When Tim Berners-Lee first talked about the semantic web back in 2001, he was describing the coming methods and technologies that would be able to understand the meaning, or semantics, of information on the internet.
This was in the days before Google (sidenote: can anyone remember them?) and times have changed. Today we expect our searches to intelligently be able to serve up what we’re looking for. Our social connections form a highly sophisticated and networked group, a supersized mind, at our disposal, day and night.
With some irony I find myself writing about the semantics of the word semantics. There’s a reason, because today it seems to me the definition that’s most apt is Alfred Korzybski’s, he of ‘the map is not the territory’. The most ironic thing is that the web world’s sense of the semantic might just be the thing that ends up allowing the full potential of the internet to elude its grasp, if we cling onto it.
Alfred Korzybski’s definition of semantic is ‘a system for looking at the semantic reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event, symbolic or otherwise’.
We’re in the middle of a semantic revolution in that sense, and the power that enables it is not ultimately technical but biological. Technology is creating the smarts for human evolution to take place and scale with a whole host of commercial implications.
When people connect through the web, they connect to Alfred Korzybski’s definition of semantic, they connect to ‘a system for looking at the reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event, symbolic or otherwise’. They look for meaning in this way, they look to be moved.
Yet, according to Forrester Customer Experience Research conducted in June, 67% of all customers find their online experiences an emotional void. Roughly two-thirds of shoppers now scour customer online review sites before making a purchase, and 57% of customers weigh up and trust the suggestions, tips, endorsements and criticisms of their fellow customers before deciding to buy. User-generated reviews are more trusted than any form of advertising in the purchase-decision process. All that adds up to a big unsatisfied gap and a big business case that argues for doing something about it.
The smart money’s gone out of search as we’ve known it and into understanding the anthropology of the online communities of interest we now occupy, whether they’re organizations, brands, platforms or networks. These are biological organisations, cultures with their own recognizable way of doing things, they own identifiable digital footprint, and they’re online.
The TEDxPennQuarter talk in Washington I did recently talked about this and reinventing organization, with a new metaphor to understand how we organize, the framing of our organizations and brands as biological species.
Social and anthropological observation shows us there are a huge number of ways of we can organize and that organization comes in very fluid, fascinating, diverse and dynamic forms.
We’re a lot more sophisticated than we were when the commercial organization was first invented. We understand, both commercially and socially, that every organization is unique, and needs to be, in order to provide a differentiating advantage. So it’s worth thinking about organizations as biological entities because DNA is competitive advantage and considering that we might be on the cusp of creating an exciting new genetic code for how we can do business.
New technologies and the amount of data at our fingertips are enabling us to do this. The question is, are organisations really developing strategies that can make the most of their social diversity and liberate the social value that’s on offer to help them sustainably flourish and thrive?
We know that social ties boost survival. The next step is to engender cultural, communal strength of purpose and belonging, something that some brands still shy away from. Social media for many’s a tool best to be kept at arm’s length, in keeping with the way media’s always been managed. This is a mechanical mindset and a damaging one.
The biological organisation, by comparison, is one you can, quite literally, tell by its markings. It’s out to make a social impact. It gets to be the leader of the pack by doing what it does in its own unique way. This is next generation Darwinianism, when it’s distinctive and inclusive social leadership that leads to the survival of the fittest.
In essence organizational development hasn’t changed Darwin’s thesis was published and Eadward Muybridge made the first stuttering images of man in motion, even though technology, and our levels of insight and understanding about our world around us, has changed dramatically since then.
The fluid and iterative ways people are organizing themselves around real needs and in real time are making way for an information-led evolution. Creating connected, collaborative, dynamic, participatory and engaged business asks us to shift from being mechanics to biologists.
Maybe it’s time to re-examine the genetic identity of organizations in more detail and gain a deeper understanding of sustainable metabolic rates and lifecycles, and the commercial opportunities on offer, based on how we gather information and how we connect to people.