Author: Marina Gorbis

We live in a world in which amplified individuals — people empowered by technologies and the collective intelligence of their social networks — can do things that previously only a large organization could. Indeed, they can do some things that no organization could do before. For better and worse, this is the world in which weekend software hackers can disrupt large software firms, and rapidly orchestrated social movements can bring down governments.

Amplified individuals include artists, musicians, community organizers, and techies working alongside nontechies. For a glimpse of how their talents are “amplified,” visit, for example, BioCurious — a well equipped biology lab in the San Francisco Bay area that is actually a former garage full of apparatus bought on the cheap on eBay. Most of us think of biotech as the province of multinational pharmaceutical corporations and well-funded ventures, but the founders of BioCurious believe (as they say in their mission statement) “that innovations in biology should be accessible, affordable, and open to everyone.” The most capable synthetic biologists in the BioCurious community work not only on their own pet projects; they also help others learn to do so by offering classes in subjects like Molecular Biology, Bioinformatics, and Bioprinting. Unlike in traditional university settings, the classes are open to anyone; you don’t need to fulfill requirements or take a long list of prerequisites in order to attend. All you have to bring to the class is interest and curiosity.

To use a term I introduced in an earlier piece, people like these are engaged in “socialstructing” — that is, bypassing established institutions and processes for building new things, and instead working to create what they find missing in the world by communicating the need to their social networks, mobilizing whatever resources they have at their disposal, and pursuing solutions collaboratively. Amplified individuals are an especially formidable force because the hard work they do is work they choose for themselves, and it is the focus of the strongest of their talents.

This is the kind of amplification that plays out daily at the Tech Shop, where people are pioneering new manufacturing models. Hanging around there, you might come up with an idea for a product, then quickly prototype it at Tech Shop with advice and support from the larger community. You could get funding on Kickstarter, then manufacture it through a flexible network of small-scale producers in China and elsewhere around the world. Voila! No large-scale manufacturing facility required. A small group of individuals, amplified with connections to each other and access to resources previously available only to large organizations, can create at scales they could previously only dream of.

Given that energized innovators like these are disrupting many existing products, and the business models behind them, you can feel threatened by them. Or you can learn from them and work to turn your own organization into a collection of amplified individuals. The latter is the path we’ve chosen at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Based on what we’ve learned so far, I can offer a few tips for other organizations hoping to amplify their workers’ talents and energy for greater innovation capacity and impact:

Change how you measure performance. The value you seek from employees, and should recognize and reward, can’t be measured only by focusing on their internal contributions. It also depends on their connections to and their standing in external communities that are important to your organization. At IFTF, several of our staff members run organizations of their own or contribute actively to other networks’ efforts. These activities contribute to our organization’s impact and increase the range of views and ideas we encounter. This is why we encourage our staff to expand and create their own external idea and knowledge networks.

Design the organization to support individual initiative, not control employees’ actions. We proudly show people our unusual organizational chart (more a constellation of project networks than a linear hierarchy) because it casts IFTF as a platform on which project teams and other work structures can self-organize, tackle issues, and solve problems. “The value of self-organizing structures is that they can act quickly, responsively, and creatively from the edges,” we explain in our vision statement. “The guiding concepts in this view of leadership are openness, self-election, continuous prototyping, robust platforms, and low coordination costs. Leadership skills focus on community building, consensus building, mediation, commitment, and humility.”

Socialize your underused assets. Under the traditional logic of management, it would make sense to jealously guard the use of any productive assets a firm has invested in. But in reality, nearly every organization has a surplus of resources of one type or another. Some have an abundance of physical space, others have equipment and tools that are rarely used, and still others have talent that is not fully engaged. A few years ago my colleagues and I decided that we could donate our surfeit of conference space to be used on weekends and some evenings by various communities whose work we want to encourage. We now regularly open this space to meetups, hack days, science bar days, and other informal gatherings of people with similar interests (science, biology, coding, 3D printing, and such). In the process we learn from these external innovators, extend our network, and engender a lot of goodwill. Think of the resources you have in abundance and how you might “socialize” them to build your organization’s social capital and enrich the flow of ideas.

Stop to consider how these few managerial changes would support and extend an individual’s initiative in your organization, and you’ll soon start to think of other tactics as well. Undoubtedly the ideas you come up with will share the common theme of loosening traditional managerial reins. But don’t let that loss of control frighten you. By recognizing the power of amplification, you will be rewarded with more energized, empowered, and innovative workers, and be able to achieve a whole new level of reach and impact.

For any one of us, the “reality” of a situation is just what we choose to pay attention to. Take the wonderful experiment a few years ago when renowned violinist Joshua Bell played for tips in the subway. Thousands of people rushed through that busy metro station barely noticing what seemed to be yet another poor musician on the platform. Their reality was the noise and the myriad annoyances that go with crowds of people jostling to get to trains. A few stopped in their tracks and listened in awe. Same place, same time — two different realities.

The same goes for a complex place like Silicon Valley. Every day brings a fresh horde of visitors — business executives, overseas dignitaries, researchers, and journalists — trying to discover what makes Silicon Valley tick. Some go away thinking they’ve seen a land of “technophilic gurus and futurists…embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity.” Others see it as a giant economic engine spitting out startup after startup to capitalize on the region’s wealth of innovations. But as far as I can tell, the reality they discern here is not the same as the one I see, or at least, is just a part of my reality.

Throngs of economic development officials from all around the world regularly parachute into Silicon Valley to do the usual rounds of the “innovation ecosystem” and see one slice of reality — Twitter, Facebook, Google, venture capitalists, and Stanford University (which, by the way, is too often an extension of all of the above; even in an English class, creating an app is a requirement). They are taken to school on how to create innovation clusters in their geographies, and too often they come away with surface-level solutions: bring in venture capitalists, create incubators, provide incentives for universities and labs to commercialize their technologies, build a robust IP system, establish liaison offices in Silicon Valley.

None of that is necessarily wrong, mind you, but if the recipe worked, one would think that after some 30 years of trying to replicate Silicon Valley elsewhere, we would see many thriving clones. Yet Silicon Valley remains unique.

This, I would argue, is due to another reality of Silicon Valley. It’s a reality that is often hidden from visitors’ eyes and hard to penetrate, much less to dissect and duplicate — but if you adjust your gaze you’ll see it. This is the reality of artists, musicians, community organizers, many of them non-techies, working side by side with techies to hack not so much technologies but ways of working, living, creating, and organizing. If there is one thing people in general here have learned from technologists, it is that things are hack-able — that the way we’ve designed various systems is not pre-ordained or immutable. We can tinker, re-design, and play with them. The fact that this ethos has infected artists, social activists (yes, they are called hacktivists), philosophers, urban planners, community organizers, and technologists, and that they all mingle together to create things — that’s what makes Silicon Valley tick.

They come together in meetups, salons, hackathons, live/work houses, clubs, and many other places that cross all the traditional organizational and discipline boundaries. They don’t ask for permission to do what they do. They are not paid for their efforts, at least not with money. They are less interested in technologies per se than in playing with established ways of doing things and conventional ways of thinking, creating, learning, and being.

Silicon Valley is rife with gatherings and places for doing this. On a Sunday you may spot some of the tech and not so tech-savvy denizens at a Brunchy Sunday series, where they come together to write and share their creations — blog posts, a song, a pitch, a chapter of a book, a screenplay, or anything else. You can see them most evenings at Noisebridge (pictured below) — a collective space for learning and doing projects together whose members’ main guiding principle is to “be excellent to each other.”

You can drop in on a Science Hack Day, a 48-hour hackathon that brings together scientists and passionate amateurs to engage in any serious or whimsical undertaking (the two often blur) that has to do with science. You can pop into a meetup of the “Quantified Self” movement — a collection of enthusiasts who are collecting tons of personal, health, and other data for various purposes: to speed up the rate of medical innovations, to improve their own health, to have fun with data, to be a part of a community with similar interests. Or participate in the Institute for the Future’s Re-Constitutional Convention, where governance scholars, practitioners, artists, and others try to re-imagine our oh-so-flawed governance structures. (Many of these examples are described in my book, The Nature of the Future.)

To shine a spotlight on this reality I’m giving it a name: these people are engaged in “socialstructing.” It’s a type of value creation that takes place outside of institutional boundaries, relies on social ties, and fulfills social, not monetary, needs such as the desire to belong, to be a part of something meaningful, to have fun, or, to use game researcher Jane McGonigal’s phrase, to “achieve an epic win.”

Socialstructers engage in hard work that they choose for themselves and to which they bring the best of their talents and abilities. Without management hierarchies, without titles and assignments, they do things such as self-organize into teams for 48 hours during a Science Hack Day (pictured right) and produce over a dozen new things, ranging from software code that converts data from nuclear accelerators into music to a robot that analyzes twitter sentiments. It’s a level of ingenuity any R&D department would marvel at.

Here’s my advice, then, if you are one of those organizations that sends scouts to Silicon Valley or establishes an outpost to tap into the innovation taking place here. Yes, visit the venture capitalists and the startups, but don’t overlook this other reality. To understand and learn from Silicon Valley, you need to participate and get embedded in the socialstructed creation that is taking place here. Spend an evening at Noisebridge, hang out at Hacker Dojo, go to a Quantified Self meetup, sign up for a Science Hack or Med Hack or another hackathon. In settings like these you’ll see a Silicon Valley that is just as — or maybe more — vital to fueling the innovation the place is known for.

Noisebridge photo by Dylan Hendricks, 2013. Science Hack Day photo by Gretchen Curtis, 2012.