By Stephanie Sparks
In your introduction to Macrowikinomics, you mention that there’s a solution to fix what’s broken on a global scale. What do you see as broken or needing this fix?
AW: What we’ve seen is this pattern where conventional thinking about how to run an organization being structured around top-down, command-and-control management, hierarchical design principles that we think are really inappropriate for today’s world where you have this vast 
interconnectivity across people and communities, the ability to organize ad-hoc communities to problem solve by drawing on the skills and insights of a number of people, as opposed to the traditional modus operandi of a small group inside a traditional organization trying to do everything.
If you think about some of the warning signs that we’ve seen (the financial crisis, the Gulf oil spill, the failure of world leaders to negotiate an agreement on climate change in Copenhagen this past December), these are signs that a lot of traditional institutions are failing to deal with the scope and depth of the challenges that we face.
With the level of collaboration worldwide, do we risk not having a governing source to regulate changes and solutions?
AW: We’re not necessarily advocating that every single problem is going to be solved merely by opening it up to the whole world to participate. What we’re saying is that you can do so strategically. If you’re a government and you’re looking to infer public services, why not engage the people who are the ultimate recipients of those services in a collaboration to improve how the service is designed or how it’s delivered?
Who or what organizations should view this book as required reading?
AW: The book essentially covers different issues and problems from how we produce and consume energy and the way we address climate change to our systems of government and democracy to health care and education and of course, business issues – how is the nature of innovation changing and how could the financial services system operate in such a way that we would avoid a repeat of the financial crisis? We think there’s something in the book for everybody.
Do you foresee another financial crisis occurring in the near future?
AW: That’s hard to predict with any certainty. One thing that seems clear though is that things have started to go back to the way they were before. It’s not clear to me that the lessons of the financial crisis have been truly absorbed. There’s been a bit of tinkering with regulations around the world and different governments pledging to put in place regulations that could stop a financial crisis in the future, but we think that arguably more radical changes are required to prevent another crisis.
Will another crisis happen in another year, another decade? Who knows for sure? But unless we instill greater integrity in the financial system and, most importantly, greater transparency, it’s pretty clear we could easily have a repeat of the financial crisis we’ve just been through.”
Read Unlimited’s review of Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
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