The hierarchy of humanity is changing.

Sorry, let me rephrase.. The hierarchy of humanity must change in order to survive and remain relevant. Because the way in which we've accessed information has changed, we no longer require authority to do anything from anyone.... as far as data-flows. See humans, we love hierarchy. Hierarchy dictates who gets access to what, who knows what, who can talk about who, who makes more money, where ideas stem from. All great, amazing... historical constructs.

If we are to truly make the world a better place, we need start looking towards new structures; the structure of technology.

## Deployment Hierarchy

Deployment Hierarchies are flattening thanks to virtualization and containerization (and the two combined). We can now build virtual networks that live as clusters of containers within other containers (very meta). What the hell am I talking about?

### An example

Say you want to run Salesforce, Yammer, Google Apps, Canvas LMS, Box.net, any application from a "SaaS" vendor (more like control broker).

The question I have for you... How many people do these companies hire when you send them your multi-million dollar contracts? What are their workflows? Do you really think you are paying for access to developers and their talents?

No, you're having someone in sales probably click a button, that kicks off you being a customer. This gets picked up by the DevOps team's scripting engine and automatically provisions a new container of the infrastructure, plugging in the tokenized values for things like "My University" and "Company Logo here". The future of SaaS based products is increasingly automated (so stop paying someone to do what you can automate yourself if you plan to exist 50 years from now).

## The legacy of human infrastructure

But we've already hired hundreds of people. But we've already got people managing them in a pyramid shaped structure. Oh, so you think you're the only one? No, everyone still organizes this way in the old world constructed before the dawn of deployment architecture. Instead of giving up though, how can we reenvision ourselves and our organizations to remain competitive (aka exist) the next 10 year transition.

## Big Red Button

If your organization had a Big Red Button (that was easy) of sorts that did all the work for you, who would you allow to push it? Can everyone push the button if it produced new ideas, new products, better outcomes? Or is the HPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) the only one that matters, the only idea allowed to be pushed into production. When we've dissolved the legacy infrastructure of humanity we'll be able to allow anyone with any idea to empower the organization to win. If we don't, they'll leave.

We can group the parts of an organization into the three Es of social shift: Eliminate , Evolve , Emerge .

## Eliminate

- Committees - "Group" consensus that can't be met after a single meeting of a handful of people dictates that someone dictate the solution and path. Dissolve these immediately, people will be happier.
- Vacated positions - Force the structures underneath these positions to reorganize, flatten, and allow that transformation to allow business processes to evolve.

## Evolve

- Business practices - Workflows in the human hierarchy were built around who knew what and could accomplish a task. The future deployment hierarchy empowers all members to push the big red button of change.
- Trust - If you can't trust someone to push the big red button of progress, they shouldn't be on the team. Opening up room for failure ensures we aren't denied success in the process. Safe is dead.

## Emerge

- Pseudo structures - people across traditional organizational boundaries now operate as a crack team to solve problems. Over enough time, the traditional structures can be largely dissolved as these new pseudo structures become the institutional fabric of an organization.

Organizations that don't align themselves with the properties of technology (boundless , connected , structureless ) and instead adhere to traditional properties of the human hierarchy (bound , separated , vertically oriented ) will surcome to those "competitors" who do transform.