Swa(r)m(i’)s anyone ..?

OK. That title needs some explanation. This is that.

First, a pic to display the right mood:

[Office; Y2K fieldwork at Martinique]

Yesterday [at time of scheduling ;-] it struck me that some years ago already – time flies like an arrow (eight interpretations) OR when you’re not working (traditional interpretation) – there was this fad in organisationland called ‘swarms’ in which agile (sigh…) little bands of independent professionals would come together all bringing their individual expertise and competences (as swami’s) to do a certain project job, then disband to go off to other ventures in yet other swarms. As transparent pools of in-group trusted achievers that would need less coordination than Big Corp in-house controlled project teams, and would leave the independents truly independent even from one another. Yet needing the trust among themselves.

But as swarms go, the hype’let soon disappeared it seems. So I checked with Trends™ – and found something interesting:

Off search term ‘swarm -bird -bee -starcraft -alien -heart -“the swarm” -locust -particle’ yes even the movie needed to be excluded to let it make some sense.

Where you see … there might not have been a hype’let in the first place. And/or it was buried amidst negativity over the New Economy (© The Year 2001) in the Financial Downturn.

Anyway; which part of the jobless growth isn’t jobless but rather perm-contractless ..? Only if we net out the work contracted to independents (individual / swarm / inc.), would we know how much actual productivity/growth is jobless indeed.

Or you would have pointers to definitive data on the latter already ..?