Sam is an experienced network builder who seemed to take a calm and inspiring approach to the situation and had a clear vision of the company that the network was happy to align behind in public.

Given a company of OpenAI’s influence, however, there will almost inevitably be future crises and challenges. It’s worth watching what happens not only at OpenAI but other companies. The tech world is particularly vulnerable to these kinds of attacks because they threaten media companies’ business models and influence and thus employees know they can leak things to the press to find allies. Not to mention the emerging “six religions” as

Venkatesh Rao

captured here. For now, the media may be less interested in other industries which is good for leaders who don’t really understand this new paradigm but in some ways, tech is eating the economy, so it is only time.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve seen endless attempts to coin a new big idea about what kind of leader is most important for today’s company: from the “servant leader” to the “transformational leader,” to the “authentic leader”—all these archetypes were the thing people should aim for.

But really, today’s leader must be a "networked leader," one who understands the power of networks, memes, and swarms, and can navigate them as adeptly as they do the traditional hierarchies of corporate power. And if they can’t? A swarm of people more comfortable with technology will be standing by.

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