Remote work is not a fad or a trend, and it’s self-organizing. It’s the natural evolution in how work happens. We might not have seen it coming, but it is here. For those that get the concept, they are riding the wave and embracing the change. In the industrial age, work evolved around the model of the assembly line. As we embrace the information age, work is evolving again. Those that are struggling with the self-organizing work environment are seeing regular business disruption, retention problems, and other challenges. Forcing people back into the old office model simply doesn’t work because work has reorganized itself in the past couple years. To quote Harrison Owen, “trying to organize a self-organizing system is an oxymoron. It’s also stupid.”
Self-Organizing Systems
All systems are self-organizing systems. That may sound like the motto of the department of redundancy department, but if you think about it, this tends to be true. There are often layers added on to the original event and in modern society, there is usually a person or group organizing things. But the original event behind most movements, structures, and practices was self-organized.
A self-organizing system is one that autonomously changes over time based on its characteristics, structure, and organization. All living things are self-organizing systems, but you can also find them in the natural world around us and in the technological products we use every day. Understanding how these systems grow, function, and evolve helps us make better decisions about our lives, businesses, and careers, from the quality of our relationships to the success of our projects to how we create lasting change in our communities and society as a whole.
Biological Models for Work
Large systems, such as a bee colony or ecosystem, can self-organize. Organized dynamics are created when information is gathered and feedback loops are closed. Social insect colonies have a small number of rules that they follow, but they do not have a centralized leadership. The remote work revolution is following a similar model with some simple rules – work-life balance, environmental friendliness, asynchronous communication, and remote access to information and resources. The concept of centralized leadership is also changing. We no longer need a central task master who hierarchically controls all work. The new leadership model is about holding a vision, developing a culture, and ensuring the health and welfare of those doing the work.
Artificial Intelligence Models
Self-organizing systems are a type of artificial intelligence model in which individual agents within the system create order by following simple, non-hierarchical rules. An example is how ants can collectively build complex structures without centralized direction, by each minding its own business and building as it goes. The rise of self-organizing systems illustrates how coordination and complexity arise from individual efforts in unexpected ways – a kind of selflessness that bodes well for the future of collaboration. There hasn’t been any one person leading the remote work revolution. There has been a variety of contributing factors and lots of people who “just get it”.
Riding the Remote Work Wave
Remote work is much like a wave. Some are riding it, and some are trying to stand up to it and are getting knocked down. They get up and try to sturdy their position and they will inevitably get knocked down again. You rarely see someone try to stand up to a wave in real life, but it seems to happen in business all the time.
Our concept of work is changing and self-organizing at the same time. It can’t be stopped and you can’t turn back the clock to 2019. The sooner you can figure out that the wave is going to keep knocking you down if you stand up to it, the sooner you can start learning how to ride the wave.
