perpetual beta — our new normal – Harold Jarche

We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm.

Practically this means a shift away from the external towards the internal. And by internal we mean the new social capital is created by knowledge (theory, ideas, thought processes, etc) — that is being shared and translated through new (ex: the cozy web) and old (ex: brand collabs and the 'if you know, you know' mentality) mechanisms.

In the last few decades we have seen tremendous technical breakthroughs in the latencies and tooling possible to remove these constraints. Across the world, whether in productivity apps or in national governance, there will be a transition period as our norms and processes adapt to this tightening of the collaboration feedback loop. But perhaps I r... See more