AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENTS

Authentic Assessments

Authentic Assessments

Scenario One: Small Companies, Large Networks

Imagine that it is now the year 2015....

The corporation of the late twentieth century was just a transitional form. It lasted more than one hundred years, but few corporations of that kind remain today. Now, looking back at the "dinosaur" era in which General Motors, Microsoft, and Sony stalked the earth, we are most aware of the tiny "mammals"-entertainment production companies, construction project teams, and consultant work-groups-which operated without much public notice back in the 1990s, only to become the prototypes of today's modern organization.

Today, nearly every task is performed by autonomous teams of one to ten people, set up as independent contractors or small firms, linked by networks, coming together in temporary combinations for various projects, and dissolving once the work is done. When a project needs to be undertaken, requests for proposal are issued or jobs to be done are advertised, candidate firms respond, sub-contractors are selected, and workers are hired largely on an ad-hoc basis

Consider the design of automobiles: In a typical project, a variety of independent firms form competing coalitions, to explore alternative designs for the electric system, the chassis, or the task of putting the car's subsystems together. Some of these firms are joint ventures; some share equity; some are built around electronic markets that set prices and wages. All are autonomous and self-organizing. All depend on the ubiquitous, high-bandwidth, transaction-heavy electronic network that connects them to each other. A highly-developed venture capital infrastructure identifies promising teams and provides financing.

Authority is still evident, but not through commands. A small "Chevrolet/Saturn" central company still has senior people who exercise their judgment by choosing where to invest their R&D, marketing, and production capital. But groups also try wild-eyed ideas that turn out to be very successful-and financially rewarding for their participants. For instance, one team of four people created a factory for nano-engineering individualized lighting systems for each car's grille. They bucked conventional wisdom when they built it, and all became millionaires in the process.

There are two key elements of this scenario: the fluid networks for organizing tasks and the more stable communities to which people belong as they move from project to project. Part of the analysis and development of the scenarios has involved collecting examples of current or historical organizations that embody aspects of the scenarios. These examples can help provide a concrete sense what the future organizations might be like and some of the issues they may face. Consider, for instance, the following examples of organizations today that embody aspects of the first scenario.

One potential current model might be the guilds and unions which serve workers in the film industry. Because screen actors and writers, as well as the technicians who staff film crews, can frequently obtain work only on a sporadic basis, the labor organizations which serve these groups are set up to accommodate the periodic nature of employment in the ...