Thursday, March 27, 2003

LEADERSHIP, INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE

Networked leadership is needed for a networked society.
Ernie Wilson

Complex leadership is needed for a complex society.
John Daly

I have been thinking again about leadership for ICT for development, and Ernie’s insightful aphorism caught my attention. “Leadership” makes me think of the military, and in the military it is clear that leadership is needed at all levels: from the supreme commander setting overall goals and objectives, from the area commander leading in the development and implementation of strategy to achieve those goals, from unit commanders leading in the development and implementation of tactics, and from lower commissioned and non-commissioned officers. Indeed, Iraq suggests that the increasing power of weapons and speed of action requires more distributed leadership than ever before. Considerable attention has been given to the battlefield information systems that provide leaders at all levels of the military with more information, more quickly than ever before. Perhaps less attention has been paid to the probability that leaders all levels will also need more knowledge than ever before. I am using the term knowledge here to refer to information embodied in the person, and indeed in the equipment that surrounds that person, and embodied in the team in which that person works. If people all though the military system are to take leadership, integrate new information, and act appropriately, it would seem that they will also need more knowledge to do so well!

Formal organizations have been characterized as a social invention that prospered because such institutions were able to handle knowledge and information better than alternative available institutions, especially for the accomplishment of large scale tasks. The military and the church have been seen as prototypical large formal organizations. It has been suggested that the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, together with the growth of the Global Information Infrastructure, have changed the situation. That many large business firms will now downsize, specializing in core competencies, while they outsource goods and services that they formerly produced internally. It has been suggested that this is true because the technology has allowed market institutions to be more effective and efficient in handling the related knowledge and information than would be the business organizations.

I infer that the further implication is that in addition to hierarchical leadership within the business organization, the role for distributed leadership among the firms collaborating through the new ICT intermediated markets will become more important. Again, I would extrapolate to suggest that more widely distributed knowledge will also be necessary for the “new economy” to work well.

I suspect that other institutions also will be potentiated by the technology, such as business communities, civil society, local communities, etc. Perhaps the result will be a realignment of the functions socially allocated to various institutions, and perhaps that will diminish the relative importance of hierarchical, formal organizations as compared with other institutions. Again, this suggests that the “information society” will involve more distributed leadership, information and knowledge than its predecessor.

I would note that when a student in the Graduate School of Administration I had the suspicion that the materials on leadership, power and authority were defined for Dilbertesque organizations in which the pointy headed managers sought to control the engineers and techies. Since my fundamental professional identity is that of an engineer, I knew which side of that battle I favored. I like the idea of a less hierarchical society, influenced by a wider variety of institutions, giving more room for individual initiative and diffusing leadership responsibilities, requiring more general dissemination of information, and broadening the knowledge base of individuals, teams, and communities.

Of course it is hard to predict how such a society will function. Complexity theory offers one area of insights. And thus, I would suggest that a complex society requires complex leadership!

No comments: