Social Media and De-Traditionalisation

In the future, big organisations will not dictate the lives of small individuals. I suggest individualism is mutating. We must come to terms with these alterations that are hard to deny, still harder to make. Individualism has been one of the ingredients that has caused the problems of our society today. I’m not suggesting we revert away from individualism, on the contrary I believe we are becoming more individualistic. That will jolt company culture and have traditional leaders quivering:

1. Shifting from power originating from ownership of property to our individual skills and capability. Man’s labour is increasingly becoming his own especially as it is derived more from his thinking than his muscle power. The individuals who have the means to actualise their characters, intellect and ability, do not need to reserve any rights against a civil society, since society is and will be constructed by them. In the future, brands, institutions and organisations will not construct society but ‘social’ individuals will. The worm has turned.

2. Barriers have been removed. We no longer need organisations on the scale of the last 100 years in order to work and earn a living.

3. Individualism and collectivism, whether we put the purposes of the individual or the purposes of society first. Social networks and communications could cast the future of a balancing act hard to create in current conditions.

4. Engagement with networks, individuals, brands, product development, connections and communities of affinity both virtually and in the real world (IRL.)

5. Management structures will dissipate and become fluid. People will require less management and control and need more enablement and facilitation rather than on going surveillance. Leadership metamorphosing into coaching is the start of the process towards social leadership. Ram Charan (2010) states, “In the end you will have fewer customers, fewer products, fewer facilities, fewer people, fewer suppliers and a stronger company.”

6. Employees, associates and clients will increasingly through social processes, refine, change, reinvent and transform themselves on a regular basis. This has huge implications for human resource teams, leaders, business models, contracts and career management. The brand is no longer the one in charge.

7. It is organisations fault. Companies have required more flexibility and so treated their most expensive resource as a commodity. This has created instability amongst employees. They are looking for stability that they now believe only they can control. People’s demand for experience, space, time and diversity will still need a sense of belonging, but they will not seek it from traditional means such as the family, work and old brands and sectors. They will get it from different cultures, countries, new brands, new friends, new connections (they haven’t even met) and stuff we have not even created yet. This could be called de traditionalisation and it has far wider implications for the Facebook and mobile generations.

8. Self-expression. The merger of public and private lives, the abundance of sharing, the protection of nothing. Risk taking (as seen by the traditionalists,) live experimentation, mass publishing by individuals, transparent lives are all things that we will see daily and then become accustomed to.

9. Emotions will become equal to facts. No longer will we just base decisions on statistics, accounts and facts. Buying decisions are just as much about emotions. Marketing and human resource functions will need to respond to this.

10. Liberation from the vice of tradition. What we have known before is no longer an indication of what we will know in the future. That has always been the case, we just on the whole have ignored it.

Perhaps the most significant implications are the ability and capability of a mass of individuals, without corporate structures, to mass participate, mass connect, mass co create, mass innovate and mass motivate. Our lives are being re shaped by technology and social communications. Globalisation and the alteration of capitalism are the results in this shift in societal behaviour.

Final instalment of this series of blogs tomorrow……..