Unbundling and Disaggregation

Aspects of the Social Age

Our ability to bundle things together is part of our cognitive architecture: it’s inherent to how we learn, and beyond our own heads to how communicate, and hence imagine and construct our complex societies, as well as continue to evolve them.

We ‘bundle together’ ideas of what we like, enjoy, or need, and call them our ‘culture’, our ‘values’, our ‘beliefs’. We collate rules into systems, laws, and norms. We bundle behaviours into categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. We pull together ideas of labour, organisation, reward, and control, into more fundamental ideas of ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, ‘citizenship’, and ‘nation’.

In my broadest work I describe the Social Age not simply as one ‘thing’, but rather a collection of changes which, in aggregate, describe a fundamentally evolved ecosystem. And one feature of the Social Age is an unbundling, or disaggregation, of what came before.

This makes some sense, as the ‘bundling up’ of things is essential to the creation of coherent, consensual structure (e.g. children go to school, take exams, graduate etc), but equally it traps us within epistemes, or ‘ways of knowing’ that blind us, or occlude, new truths.

I’ve been exploring this in a broad array of contexts over the last few years. In the work on AI we see how AI disaggregates conception of mastery, value, trust, expertise, and labour. In the Planetary Philosophy work we see how notions of citizenship and nation are being aggressively unbundled by both parallel and alternative structures of capability, culture, security, and belonging.

I shared recently new work around ‘epistemes’ – ways of knowing – and I used this in the Strategic AI workshop yesterday: to explore how our ‘ways of knowing’ represent not simply contextual perspectives on knowledge, but also represent structures of power. Power and system, in this sense, are intertwined. Like the notion of ‘citizenship’ is not abstract, but rather a foundational concept in our structures of national power. You cannot be a nation is none of your citizens believe that they belong, or pay tax, or feel safe. Especially if they are feeling that they ‘belong’ somewhere else.

Learning itself, in a structural sense – both within Organisations, and in our broader education systems – is almost certainty something being aggressively unbundled by emergent social norms and technologies, despite certain resistance from incumbent structures. Whilst we have always used terms like ‘personalised learning’ and ‘on demand’ learning, learning ‘in the flow’, or ‘at point of need’, it turns out that when a technology arrives that can finally give it to us, only then do we realise that this abstracts, or de-powers, much of the structures of learning that we inhabit. Right now it feels like a very valid question to ask, what do we actually want from ‘learning’ functions within our organisations and society, because much of what we do is now focussed on quantification, control, or somewhat abstract economic ideas around skills and behaviours. We run the risk of slipping from enabler (limited by technology), to gatekeeper, or guard, defending against technologies that have slipped our grasp.

In the Socially Dynamic Organisation work, I argue that we need to consciously consider our broadest aspects of Organisational Design, to create structures that are less industrial, more interconnected. Changeable by design, in part because they do not so tightly bundle together as many features. Consider if we disaggregate notions of ‘task’, ‘role’ and ‘job’, creating instead a focus on team and tribal structures, a capability in definition, measurement, data analytics and so on, as opposed to the distinctly functional and industrial notion of directing people to do stuff.

A lens of unbundling, understanding the forces and mechanisms of disaggregation, can be helpful both to ‘undo’ aspects of our current understanding, but also to conceive and prototype alternative possible futures. An organisation constrained by legacy notions of structure will struggle to prototype, or even imagine, new ones.