In case some prejudice seems to be creeping in, I want immediately to clarify something important: these are nice folks as a rule. Admittedly many of them don’t seem to know what to make of “people like us”, and their responses to chats and conversations vary from dismissiveness to a kind of wishful yearning that they could have “my” lifestyle. But on the whole they’re doing what they perceive as their best to improve the world by whatever criteria they feel are most crucial.

But if I wanted a bit more hyperbolic effect, I might call these nice folks the remnant of the traditional business community. They may not feel so good about that, though I don’t mean them harm by imposing the modifier.

I admit though: I have, through these dozens of conversations and interviews, tried to convey that “people like us” often see them as a remnant, when we consider them at all.

Beyond a confirmation of the inherent niceness of people, and their critical diversity of toolkits, what have I learned with this two-year project? I’m making some notes.

Ubiquitous Overextension

As a rule these folks seem to schedule their time poorly. They’re always in a hurry, or late, or interrupting a conversation to take a call. They prefer to hold public meetings and events during the wee hours of the morning, or after work. They dilute even their nominally entertaining outings with one another (typically golf, of all things) with business concerns: “networking” or speeches or award-giving rituals.

I suspect that in part these habits are a mix of signaling and territorial behaviors, part the echoes of constraining sociotechnical infrastructure, and the habituation to the Received Clock.

Signaling is what you might expect, if you know some of “us” and some of the remnant.

“Somebody like me” signals I have the luxury of meeting you for two hours in the middle of the afternoon to discuss the philosophy of business and the next ten years’ forecast for banking and redevelopment in the state. I will meet you right now, if you like, or I can tweet you or phone you or send you an email or open up a Google Docs shared file for you to edit, right now. Because I can, you should be able to as well.

The signal of the remnant’s early morning meeting, the rushed meeting between other meetings, the truncated half-hour refresher or the hurried chat in the parking lot between events is: There is a hierarchy of demands on my time, and they are numerous. My hands are tied; we can go this far and no farther. Depending on the worldview of the person involved in sending this signal, the implication is either (1) a message about how egalitarian they are, that they have two dozen people from all walks of life to deal with, and that each gets their fair share, or (2) that you only rate this much time based on your relative importance in the scheme of things.

Both groups are saying something, in the way they set their time up, about their expectations for the other party. But those expectations are different for “us” and for institutional players.

The sociotechnical constraints seem to stem from these different senses of “institution”, as well.

I know (more or less) where everybody with whom I am concerned is, right now. Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, the phone (and SMS), email and a variety of tagged social media sites that work on a longer timescale keep my network in a kind of dynamic informative tension, like a spiderweb I suppose—though one that overlaps with all my friends’ and colleagues’ own spiderwebs. And when the unexpected comes up, I have these five or seven channels with which to reach somebody, ranging from speaking into the air to make the molecules vibrate in a sensible way, to a phone call to a for: tag on a delicious.com link.

The folks in the remnant, though, they seem blind and deaf somehow. I’ve often wondered if this is an adaptation; I suspect it’s a protective mechanism on a couple of levels. To have to be somewhere to communicate can be a feature or a bug, depending on what you want. To have to see somebody to have a conversation, to fail to record notes and make each meeting revisit old business, to spend so much time physically traveling… these offer up moments for planning, or for self-reflection. They reinforce immediate, physical social cues that are wired into our meat. They can be off-putting to “folks like us”, but if you think about it they can also help establish community boundaries and strengthen internal connections within larger-scale businesses “people like us” don’t interact with.

These cultural differences come up surprisingly often when you’re attuned to them.

I can think of several times I’ve watched “one of us” being told “I’ll have to get back to you once I’ve checked my schedule,” by a member of the remnant. You can see the frustration on both sides: schedules, among us, are made to be changed and adapted to on the spot; they’re agile and flexible and dynamic and our worklives are a matter of tracing an efficient path through the coming days. “Our” success comes from acting as quickly as possible upon the smallest tasks which provide the greatest return. The remnant’s schedules, on the other hand, are planned things, contingent on many stakeholders’ external decisions, written in the slow-flowing glass of institutional infrastructure.

The impatience “one of us” feels when told we’ll hear someday eventually about a scheduled event? That impatience comes from the execution risk that this imposes on our lives: risk that what would otherwise be a linearly separable quantum of social interaction and business value is left as an unknown in our agile schedules, with no clear likelihood of actually occurring at all, disrupting the flow through unaccounted linkages and forcing us to deal with unforeseen repercussions. The confusion one of the remnant feels when asked to make time right now is the disregard for the institution, for the plan, for the process that tries to be “rational” in balancing the utility functions of many stakeholders trying to cooperate on many schedules.

As a consequence, there are deep currents and implications of schedule-setting revolving around the notion of responsibility. “We” are responsible to ourselves, and to our social networks—an often global, contingent and ephemeral cloud of people who are effectively invisible to members of the remnant. The remnant have well-established channels for coordination, and the Company or the other large institutional boundaries make the breadth and bounds of those coordination networks publicly visible.

One correspondent of mine, living as he does at the peak of the local branch of a global remnant organization, often politely tells me how he envies “my flexibility in working whenever I want.” I’ve tried to explain that I work, in the sense of coordinating and driving this jinking spiderweb I ride through life from minute to minute, from the time I open my eyes to the time I fall asleep. But he cannot see that network or the effects I cause in it or I feel from it, and lacking an alternative signal he imagines I am sitting here philosophizing in a life of leisure and guileless meandering dilettantism. And I in turn write him off as a kind of fixed point in town, and expect him to be exactly the same in two weeks, doing exactly the same things as he was yesterday.

And think of planning and project management, across this cultural gap between the remnant and “us”: When I find my occasional correspondent is actually acting, when I discover she has unexpectedly “moved ahead” on a musing project notion we touched on briefly in our meeting three months back, when it comes to light she’s hared off like a juggernaut and done something that seemed like a good idea back then… how often was it the right thing for her to do? Our timescales are so often misaligned, that I can make a dozen iterative changes in a document or program or community design in a weekend, where she has scheduled an appointment with her staff to set up a committee in a few days. A crowd “of us” may have made three versions and discarded them, moved on and established both a position statement and a draft RFP in the time a government or business or church or other remnant institution has coordinated its way into considering what to do.

Just this week a friend in the remnant sent me a link to a “call for contributions” for a meeting to be held several months in the future, which will involve travel and planning and meetings and publishing and setting up bank accounts and LLCs and all kinds of stuff. But in the time between our original conversation and the “call for contributions”… the problem has gone away. It’s solved, at least in my context.

Our different attitudes toward time and action are alternate solutions to the same problems of coordination and planning and risk amelioration in an uncertain world. “We” are no better off for doing five times the work, for hiding or not even knowing who we affect in our ephemeral social networks, than the remnant is for spending all this energy on institutional identity and mid-range planning meetings.

But think for a moment about the remnant—whether you’re a member or not—and consider what happens when a traditional institution says they “need somebody to do social networks for them”, when they explore “modern” methods of customer response management, when they schedule meetings with “us” over golf outings (of all things) or at 7am in the morning, or in a City Hall five miles from “our” workplaces.

When we take the time to do the retrospectives, words like “blindsided” and “unmanageable” and “retrenching” always seem to crop up in internal discussions among the remnant. Terms like “obsolete” and “artificial” and “lame” tend to crop up in whatever appraisals of these remnant projects “we” are willing to record. “Lame” is particularly interesting, if you think about it etymologically: halting, crippled, disabled, slow.

How many times have you seen these clashes in the use and perception of time? In schedules and planning?

Can you see the remnant among the institutions around you? And can you see the ephemeral (nearly invisible) swarming social networks that “we” depend upon instead?

Which is bigger? Which is more important? Which should have the most influence in the coming economic transitions?

How prepared are you, whichever side you live on, for the role the other side must play? What will you do to reconcile these conflicts in habit and perception? How will you schedule your time and make coordinating plans across this cultural divide?

I want you to see a hundred or a thousand of “us” in every town of 100000, with our overlapping social networks and value streams and contingent agile plans thrashing wildly on a minute-by-minute basis on a dozen channels, permeating the infrastructure of the remnant. With little mass individually, but velocity enough to impart considerable momentum. Imagine then the effect on the remnant, these large, many-bodied institutions moving at a lockstep pace, surrounded by these thrashing waves of attention, of goals and actions changing faster than they can perceive them… invisibly in fact.

I see erosion. I see weathering, and seeds growing in cracks in a rock face.

But this doesn’t happen imperceptibly, from the rocky remnant’s point of view. The newspaper can perceive “us”, though it cannot make the connection between individuals and their invisible networks. The Chamber of Commerce can perceive “us” in their declining rolls, and executives there are scrambling to find ways to adapt. No doubt the remnant business development people are starting to falter and wonder what’s broken, though they (and the city) clearly imagine they stand firmly alone in a field. The University, the arts groups, the anchor businesses, the marketing infrastructure: what do they feel?

They are surrounded, invaded, and increasingly driven by things not planned for. Their plans erode and get revised to death, their boundaries and a century’s coordination strategies are made asynchronous and increasingly chaotic.

This is not a threat, but just a natural extension of the metaphor: every chip, every fragment and moment of their unscheduled time and attention, every lost cent of revenue slipping through the cracks in the remnant’s plans, that is a resource one of “us” can pick up, and pass along the networks we have built, that only “we” can see.

Whoever “we” are. I don’t know, myself, past the half-dozen friends I watch and interact with in my immediate social neighborhood. But then I don’t need to know more than that to make my way successfully. None of “us” do.

I’ll have more to say on that in a few days. Still some work to do.

Meanwhile:

• Flickr feed of photos tagged “Workantile” or “WorkEx”
• Twitter feed of tweets including those terms
• Vimeo feed of time-lapse imagery of self-organizing open workspace
• Google Blog Search results for “workantile”

There will be more, soon. That’s a promise.