Ross Mayfield tells me I must, must read the new book by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?. I haven't had a chance, but I did see [pointer from Ross] an interview with the authors at Wharton's Managing Technology column, interviewed by Kevin Werbach.

Many of the premises that were developed in the piece seemed almost shopworn -- executives need to think about competitive advantage in dynamic terms rather than static, sustainable advantage requires people at the edge being able to perform new work, the need to be faster to develop capabilities faster than competitors, and so on.

I think what I was struggling with most is the implicit premise: the book is written for executives of large companies, rather than speaking to individuals living in a new world. If it's people at the edge doing all this invention of new capabilities, isn't that where we will see the new use of social tools? Is that itself one of these capabilities? My bet is that fatcat senior executives are not going to invent much of anything in this regard, although -- in typical self-congratulatory, great-man-theory-of-history fashion -- if various front-line engineers, customer support staff, or product managers develop innovative ways of applying social tools that enable increased productivity, better products, and more profits, the lions of industry will certainly take credit for it.

One comment in particular jumped out, though:

[from Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge? Ask John Hagel and John Seely Brown]

Hagel: One of the big issues we see is that to date most of the social software tools we are talking about have tended to be one-off kinds of tools. You have instant messaging, Wikis, a whole array of collaboration workspaces that have been developed, but there isn't an operating environment where all these social software tools can come together in a seamless environment. Part of the opportunity here is that as you create these environments that are open ended so you can plug in social software tools as they develop and evolve, you can also create a record-keeping facility. By doing that, not only are you helping people to resolve the exceptions, but you are also creating a record of who came together over what kinds of issues, what was the context of the issue, and what was the resolution of the issue. That creates the basis for doing pattern recognition and dissemination of the learning to a broader part of the organization.

This is an echo of the Nerdvana meme I have been chasing, although my desire for the Nerdvana model is not really motivated by an enterprise vision of analysis and feedback about handling exceptional cases in defined workflows -- I spent what feels like eons chasing a dream of the perfectability of process, and have left it aside. While I believe it is still useful to define business scenarios -- how to process an insurance claim, and the like -- increasingly, the work left to people are the exceptions, where automation fails. In this domain, the language of process holds no power.

The dynamics of group interaction and the interaction between groups, when all is not known, and people need to invent solutions, is very different. The critical factor is not each person doing the role assigned to them, but each person applying their own personal knoweldge and network to the issue at hand, based on their own imperfect reasoning. This moves into the realm of Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds: swarm intelligence works where people do not converge to a consensus, where they independently apply their own thoughts, and then share them through social connections. Paradoxically, providing the same information to everyone can lead to bad outcomes, because it can lead to information convergence, and then to bad decision making.

So the vision for the Nerdvana client is not about the enterprise gathering information about how individuals respond to exception situations, so that the enterprise home office weenies can analyze it and send it all back out to the edge as a new operations manual. Nerdvana is about the individual, managing in a complex and fragmented world, but bringing together all the threads of our social relationship of the world into one metaphor. It is a focus on the needs of the individual, not the need of the enteprise to have it all managed in one seamless, centrally controlled social architecture

Learning naturally follows social paths, so I think all of the sorts of things that Hagel and Brown are talking about will take place at the edge. The future of work is that there is only edge, no center: there will be no one at HQ analyzing invention going on at the edge. Any analysis will be direct, on both sides of the social connections that link us. Any model of social architecture -- as outlined by Brown and Hagel -- will need to account for the intensely personal, as opposed to corporate, forms of social interaction that increasingly typify the world of work.