There’s plenty of room at the top
Photo credit: Mert Kahveci via Unsplash
In 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a famous lecture entitled, ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom.’ In this lecture, he proposed the idea of tiny, nanoscale machines that would do work, manufacture products, and even become part of our biology.
We don’t yet have nanobots, but we already live in a world of nanoscale technology. Modern silicon chips are made up of nanoscale circuits and are built using nanoscale techniques. We may not have nanobots that manipulate molecules, but we do have nanomachines which manipulate information.
I think that, by building a world that uses the room at the bottom, we are creating more room at the top – especially in our leadership structures. But I do not believe that we are making the most of this room. The leadership structures in most organisations look like they did in the 19th century, when corporate bureaucracies came into being, and are determined by dimensions of budget and headcount. When impact was solely delivered by people, these dimensions made sense: when impact is delivered through machines and software, they make less sense.
Our struggle to adapt our leadership structures can be illustrated in a story familiar from the career of many technologists:
‘You’re doing fantastically well! Your technical work has real impact on our organisation! We don't really understand it, but we love it!’
‘In fact, you’re doing so well that we’re going to promote you.'
‘In order to promote you, we’re going to move you into a management position. You don’t need to do any of that technical work any more.’
(One year later.) ‘We need to have a serious conversation about your performance. We’re not happy and it’s clear that you’re not happy. What went wrong?’
We can call this the Technologist’s Career Paradox: when you prove you’re good at something, you get promoted to a role where you don’t get to do it any more.
There are proven responses to this dilemma. Some organisations (usually technology or consulting firms) have recognised the value of their expert technologists and created more room at the top by establishing Distinguished Engineer programmes or Expert career tracks. Implemented well, these allow people to pursue fulfilling technical roles at senior levels, and recognise that these roles shape the future of the organisation to at least the same degree as traditional leaders and managers. Such approaches do not absolve the people in these roles of leadership accountability – but they do recognise that this accountability looks different in a digital world.
Many traditional organisations have a hard time dealing adopting these approaches. This is not surprising: the people who have the authority make decisions about structures and roles typically attained this authority in a world based on traditional leadership dimensions. But it is part of leadership to recognise when the world has changed.
I think that, in the future, the performance of organisations will be strongly and demonstrably linked to the degree to which they recognise expert technical leadership – and that this link will be accelerated by the adoption of AI. In a world where work is carried out by AI agents, will we measure someone’s leadership authority based on the number of people they manage or the number of agents they control? Or will we measure it on the basis of their ability to use technology imaginatively and effectively? Maybe our organisations don't need to look like pyramids any more.
Just as computing has enabled us to make the most of the room at the bottom, creating the nanoscale cityscapes of modern microprocessors, it enables us to create more room at the top, breaking the connection between impact, headcount and budget. What we do with this room – and the success of our organisations – is up to us.
