Second and fourth industrial revolution organizations.

There is one main difference between those two industrial revolutions. The second industrial revolution was all about mass production, to achieve mass productions factories used people hands. This industrial revolution is all about mass production as well (with the addition of new virtual commodities), but this time robots and algorithms are going to be the mass producers, not people hand.

To be honest enough this is a trend that is going on for quite a while. This trend builds an avalanche that is now about to take a massive impact. The move from using people hand for mass manufacturing to robots is going to impact the way organization structure, motivate people and manage work. When people are not used in the assembly lines or to do repetitive tasks, they will be used to think, be creative and use more heuristic tasks at the working place.

Structure, Motivation and organizing work for people that are not doing repetitive tasks is entirely different from management philosophies and organizational structures used to motivate people to do repetitive tasks. I’m pretty sure that like in nature we will see less hierarchical and more decentralize organizations which distribute decision making, authority and provide autonomy to teams and individuals in organizations.

It is hard to predict to which level organization will adapt decentralization and distribution of authority, but I’m pretty sure that the evolution that started with the Toyota production system is going to keep on evolving in the near future.

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