Dave Pollard, who thinks and writes about the future of the world, has a good post on tools, technologies, and artifacts that will go the way of FAX and CDs. Included on his list: hard drives, “wall of text” reports & documents, “best practices,” email & groupware, corporate intranets, corporate libraries and purchased content, cell phones, classrooms, meetings, job titles, and offices. The notion of job titles going away resonated with my own recent post on the importance of well defined roles in some circumstances.

Pollard says,

“Generation Millennium members expect to have 12 jobs in their lives on average, and to work on varied projects with cross-disciplinary teams rather than in a defined role. Companies are outsourcing, offshoring, fragmenting, moving to Peer Production. What value or meaning do titles have in such an environment? (If titles are still a useful status symbol, companies could simply follow the example of the banks and make everyone a Vice-President.)”

I agree that titles in this case are meaningless, but that does not mean that people should not be clear about their roles in each of the projects that they contribute to. And sometimes these roles may also be “titles.”

Meanwhile, Dave Snowden has been developing an organizational model to support working across organizational silos; he refers to this concept as crews. A crew is an organization formed for a particular project, mission, or task. It “ritualizes and formalizes” cross-silo activity by ensuring that the crew starts with identifying the specific roles that it needs and then fills those roles by selecting people from different silos. This is, prima facie similar to the “Hollywood model,” which many researchers and writers have used to exemplify a potential future state of work wherein individuals belong to professional associations (”guilds”) and come together to work on specific projects. As Snowden goes on to say,

“A crew works because its members take up roles for which they are trained, and where their expectations of the other roles in the crew is also trained and to a large extent ritualised … A crew has cognitive capacity beyond the sum of its members, members occupy their roles for limited time periods…”

Being Snowden, Dave also integrates his concept of network stimulation into the crew model, in which he sees “people swapping between roles to allow for continuity. ” Within an organization (or, in the case Dave is writing about, a network of organizations) the requirement for working cross silos and swapping people in and out ensures that the network ties broaden and deepen over time.

Back to Hollywood: I found it very interesting to read “Can Hollywood Help LinkedIn?” in the New York Times this week. It appears that LinkedIn is looking for a niche in an industry that has long used a networked, “crew,” guild-based model in which roles and titles identify precisely what skills a person offers as well as access to relationship information that reveals context.