Power, Influence, and Collaboration

My faculty workshop on Collaborative Technology Tools is now behind me. Early in the workshop, while introducing the historical and philosophical background for collaborative decision making and knowledge, I quoted Lawrence Wright writing in his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. In discussing the lack of communication between the CIA, NSA, and FBI, Wright talks about those individuals who had information that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks, but were unable to communicate in a coordinated manner through the bureaucratic maze of national intelligence. He says "...excellence was the enemy of any bureaucracy. (317)" If we believe collaborative knowledge to be most valuable, it is easy to see how bureaucracy might stand in the way of good decision making.

Twentieth century macro-sociology focused on bureaucracy in the works of Weber, Homans, and Durkheim. It was the scaffolding for power; how else could one wield authority with a group of people who had no kinship ties without a bureaucracy. While states have used this structure for five hundred years, other organizations such a corporations and educational institutions are much newer players. As David Weinberger's "new shape of knowledge" begins to evolve, the notion of power is slowly eroded. The stakeholders or "gatekeepers" as Weinberger calls them, feel threatened by the new collaborative tools that rely on influence more than power. Plato's famous line "knowledge is justified true belief" fits as well with our current collaborative tools as it did in the Classical Greek Agora. Slowly, but surely, the heavy weight of knowledge currently available to all of us will collapse the traditional compartmentalized scaffolding. Power will slowly bow to influence, and influence requires people skills, either face-to-face or using the new collaborative tools.