Adhocracy

Rapid technological change is something I’ve lived with my whole life. Gen X kids have had a front-row seat, watching the internet grow from nothing to a crowded and rich AI and social media-driven landscape.

Change has always caused disruptions in society—that’s nothing new.

What’s new is the blistering pace today, although it’s been a long time coming. I mean that the pace of change itself has always been increasing over time, as every new invention brings a little more potential for the next one, combining with the existing ideas and always spawning more.

Sometimes, it feels like we are accelerating toward the edge of a cliff that’s straight ahead. A couple of years ago, I wrote this when discussing Moore’s Law:

When it comes to the future, the implications of this trend are profound. If this pace of accelerating returns continues, we could witness technological advancements in the next decade that could outstrip all of the progress we've seen since the advent of computing.

Two years down the road, and this is starting to look almost inevitable. The spending bonanza over the last two years has catapulted AI from niche to mainstream, with hundreds of billions of dollars in investments already planned, and tens of billions already spent.

Millions of people have already changed the way they search for things (I’m one of them). Hundreds of millions of people use some type of generative AI every month, and that number is rising rapidly.

All of this rapid change is causing a great deal of social and political turmoil, too. Nobody has any time to get used to the hot new AI tool before the next one rolls out. Nobody is ready for convincing deepfake videos, but they’re already here. Even worse:

AI designs better chips by a process we don’t fully understand, and then those better chips help us to create better AI systems we surely understand even less.

Everything is changing so quickly that we just can’t keep up anymore, and it’s only going to change faster and faster from here on out. My drum-beating proclamations here are astute, but hardly original or mind-blowing. For that, we need to turn to the past.

Five and a half decades ago, a writer named Alvin Toffler wanted to find a word to describe this rapid change he saw everywhere, and the way it was necessary to approach all this change. He found such a word in a collection of essays from just two years earlier (1968) called The Temporary Society. The word that the authors had coined was adhocracy.

The original idea was that ad-hoc organizations would spring up to address issues as they arose, ultimately creating a landscape of nimble, flexible companies that have adapted to the rapidly changing world. In other words, the organizations of the future would not be mired down in bureaucracy.

When I think about the largest and most developed nations in the world today, I don’t see a crisp, clean line of autocracy or democracy. This is the way it was presented to me for most of my life, but I think it’s a bit more nuanced today.

Everywhere I look I see a nation reeling from rapid change that’s coming even faster than the last one, which we haven’t had any time to get used to yet.

You start with a set of basic rules—maybe it’s a Constitution, if you’re like the US. Then, something in your society makes it evident that you need to amend things. Before too long, the idea you had about where you’d be has diverged from where you are. In other words, things have changed because of all this change.

Technological innovation is one of the things in society that people have to get used to, and that means still more new laws have to be passed. These, in turn, create opportunities for new disruptive technology to be created.

The apparatus builds off of the apparatus now. Instead of five or ten basic laws, you now have ten thousand arcane codes nobody really knows, and which nobody really can follow. Some of these rules seem to compete against one another.

What emerges from this is a modern form of government, or company organization, that doesn’t really resemble the original form, but which keeps on trucking thanks to all those extra layers that were constantly added into the mix.

Right now, this is just a hypothesis, but I wanted to share it with you anyway. I want to ask you: what sorts of adhocracies have you seen? Is adhocracy the natural and inevitable form of government and organization in the 21st century?