In the last year I’ve had three, four dozen meet­ings with the local Cham­ber of Com­merce CEO and staff, with the staff of the local “sole eco­nomic devel­op­ment provider”, with com­mer­cial real estate folks and devel­op­ers and lawyers and entre­pre­neur­ship orga­ni­za­tions and CEOs of local star­tups and com­mu­nity activists and land­lords and mar­ket­ing con­sul­tants and print news­pa­per edi­tors and local gov­ern­ment offi­cials and retired exec­u­tives and bank pres­i­dents. It’s not too rude, I hope, to call them the “tra­di­tional busi­ness com­mu­nity”. Most would be com­fort­able with this description.

In case some prej­u­dice seems to be creep­ing in, I want imme­di­ately to clar­ify some­thing impor­tant: these are nice folks as a rule. Admit­tedly many of them don’t seem to know what to make of “peo­ple like us”, and their responses to chats and con­ver­sa­tions vary from dis­mis­sive­ness to a kind of wish­ful yearn­ing that they could have “my” lifestyle. But on the whole they’re doing what they per­ceive as their best to improve the world by what­ever cri­te­ria they feel are most crucial.

But if I wanted a bit more hyper­bolic effect, I might call these nice folks the rem­nant of the tra­di­tional busi­ness com­mu­nity. They may not feel so good about that, though I don’t mean them harm by impos­ing the modifier.

I admit though: I have, through these dozens of con­ver­sa­tions and inter­views, tried to con­vey that “peo­ple like us” often see them as a rem­nant, when we con­sider them at all.

Beyond a con­fir­ma­tion of the inher­ent nice­ness of peo­ple, and their crit­i­cal diver­sity of toolk­its, what have I learned with this two-​​year project? I’m mak­ing some notes.

Ubiq­ui­tous Overextension

As a rule these folks seem to sched­ule their time poorly. They’re always in a hurry, or late, or inter­rupt­ing a con­ver­sa­tion to take a call. They pre­fer to hold pub­lic meet­ings and events dur­ing the wee hours of the morn­ing, or after work. They dilute even their nom­i­nally enter­tain­ing out­ings with one another (typ­i­cally golf, of all things) with busi­ness con­cerns: “net­work­ing” or speeches or award-​​giving rituals.

I sus­pect that in part these habits are a mix of sig­nal­ing and ter­ri­to­r­ial behav­iors, part the echoes of con­strain­ing sociotech­ni­cal infra­struc­ture, and the habit­u­a­tion to the Received Clock.

Sig­nal­ing is what you might expect, if you know some of “us” and some of the remnant.

“Some­body like me” sig­nals I have the lux­ury of meet­ing you for two hours in the mid­dle of the after­noon to dis­cuss the phi­los­o­phy of busi­ness and the next ten years’ fore­cast for bank­ing and rede­vel­op­ment in the state. I will meet you right now, if you like, or I can tweet you or phone you or send you an email or open up a Google Docs shared file for you to edit, right now. Because I can, you should be able to as well.

The sig­nal of the remnant’s early morn­ing meet­ing, the rushed meet­ing between other meet­ings, the trun­cated half-​​hour refresher or the hur­ried chat in the park­ing lot between events is: There is a hier­ar­chy of demands on my time, and they are numer­ous. My hands are tied; we can go this far and no far­ther. Depend­ing on the world­view of the per­son involved in send­ing this sig­nal, the impli­ca­tion is either (1) a mes­sage about how egal­i­tar­ian they are, that they have two dozen peo­ple from all walks of life to deal with, and that each gets their fair share, or (2) that you only rate this much time based on your rel­a­tive impor­tance in the scheme of things.

Both groups are say­ing some­thing, in the way they set their time up, about their expec­ta­tions for the other party. But those expec­ta­tions are dif­fer­ent for “us” and for insti­tu­tional players.

The sociotech­ni­cal con­straints seem to stem from these dif­fer­ent senses of “insti­tu­tion”, as well.

I know (more or less) where every­body with whom I am con­cerned is, right now. Twit­ter, Plurk, Face­book, the phone (and SMS), email and a vari­ety of tagged social media sites that work on a longer timescale keep my net­work in a kind of dynamic infor­ma­tive ten­sion, like a spi­der­web I suppose—though one that over­laps with all my friends’ and col­leagues’ own spi­der­webs. And when the unex­pected comes up, I have these five or seven chan­nels with which to reach some­body, rang­ing from speak­ing into the air to make the mol­e­cules vibrate in a sen­si­ble way, to a phone call to a for: tag on a deli​cious​.com link.

The folks in the rem­nant, though, they seem blind and deaf some­how. I’ve often won­dered if this is an adap­ta­tion; I sus­pect it’s a pro­tec­tive mech­a­nism on a cou­ple of lev­els. To have to be some­where to com­mu­ni­cate can be a fea­ture or a bug, depend­ing on what you want. To have to see some­body to have a con­ver­sa­tion, to fail to record notes and make each meet­ing revisit old busi­ness, to spend so much time phys­i­cally trav­el­ing… these offer up moments for plan­ning, or for self-​​reflection. They rein­force imme­di­ate, phys­i­cal social cues that are wired into our meat. They can be off-​​putting to “folks like us”, but if you think about it they can also help estab­lish com­mu­nity bound­aries and strengthen inter­nal con­nec­tions within larger-​​scale busi­nesses “peo­ple like us” don’t inter­act with.

These cul­tural dif­fer­ences come up sur­pris­ingly often when you’re attuned to them.

I can think of sev­eral times I’ve watched “one of us” being told “I’ll have to get back to you once I’ve checked my sched­ule,” by a mem­ber of the rem­nant. You can see the frus­tra­tion on both sides: sched­ules, among us, are made to be changed and adapted to on the spot; they’re agile and flex­i­ble and dynamic and our work­lives are a mat­ter of trac­ing an effi­cient path through the com­ing days. “Our” suc­cess comes from act­ing as quickly as pos­si­ble upon the small­est tasks which pro­vide the great­est return. The remnant’s sched­ules, on the other hand, are planned things, con­tin­gent on many stake­hold­ers’ exter­nal deci­sions, writ­ten in the slow-​​flowing glass of insti­tu­tional infrastructure.

The impa­tience “one of us” feels when told we’ll hear some­day even­tu­ally about a sched­uled event? That impa­tience comes from the exe­cu­tion risk that this imposes on our lives: risk that what would oth­er­wise be a lin­early sep­a­ra­ble quan­tum of social inter­ac­tion and busi­ness value is left as an unknown in our agile sched­ules, with no clear like­li­hood of actu­ally occur­ring at all, dis­rupt­ing the flow through unac­counted link­ages and forc­ing us to deal with unfore­seen reper­cus­sions. The con­fu­sion one of the rem­nant feels when asked to make time right now is the dis­re­gard for the insti­tu­tion, for the plan, for the process that tries to be “ratio­nal” in bal­anc­ing the util­ity func­tions of many stake­hold­ers try­ing to coop­er­ate on many schedules.

As a con­se­quence, there are deep cur­rents and impli­ca­tions of schedule-​​setting revolv­ing around the notion of respon­si­bil­ity. “We” are respon­si­ble to our­selves, and to our social networks—an often global, con­tin­gent and ephemeral cloud of peo­ple who are effec­tively invis­i­ble to mem­bers of the rem­nant. The rem­nant have well-​​established chan­nels for coor­di­na­tion, and the Com­pany or the other large insti­tu­tional bound­aries make the breadth and bounds of those coor­di­na­tion net­works pub­licly visible.

One cor­re­spon­dent of mine, liv­ing as he does at the peak of the local branch of a global rem­nant orga­ni­za­tion, often politely tells me how he envies “my flex­i­bil­ity in work­ing when­ever I want.” I’ve tried to explain that I work, in the sense of coor­di­nat­ing and dri­ving this jink­ing spi­der­web I ride through life from minute to minute, from the time I open my eyes to the time I fall asleep. But he can­not see that net­work or the effects I cause in it or I feel from it, and lack­ing an alter­na­tive sig­nal he imag­ines I am sit­ting here phi­los­o­phiz­ing in a life of leisure and guile­less mean­der­ing dilet­tan­tism. And I in turn write him off as a kind of fixed point in town, and expect him to be exactly the same in two weeks, doing exactly the same things as he was yesterday.

And think of plan­ning and project man­age­ment, across this cul­tural gap between the rem­nant and “us”: When I find my occa­sional cor­re­spon­dent is actu­ally act­ing, when I dis­cover she has unex­pect­edly “moved ahead” on a mus­ing project notion we touched on briefly in our meet­ing three months back, when it comes to light she’s hared off like a jug­ger­naut and done some­thing that seemed like a good idea back then… how often was it the right thing for her to do? Our timescales are so often mis­aligned, that I can make a dozen iter­a­tive changes in a doc­u­ment or pro­gram or com­mu­nity design in a week­end, where she has sched­uled an appoint­ment with her staff to set up a com­mit­tee in a few days. A crowd “of us” may have made three ver­sions and dis­carded them, moved on and estab­lished both a posi­tion state­ment and a draft RFP in the time a gov­ern­ment or busi­ness or church or other rem­nant insti­tu­tion has coor­di­nated its way into con­sid­er­ing what to do.

Just this week a friend in the rem­nant sent me a link to a “call for con­tri­bu­tions” for a meet­ing to be held sev­eral months in the future, which will involve travel and plan­ning and meet­ings and pub­lish­ing and set­ting up bank accounts and LLCs and all kinds of stuff. But in the time between our orig­i­nal con­ver­sa­tion and the “call for con­tri­bu­tions”… the prob­lem has gone away. It’s solved, at least in my context.

Our dif­fer­ent atti­tudes toward time and action are alter­nate solu­tions to the same prob­lems of coor­di­na­tion and plan­ning and risk ame­lio­ra­tion in an uncer­tain world. “We” are no bet­ter off for doing five times the work, for hid­ing or not even know­ing who we affect in our ephemeral social net­works, than the rem­nant is for spend­ing all this energy on insti­tu­tional iden­tity and mid-​​range plan­ning meetings.

But think for a moment about the remnant—whether you’re a mem­ber or not—and con­sider what hap­pens when a tra­di­tional insti­tu­tion says they “need some­body to do social net­works for them”, when they explore “mod­ern” meth­ods of cus­tomer response man­age­ment, when they sched­ule meet­ings with “us” over golf out­ings (of all things) or at 7am in the morn­ing, or in a City Hall five miles from “our” workplaces.

When we take the time to do the ret­ro­spec­tives, words like “blind­sided” and “unman­age­able” and “retrench­ing” always seem to crop up in inter­nal dis­cus­sions among the rem­nant. Terms like “obso­lete” and “arti­fi­cial” and “lame” tend to crop up in what­ever appraisals of these rem­nant projects “we” are will­ing to record. “Lame” is par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing, if you think about it ety­mo­log­i­cally: halt­ing, crip­pled, dis­abled, slow.

How many times have you seen these clashes in the use and per­cep­tion of time? In sched­ules and planning?

Can you see the rem­nant among the insti­tu­tions around you? And can you see the ephemeral (nearly invis­i­ble) swarm­ing social net­works that “we” depend upon instead?

Which is big­ger? Which is more impor­tant? Which should have the most influ­ence in the com­ing eco­nomic transitions?

How pre­pared are you, whichever side you live on, for the role the other side must play? What will you do to rec­on­cile these con­flicts in habit and per­cep­tion? How will you sched­ule your time and make coor­di­nat­ing plans across this cul­tural divide?

I want you to see a hun­dred or a thou­sand of “us” in every town of 100000, with our over­lap­ping social net­works and value streams and con­tin­gent agile plans thrash­ing wildly on a minute-​​by-​​minute basis on a dozen chan­nels, per­me­at­ing the infra­struc­ture of the rem­nant. With lit­tle mass indi­vid­u­ally, but veloc­ity enough to impart con­sid­er­able momen­tum. Imag­ine then the effect on the rem­nant, these large, many-​​bodied insti­tu­tions mov­ing at a lock­step pace, sur­rounded by these thrash­ing waves of atten­tion, of goals and actions chang­ing faster than they can per­ceive them… invis­i­bly in fact.

I see ero­sion. I see weath­er­ing, and seeds grow­ing in cracks in a rock face.

But this doesn’t hap­pen imper­cep­ti­bly, from the rocky remnant’s point of view. The news­pa­per can per­ceive “us”, though it can­not make the con­nec­tion between indi­vid­u­als and their invis­i­ble net­works. The Cham­ber of Com­merce can per­ceive “us” in their declin­ing rolls, and exec­u­tives there are scram­bling to find ways to adapt. No doubt the rem­nant busi­ness devel­op­ment peo­ple are start­ing to fal­ter and won­der what’s bro­ken, though they (and the city) clearly imag­ine they stand firmly alone in a field. The Uni­ver­sity, the arts groups, the anchor busi­nesses, the mar­ket­ing infra­struc­ture: what do they feel?

They are sur­rounded, invaded, and increas­ingly dri­ven by things not planned for. Their plans erode and get revised to death, their bound­aries and a century’s coor­di­na­tion strate­gies are made asyn­chro­nous and increas­ingly chaotic.

This is not a threat, but just a nat­ural exten­sion of the metaphor: every chip, every frag­ment and moment of their unsched­uled time and atten­tion, every lost cent of rev­enue slip­ping through the cracks in the remnant’s plans, that is a resource one of “us” can pick up, and pass along the net­works we have built, that only “we” can see.

Who­ever “we” are. I don’t know, myself, past the half-​​dozen friends I watch and inter­act with in my imme­di­ate social neigh­bor­hood. But then I don’t need to know more than that to make my way suc­cess­fully. None of “us” do.