TODAY'S ORGANIZATIONS ARE IN DANGER OF EXTINCTION

Needed: Improved Organizational Nervous Systems

Doug Engelbart likes to compare human organizations to living organisms; both evolve in response to the world around them. He says that, like living, biological creatures, organizations mutate, and those mutations are continually being tested for survival value within their environment. Engelbart feels that "today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations--finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design—and that the degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction."

Teaching Organizations to Learn

Since the late '50s, Engelbart has been hard at work on the redesign of organizational nervous systems. By 1070, he was deeply involved in what he dubbed his "Human Intellect Augmentation" project. He explained, "By intellect, I mean the human competence to make, send, exchange, and apply to decision-making the commodity called knowledge, as applied toward giving human individuals and organizations more effectiveness at formulating and pursuing their goals." Engelbart could foresee that the nervous systems that organizations had evolved in order to thrive in the industrial age were not going to be adequate to take them into the knowledge age. What was needed was a major advance in organizations' abilities to think, to observe, and to assimilate, apply, and refine knowledge.

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