 Andreas Fruchtl
Director Strategic Futures Design
It is important to have structures, as without them, nothing would run smoothly and hardly anything would get done. The carpenter has his own structure to build a chair, the enterprise has its own structure to develop value for money and any given society has its own structure to define the functions, responsibilities and duties of all its citizens.
However, such functional structures can also become limitations, obstacles and constraints - particularly if your business is dealing with innovation and change.
In contrast, the virtual world is an abstract world only consisting of our expressions, independent from any physicality requested in our real world. It allows us to relate to each other intangibly without having to move our time zones and spaces and to discard the physical realities of the real world, and explore almost risk free, in real time.
Engaging in such an immaterial world allows our minds to open. We experience the feelings of opportunities, the possibilities to enter new territories and experience the unknown. With just one click, we can link questions to answers, our minds to similar minds and dissimilar minds, one thought to another.
To facilitate this process, we have created global villages, online communities, social networks, interactive platforms. Over the past two decades these have given global explorers adequate structures for expressing, connecting, reflecting, discussing or experimenting. Unlike real structures, virtual structures are flexible, allowing their participants to participate in many different ways. They have the capacity to learn, adopt and to transform, to change their shapes and grow, just as we humans do in real life.
This is in contrast to the organization of a typical company, which usually places individuals according to a function and responsibility, rather than offering a structure that enables easy connection with others and encourages open thought beyond conventional parameters.
In reality, we probably need both, a functional structure that grounds us in reality and a virtual one that allows us to imagine. The question however remains: how to combine both to achieve one organic structure that is able to move us forward in time based on our insights, experiences and learnings, while still providing a sensible framework for growth. This requires experimentation, which in the future, more and more companies may be prepared to conduct.
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