Ron’s PhD dissertation opens with a line that’s hard to read without a jolt of recognition: In the next two decades, the patterns of organisational communication are likely to undergo major changes due to innovations in technology. He wrote that in 1972 before the tools we now take for granted existed.
What’s striking is what he got right and what surprised even him. The expectation back then was that technology would ease the load on organisations. Instead, Ron argued it would speed information flow, increasing the transfer rate of data and information from one location to another raising the tempo and the pressure rather than relieving it. Anyone leading through the current wave of AI will feel the resonance immediately.
This matters because information flow sits at the very centre of the Westrum Continuum. How an organisation enables information flow, whether it enables or suppresses it, whether information flows freely across silos or gets logged jammed, this is what distinguishes a generative culture from a bureaucratic or pathological one. As AI further accelerates the tempo of information flow, the question isn’t whether your systems are faster. It’s how people will adjust when exposed to a wider range of distant events, and a higher rate of communication-driven interruptions. Will this enhance decision making or lead to increased subjective tension and pressure.
Listen: PhD and Hidden Events (Part 1)
These reflections come from Generative Cultures with Ron Westrum, a series of conversations I host with Professor Ron Westrum, originator of the Westrum Continuum. New thinking on generative culture, leadership, and the age of AI. [Subscribe to the podcast] · [Read the papers]