A clickstream is the record of every transaction we make on the World Wide Web, that visible and notorious dimension of the Internet we access through a friendly graphical interface called a web browser. Every click of our mouse leaves a trace in the melting snows of cyberspace. Those tracks make up a clickstream, a trail through the virtual worlds we are all learning to inhabit. "Islands in the Clickstream" will examine ways that life in the virtual world is changing life in general.

The Internet is both a symbol of and a vehicle for the transformation of work and life. A few years from now, the Internet may well evolve into something else -- the forms of electronic connection are not inviolable -- but the fact of connection is. The human species is growing a new nervous system. The Internet does not demand merely a new set of skills; the Net is a new culture, with mores, customs, and its own rules of netiquette. Learning to do business in cyberspace requires patience, attentiveness to how things work in the virtual world, and a willingness to call into question some of our fundamental assumptions about how we do business.

"Islands in the Clickstream" is a travel guide to that new culture. Privacy and surveillance, personal and corporate security, marketing and sales, PR and disinformation, how to avoid netscams -- we'll look at all this in future columns. This month we'll look at how we experience change due to the revolution in information technology and what we can do in response.

Someone asked Ernest Hemingway, How does a person go bankrupt?

Two ways, he replied. Gradually and suddenly.

That is also how individuals and organizations experience transformation. Inside the old paradigm, it feels as if we're learning little by little, adding each new fact onto the last ... until the paradigm snaps. Then we struggle together through a threat of impending chaos to learn new behaviors or new ways to frame reality.

Paradigm change is easy to manage in the seminar room. In real life -- where it translates into downsizing, bankruptcy, and new rules for utilities, government, manufacturing -- it isn't as easy.

Individuals and organizations everywhere are going through this passage. Radical change is traumatic. It always causes fear, rigidity, and isolation. We've lived with fear, isolation, and rigidity so long. we think it's the normal condition of life. The high level of stress turns our offices and cubicles into zones of "fight or flight." We turn colleagues and customers -- the very people who should be our allies -- into enemies. We collude to create an artificial scarcity of affirmation and power in the work place. Internal competition undermines our best intentions and drains our energy.

There is an antidote, however: the creation of structures of mutuality, feedback, and accountability.

Every quality program -- from quality circles to re-engineering -- builds structures of mutuality, feedback, and accountability. This is not an accident. All three are necessary for organizations to remain viable through times of accelerated change. The absence of any one of them skews organizational life in predictable ways, with predictable consequences.

Structures of mutuality, feedback, and accountability keep us flexible and effective under rapidly changing conditions. On the human level, they provide the security we need to keep building the bridges -- even in the middle of the air -- that we're using to cross the abyss. As a worker in a bank told me, they enable us to build the airplane while it is flying.

New paradigms call us forward through successive zones of transition. The center is constantly shifting. People who had grown comfortable living at the center find themselves on the edge. They need to learn new skills or, at the least, make alliances with people whose skills are relational and whose gifts include creativity and knowing how to make connections. Traditional "outsiders" can help center-dwellers learn how to live on the edge that is always arriving. They can help "traditionals" move out of the rigidity of hierarchical thinking into the more transitory and flexible structures mandated by change.

Paralleling the change in how we work, the revolution in information technology is changing our basic experience of ourselves. Just as the printing press was a catalyst for the Renaissance and the Reformation, life in cyberspace is changing what it means to be a human being.

Networks are subversive of hierarchical structures.

When we connect to a network, we experience ourselves as a point of presence at the center of the web. Our ongoing experience in a web changes how we think about possibilities, how we frame options for action, how we behave.

Persons in hierarchical structures, for example, talk about those structures as if they are external to themselves. They complain about the organization as if it is doing something to them. When they grasp that they are the organization, they move from the edge to the center again.

In a network, there is always more than enough power and affirmation to go around. No-one is ever displaced from the center.

Think of how characters in modern movies change shape, like Jim Carey in The Mask or the bad guy in Terminator 2. That special effect is called "morphing." It is said that the only competitive advantage a business has today is the capacity to morph like that into new forms.

The same is true of individuals. Only the self-conscious creation and nurturing of structures of mutuality, feedback, and accountability will give us the security we need to risk changing so we can move together in the right direction.