Advanced Technology and End-Time in Organizations: A Doomsday for Collaborative Creativity?

Our capacity to tackle grand challenges facing humanity depends on collaborative creativity. Increasingly, such collaborative creativity is affected by advanced technology such as mobile technology, virtual communications, and algorithmic computing. We use a temporal lens to study the potential of advanced technology to influence collaborative creativity.

Prior studies have found that inner time and social time are critical for collaborative creativity. To creatively and purposefully contribute to collaboration, inner time—a temporal capacity to reflect on actions, meaning, and consequences over time—is required. Also necessary is social time—the time spent with others—to practice giving and taking of multivocal ideas and perspectives.

What has not been well scrutinized in the organization and management literature is whether advanced technology might suppress both inner time and social time. In this paper, we advance future-oriented conjectures on the potential role of advanced technology on such temporal capacity. Included in our projections is a futuristic doomsday in which advanced technology has extinguished inner time and social time and hence curtailed collaborative creativity.

We advance policy considerations for avoiding such an “end-time” scenario in organizations and societies.