The Semantic Organisation

In our current series, we have been exploring the nature of Lead 3.0, and the skills and insights leaders require to be on top of the massive changes rippling through our world. Society, technology, and the marketplace are evolving at an ever-increasing speed. And on top of all that, we face the impact of Covid, a weaker economy, climate change and energy transition.

The research team at Regenesys Business School have been building Lead 3.0 scenarios within which to understand what kind of leadership is required for this dynamic and volatile context. Thus far we have explored:

• Dimensional Intelligences
• Connected Leadership and
• Digital Leadership

In this article, we are going to explore the Semantic Organisation.

Traditionally, organisations sent employees on generic training programmes. A variety of employees attended the same course (to make up economic numbers) and there was no customisation to the specifics of the attendees’ previous experience or their actual role in the organisation. But it was great for reporting the numbers of employees trained and the number of training hours devoted to employee development. The training was aimed at helping employees ‘understand’ and to conform to the ‘accepted way of doing things’, in short, it was a way of enforcing compliance. This view of organisational learning considers knowledge to reside in the company, in the form of procedures, rules, training interventions and other means for shared representation.

However, regular readers of RegInsights will know that organisations no longer require conformance and compliance. They want creative, open-thinking, dynamic team members. The challenge therefore is: how do we create open, unique, high impact training and learning experiences for our employees?

The World Wide Web is an agglomeration of unstructured data and information ‘out there’. It requires careful, painstaking, and persistent search efforts to find and collate information relevant to any particular task. We have all experienced the tedious effort required to find that elusive supportive fact that is critical to the task at hand.

Now imagine a web where information is organised around meaning and not according to structure and hierarchy. A web where meaning is derived from the meta meaning of words strung together, and not the individual words themselves. This is the Semantic Web. Semantics relates to meaning embedded within language. The Semantic Web is a natural follow-on from the World Wide Web.

The Semantic Web is an unimaginably large mesh of data that is processed by machines instead of human operators. The operationalisation of semantic content  – meaning  – in the Semantic Web converts unstructured world wide web data into a web of meaning. The Semantic Web is the next evolution of the existing Web to enable us to search, discover, share, and join information with less effort.

Now imagine a Semantic Web in your organisation, where every digital artefact is searchable based on meaning rather than individual words. It is a living repository of all the institutional knowledge, available for immediate access. What about that project five years ago, where the team members have moved on? All that becomes immediately accessible. The power is multiplied by access to the external semantic web. This kind of understanding demands that information sources are semantically structured. This is a very difficult and complex task, which is why the Semantic Web is not fully with us.

The semantic web can deliver just-in-time learning activities that are required by the individuals as a response to current work activities. In Lead 3.0, the learning comes to you; you don’t search out the learning. Pause for a moment and let that sink in.

This is a forceful, turned-on-its head change to how we develop our leaders and our teams. Peter Senge spread the notion of learning organisations in his book The Fifth Discipline (Senge; 1990). He described learning organisations as places ‘where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.’ Senge’s concept of the learning organisation will only be truly possible with the semantic web and the Semantic Organisation. The semantic organisation is an ideal form of leading and managing in which learning behaviour improves and adapts, in a climate that facilitates the learning of individuals in the context of their work teams and where managers become coaches and not supervisors.

The semantic organisation allows us to look at Senge’s concepts of systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning in a new way. A semantic web, based on operationalised meaning, allows for personal mastery. In such an environment we can fully take control of our contribution to the organisation. Mental models and shared vision express themselves in semantic meaning. When we have a living repository of all the organisation’s institutional knowledge content, available for immediate access, we can power up team learning in ways that Peter Senge could only dream of.

The Semantic Organisation is huge and massively data-intensive. It will cut across human and organisational boundaries. The structuring of meaning will reflect the prejudices and worldviews of those who develop the architecture. New challenges to personal and data privacy will emerge. There will be concerns about those who have no access to the semantic web. But as we saw with the ubiquitous emergence of the smartphone, technology can develop and proliferate at an astounding speed. As responsible leaders in Lead 3.0, we need to be ready to grasp the opportunities as they emerge. An understanding of Lead 3.0 gives us an advantage not given to many.

Read also:

• Lead 3.0: Digital Leadership
• Four Insights into Connectivity and Leadership