The “Future of Collaborative Enterprise” project is a laboratory, an attempt to pave the path to a plausible future, by drafting actionable scenarios of what “social” organizations might look like and operate in five to ten years from now. Far from a definitive answer to every question businesses ever asked, we aim at providing breadcrumbs, inducing reactions, and dissipating the smoke around organizational innovation.
What we aim at is helping organizations, technology vendors and business consultancies to better understand the ‘what’s next’ to go ahead together with a true collaborative mindset. We will publish interviews of thought leaders from many disciplines, build scenarios, and hopefully provide companies with keys for tackling the complexity of our fast evolving world.
Building on the many brilliant insights gathered since the birth of this project, we were able to build and publish our first report: What Is Social Business Really About?, which you can download here.
More than trying to answer the many questions raised by the new hyper-connected nature of business, we intended to dig deeper under the surface and to challenge our assumptions about the nature of work. Technology, culture, organizational identity and purpose, are among the main topics we will all have to tackle in order to be able to build, or to help building, sustainable businesses for the following years.
By helping in reframing those topics, the first phase of the Future of Collaborative Enterprise project allowed us to broaden our perspective, and to re-formulate most of our initial questions at the light of collected insights.
Broadening our view also leaded us to reframe the initial scope of the project: weren’t organizations collaborative by design from the very beginning? Putting a new emphasis on it might only be a matter of moving the cursor, thus not fully giving an account of the deep transformation they are facing to embrace complexity and not truly envisioning the range of shapes organizations will take in an hyper-connected world. Thus we renamed our project as the “Future of [Collaborative] Enterprise” to reflect our goal.
We are now submitting those new questions to more experts and thought leaders for a second set of interviews, whose outcome will, hopefully, provide more understanding of what is needed to drive tomorrow’s businesses…
