Andrea Saveri on The Future of Work: Amplified Individuals, Jobs & Organizations Institute for the Future - founded in 1968
How to forecast the future, applied to business, government and non-profits
Think about the future though aware of the present
Amplified individual uses twitter to get information out. Thinking of global events and tweets becoming quick and powerful ways to sort, filter and disseminate information.
Amplified individuals are also highly collaborate - work with others to collectively solve problems, tap into an contribute to the intelligence of crowds. Re: businesses this might expand staff without necessarily hiring new staff. Through social media can actually attract people to you to provide people to you without hiring somebody.
Wikis - a great example with wikis on just about everything. Imagine being a small business, putting up a wiki page about a new process, technique or technology you're inviting other people to contribute to that knowledge base. Identify your own need (HR: you get other people to scratch your itch).
Prediction Markets - imagine what it would take for small businesses to do their own market forcasting, accessing intelligence from a broad community about a focused question. See: http://us.newsfutures.com/home/home.html
Another way to use sociology and collective action might be to bring in ludic concepts. Gaming allows different kinds of associations and people get interested in solving puzzles etc...
Amplified Individuals are highly improvisational. Andrea tells us about a group of work-from-home people who band together to work in a real space and share infrastructure and resources.
Amplified Individuals are also highly augmented. They employ systems, tools, and hacks to enhacne cognitive abi
lities and coordination skills. This is particuarly important for small businesses as they are likely to fill many hats, the kinds of techniques and practises to enhance memory, attention etc...is important.
See chumby - way to control information. Have a look at the chumby website. Totally into social media, they have a section where the audience (are they really called customers?) can upload (via flickr) their own photos or videos (via youtube) of a chumby: http://www.chumby.com/pages/showoff.
Key Characteristics:
moddable, influency, ping quotient (measure of your responsiveness to other people's requests for engagment, your propensity and ability to participate), protovation (fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles), open authorship (creating content for public consumption and modification), multi-capitalism (fluency in working with different capitals, eg. natural, intellectual, social and financial), longbroading (thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the bigger picture, can you rise above and look at the higher-level system), signal/noise management, cooperation radar (ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task)
Why Important for Small Biz?
This really does amplify scope for info. Individuals have the motivation and know-how to create new strucutres and processes that bypass traditional constraints
Key Ways:
Economies of sociality
Asymmetric power
Responsive resilience
New market niches
***Questions
How to monetize the individual? Go to that multi-capitalisation skill. Understanding of the relationship between building social captial and reputation might be a way to convert that into monetising. What do you give away and what do you charge for? This is a real area of fluidity right now. We shouldn't think about monetisation alone...we should think about other kinds of capital.
If you're talking about micro-businesses and the amount of time that should be spent on this kind of social networking/web. Andrea: it's not just a chunk of time...what is it that they're doing on the web. Are they participating in a discussion related to their job...that would be related to their work. The question is why are you going out there? You need a good reason for using that kind of technology, a way to enhance the staff that actually makes them more productive.
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