Spider Web as Global Structure

I hate spiders. They are ugly eight-legged invertebrates with webs that trap insects. The web is also used to help them climb, form smooth walls for burrows, build egg sacs, wrap prey, and temporarily hold sperm, among other applications. Disgusting, right?

When I was working for an oil company, the Chairman and CEO always called his managers in his office to discuss his out-of-the box ideas about the business. This was in the second half of the 90’s when the industry was just recently deregulated. I was heading the corporate planning at that time and I thought the guy was really brilliant and very much ahead of his time. I was particularly amazed of how he tinkered on how to change the industry structure by changing the rule of the game altogether. Likewise, he loved playing on how to structure his companies as if they were a bunch of clay he could easily form and deform, integrate and disintegrate. In his mind were concepts like consolidation, bundling and unbundling, scalability, flexibility, alliances, and networks based on the idea of Tao. Although there were a number of legal entities (companies), the structure was designed as if there was only one independent organization represented by triangles within a big triangle – a radical departure from the delayering (or flattening) of the organization plantilla of the re-engineering era. As a matter of fact, he wanted to implement a structure as if it was a spider web where the spider can laterally see what is going on within the web and can respond to opportunities or problems speedily. I disagreed to him about the spider web structure not necessarily because I didn’t like the web-structure per se but more because of my shallow (partial) understanding of a leader as spider seeing and running around! At that time, it was a crazy idea and I would have the difficulty communicating and persuading the rest of the organization. We settled for the “triangles within a triangle” instead, although I must say for most people, it was still a rather weird stricture at that time.

Just like in that oil company, people generally find it hard to imagine a new world where many of the assumptions about political structures, authority, and legitimacy may well be changed. Norman Davies in his book Europe: East and West, says that one must attempt to imagine an entirely new type of political organism which has overlapping jurisdictions, multilayered/multinational authorities, and multiple concatenacity (i.e. members of one concatenation will likewise belong to other concatenations at the same time). I thought that Norman Davies is actually describing what my boss conceptualized 12 years ago for his complex organization just as Jean-François Rischard was suggesting network governance in his book High Noon. In my previous blog entry, I asked who will play as Ms. Luz in a networked and interdependent world. A possible question at this juncture is who will be the spider in such an imagined spider-web structure in the new world order. I realize though that asking such a question emanates from our conventional concept of legitimacy and authority where the spider or Ms. Luz may represent a person, a country, an organization, or the power politics involved – a world based on a zero-sum game. If I were to wear the lenses of a non-zero sum game (with a positive instead of gloomy vision about the world), perhaps the spider represents the self-managing process and/or the information that generate from and empower the concatenations.

With this in mind, perhaps a spider is not a scary idea afterall!