We've come a long way since the Stone Ages. The roving band of nomads was nothing more than a small group. Then, with the invention of agriculture, many small groups settled down together. To "manage" them, steep, powerful, but ultimately fragile hierarchies rose up. The Industrial Express chugged in next, hauling with it the bulbous, bumbling bureaucratic beast that drives people nuts. Now in the Information Age, we're spinning out into networks, too numerous to count--thick, globe-encircling fibers, making neighbors of the most distantly situated people. Networks are the signature form of organization for the Information Age.

But don't throw out your hierarchy. Save some bureaucracy. Networks don't replace earlier forms; they transform them. The secret is to just add links.

• From Nomads to Networks
• Fire Department Mixes Modes
• Network the Organizational Ages
• Thinking the Network Way

All of business, indeed, all of humanity, is in transition from the Industrial to the Information Age. Alvin Toffler's 1980 book, The Third Wave, caught the crest of an idea almost four decades in the making. Now it is conventional wisdom. Three waves divide human history into four great ages characterized by the nomad, agriculture, industry, and information.

Each new age of civilization has its signature form of organization.

• People first honed their small group skills as nomadic hunter-gatherers.
• Hierarchy grew up with agriculture
• The Industrial Age gave birth to bureaucracy.
• The Information Age brings networks.

A network is a form of organization, like hierarchy and bureaucracy, one of the basic designs we use to construct our social world.

Teamnets of the 21st century span the life of organizational development. Teamnets are at once very old and very new. The team is the small group, rooted in the very old, and drawing on skills accumulated over millennia. Networks are the very new, meeting the need for greater scope, speed, and flexibility. They grow at the creative leading edge of change.

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Thirteen people run IBM's major business units. Five people are on the Executive Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers' Association. Four vice presidents at Qantas Airways ran its reengineering project. Two people own and manage Cafe Appassionato.

We have always-and will always-live and work in small groups. Small groups permeate business: micro companies, small teams in big firms, executive committees.

The high-performance, information-enabled, virtual team is the Age of the Network edition of the small group.

Each age adds its special characteristics to the previous one. Small groups are basic social cells that have personalities and identity. People even name them. Small groups carry the seeds of later organizations. Roles with status and task contributions expand into vertical and horizontal dimensions over the ages.

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Bill is in Ellen's group. Ellen is on the general manager's staff, who reports to a VP close to the CEO, who is accountable to the board. Status bands of low, middle, and high ranks with grades within them.

Hierarchy dramatically lengthens the status dimension in small groups.

As the source of legitimacy in business, owners, who have capital, also bring hierarchy. They crown an authority structure of executives and workers.

Hierarchy has helped people build societies among strangers throughout history. As businesses grow beyond the point where everyone knows one another, hierarchies are inevitable.

"Three years ago, all my employees, customers, and suppliers would have fit in this room," said US TeleCenters CEO Frank Reece, addressing a few dozen people in one of our workshops. "Now I have 350 employees, thousands of customers, and dozens of suppliers. I can see the bureaucracy growing and I'm afraid I'm going to create a company I hate."

Every successful entrepreneur bemoans the loss of the "family feeling" as greater size demands structure and formality.

The Egyptian Pyramids are the great organizational achievement of the Agricultural Age, the literal eternal symbol for successive ranks culminating in a paramount power. Every time we see a traditional organization chart, the pyramid comes to mind.

Hierarchies alone were not enough. Success brings change, and simple hierarchies are notoriously unstable in the face of the unexpected. Ancient empires rose and fell as populations expanded and capacity overextended. Boom-bust and on to bureaucracies.

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Science ushered in the Industrial Age. Behind logic and the laws of motion chugged the steam engine. Its cargo? Another organizational revolution: rational bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy bulged out sideways with specialized functions, tasks, and roles.

For a 300 year period, corporations, nations, organizations of all kinds became more efficient with the organizing prowess of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, while specializing horizontally, embraced hierarchy, which controlled vertically. Together, they could manage much greater complexity than either could do alone. The Industrial Age became much more complicated than the Agricultural one.

And the beat continued, faster still. Unfortunately, when faced with continuous uncertainty and change, bureaucracy is like kudzu, the vine-like weed that spreads until it overruns everything and chokes other forms of life. It often creates a new unit to solve a problem, instead of simply connecting people in existing organizations who probably have the answer. Then the "problem" turns into a department.

So a bureaucracy grows, ever bigger, ever slower until it just sits there, failing to innovate or change, placing drag on everything else. Today's complexity outruns bureaucracy's ability to organize it.

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In 1993, worldwide Internet (the global system linking tens of thousands of computer networks) traffic grew at an incredible annual rate of 341,634 percent. A new Internet node-home base for another network of people-joined every ten minutes, a new person signed on every 30 seconds.

A parallel growth in connections is happening in organizations: alliances are forming at an accelerating rate among all sizes of firms. Services are the economy's growth sector, emphasizing people and process, while manufacturing is shrinking, as agriculture did in the Industrial Age.

Connect! It's the organizing imperative of the Age of the Network.

Relationships are the dominant reality in the Information Age. They are displacing the focus on matter, at the center of the Industrial Age world view.

Today, we are challenged to cope with global scale continuous change, which constantly presents us with more opportunities. Links-technological and human-drive the reorganization of work. Bureaucracy began horizontal expansion; the Information Age takes it to mach speed.

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A fire department provides a cumulative geologic slice of the evolution of organizations.

Small groups make up the primeval early sediments. Hierarchy, with its chiefs and sergeants, is in the next layer, imposing vertical control. Bureaucracy is in more recent layers, bringing horizontal specialties. Finally at the top, in the verdant living topsoil, we see intensely linked networks.

American fire departments incorporate all forms of organization-small groups, hierarchies, bureaucracies, and networks of all sizes.

Fire-fighting captures the headlines. The department springs into action as a hierarchy when fighting fires, actually battling blazes. It prepares for the emergency crisis with command and control and practice and training. If your home erupts in flames, you don't want a network standing around trying to reach consensus on how to approach the problem. You want someone calling the shots for a highly skilled group of professionals who understand the pragmatics of dealing with heat, chemicals, and combustion out of control.

While fire-fighting gets the public attention, departments only spend a small part of time putting out fires (in Boston, only 5 percent). The department acts as a bureaucracy that enforces codes for much of the day, makes certain that pressure is maintained in water lines, that training is updated, and that apparatus is maintained. A chief shouting orders is of very little use if the hydrant isn't pumping. Here, you need experts who understand pumps, pressure, and the mechanics of the city water system. Uniform codes fight fires, too.

Fire fighters often use person-to-person networking for fire prevention, which requires education, persuasion, and role models, by working directly with people in the community. School children have no patience for-or need to know about-sprinkler requirements. Their parents need to get the message about the importance of smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and a second exit from bedrooms. The glamour of a visit to the local fire house and a ride on an engine make indelible memories in children's minds but they don't make children fire safe. Commitment to ongoing education does, a distinct and suitable role for networks together with small groups.

Fire departments forge large inter-organizational networks for mutual aid. A group of communities agrees to act as a virtual fire department and back one another up during a particularly bad fire in one locale. Each community gains protection and reduces costs. Here, local hierarchies use inter-local networks to achieve something together that they cannot achieve alone. In this field, as in many others, people also use organizational networks to pass legislation, share information, take-on large-scale education efforts, and promote professionalism.

All kinds of organizations can learn from the local fire department. In emergencies, command and control prevail. For routine situations and environments, rules and regulations provide standards. Networks educate, innovate, motivate and provide back-up when a hierarchy reaches its limits.

Fire departments-among the oldest of America's institutions and found all around the world-may be role models for the 21st century organization.

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What to save? What to change? Where to continue? When to leap ahead?

The complexity that faces 21st century business outstrips the capacity of the accumulated wisdom of earlier ages. So we invent something new: networks. In the big picture, the overall pace of change drives the next form of organization. With new technology eventually comes the ability to manage in an increasingly larger context.

Each age of organization builds upon and includes the past. Networks in particular are inclusive by nature. Breadth gives them resilience; diversity gives them insight; independent members keep them honest.

In the Age of the Network, we still will have hierarchies and bureaucracies, just as we will continue to have farms and factories.

The most literal way that networks include earlier forms is that they link all types of organizations.

Members of a network do not have to be networks. Indeed, they usually aren't.

Somerset was the code-name for the network that linked Apple, IBM, and Motorola as the three corporate behemoths shared wisdom, talent, and dollars to produce the power PC chip. The Strategic Avionics Technology Working Group is the network that links the National Aviation and Space Agency (NASA) with its compatriots in industry and the public as well as space interests in other countries to forge a new vision and working plan for space exploration in the 21st century. Meanwhile, space agencies in the United States, Russia, Japan, and Europe have joined forces in the International Mars Exploration Working Group to "coordinate and work together on future missions to explore the planet Mars."

France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom are bureaucratic partners in Airbus Industrie (whose slogan is "Taking the World View"), the upstart commercial aircraft manufacturer now controlling 30 percent of the global market. When they have to work together, hierarchies and bureaucracies naturally form networks yet remain independent.

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To cope with more complexity, groups have to be smarter. Each epoch has brought a new level of organizational intelligence required to meet its challenges. Group intelligence lies in a group's configuration, its actual organization, in how it does its work.

Over millennia, the capacity for group intelligence has increased, age by age.

New ages in human civilization bring new configurations, new patterns, to organizations. As the organizational repertoire increases, groups of all sizes have the potential for even greater intelligence.

This is powerful. Even a small increase in the average intelligence of our groups has an enormous impact on our collective capability to solve the problems of the world.

To understand what's going on around us, we use mental models of the world.

Each new era brings a shift from one dominant world view to another. When the industrial view prevailed over the agricultural one, and both over the "pre-civilized" hunting-gathering world, the new patterns were seen as replacing the old ones, if not destroying them. But :

The Age of the Network includes rather than replaces its predecessors.

Quantum physics doesn't regard Newtonian mechanics as absolutely wrong, so much as relatively limited. In the same way, bureaucracy is not wrong. It's just limited. Indeed, it should be limited to those functions where it is most appropriate.

We use simple social models for simple organizations: informal small groups or simple hierarchies. Few situations are more absurd (or boring) than when a very small group of people adheres to Roberts Rules of Orders. We've all been to those meetings (and sometimes run out screaming).

More complex situations call for more complex models. Until recently, our only response has been to structure multi-leveled hierarchies bursting with internal bureaucracies. Their rigidity is as non-adaptive in the Age of the Network as Sam Serial's sequential manufacturing process.

Today's dramatically increased complex pace of change calls forth new designs-teams and networks together.

Because it is inclusive, the network is also backward compatible with earlier forms. Networks can describe all types of organizations, including hierarchies, which are special cases of the more general network form.

Each age has made an essential contribution to the evolving organizational model reflected in the Five TeamNet Principles

• The Nomadic Age provided the basic idea of members defining boundaries.
• The Agricultural Age contributed the concept of level structure.
• The Industrial Age offered up the precision of specialized purpose.
• And the Information Age contributes explosive-in-number links, that cross boundaries, levels, specialties, cultures, geographies, industries, jurisdictions, politics, religion, and every other xdifference important to people.

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