- Increasing the connectivity of people, who will benefit from enhanced collaboration ,to achieve good things better, faster, differently, is a good idea. We need to augment that connectivity and incentivise collaboration.
- Increasing the connectivity of people who are slow, sloppy, substandard, uncommitted or combinations, will achieve mediocrity faster and at a bigger scale. So, not a good idea. We need to decrease connectivity and disincentivise collaboration.
- Hyper-connectivity and hyper-collaboration of good committed citizens, corporate or otherwise, is desirable. We need to incentivise connectivity.
- Hyper-connectivity and hyper-collaboration of terrorists, extremists and anarchists is undesirable. Unless of course for people in those baskets. We need to disincentivise connectivity.
- Digital connectivity can enhance grassroots collaboration for the uprising against dictatorship, and also can enhance its rapid quash. A twitter revolution is also a twitter contra revolution
- In hyperconnected structures, bad ideas travel faster and reach more people.
- In hyperconnected structures, innovation may be faster by involving more people.
- Hypoconnectivity is not a God. It’s a blind tool, an empty highway that doesn’t know, does not care, who is traveling with anything from altruistic behaviours to suicide vests.
- A popular network of connections (digital platform) with heavy user presence, will get more popular and will attract more use, even if the objectives or content are mediocre.
- A non popular network of connections (digital platform) with poor user presence, will get less popular and attract less use, even if the objectives or content are fabulous. Don’t let good ideas dwell in poorly populated (curated) digital platforms. These ideas will die because their credibility is associated with the low membership or participation.
At least a few of these should make you think, or at least read twice, or at least irritate because it’s counterintuitive. At least half challenge the conventional, unconscious view that connectivity and collaboration are always good and always deserve a place in corporate values.
Behaviours are blind, neutral, amoral. Their consequences never are.
First posted in July 2018.