And that's another reason that networks of people aren't the same as networks of machines, or a series of cogs. Cogs turn at a certain speed and can be adjusted and fine-tuned, but they don't adapt. People will adapt to external pressure differently at different times or for different reasons, and then make real-time judgments about how to pass that pressure internally: to whom? how hard or gently? how fast? broadcast or narrowband?

Using people as cogs wastes the single greatest benefit they bring to an organisation: free will.

It's more than sixty years since von Mises pointed out that Communist bureaucracies were failing, in relative terms, because the instructions given to managers in capitalist firms weren't rules to obey, they were goals that gave the managers autonomy: “do what you think is best for the firm, given these resources and constraints”.

Work has always been about what happens when the boss isn't looking. Autonomy, plus accountability. But one really important change that happens with work 2.0 is that all the informal stuff becomes visible, and subject to scrutiny. In the eighties, a two hour meeting would produce two pages of minutes, and it was accepted that they were the official account of the meeting (the accountability), and everything else that happened got deleted (autonomy, aka “what happens in the room stays in the room”).

So the corpuscles were always there, to use your metaphor, but our blood vessels were inside our bodies. Now, social tools give us transparent veins, and everything can be inspected. What happens in the room doesn't stay in the room anymore. Everyone's naked and everything's blatant, and people get a little uncomfortable.

This poses two questions for me. First, when everything can be looked at, we have to make conscious choices about what we do and don't look at. Second, we have to think afresh about how we balance autonomy and accountability. Not enough autonomy, and you have a burger bar, with no innovation, no learning, so a trainee can be up to speed in a day, and nobody gets smarter after their first month. Not enough accountability, and you get a company like AIG, bankrupted by one small department.