Working in Perpetual Beta is the latest volume in the perpetual beta series. It began with Seeking Perpetual Beta, a synthesis of 10 years of blogging. The next volume, Finding Perpetual Beta, specifically focused on personal knowledge mastery. Adapting to Perpetual Beta, published one year later, was an examination of leadership in the network era.

My intention with this fourth volume of the perpetual beta series is to provide a common framework from which others can test new organizational models and better ways of coordinating human work. This is not a recipe book. It is not based on best practices. I am setting forth what I believe may lead to some emergent workplace practices for the near future. Given the rise of automation, continuing income inequality, increasing human migration, and accelerating climate change, we have to think differently. This is my contribution to a new perspective on how people can work and learn together.

Today there are a growing number of prescriptive solutions pushed under the moniker of the future of work. Many of these are detailed recipes or based on some new technology that will supposedly save the day. As a student of history, I doubt these claims. People can never be more efficient than machines. All we can do is be more curious, more creative, and more empathetic.

We need to design our workplace structures and systems so that open collaboration can help each and every worker make critical decisions. In this volume I have discussed several ways of implementing network learning, as well as various methods for organizational engineering. Our biggest challenge, as my Internet Time Alliance colleague Charles Jennings notes, is to imagine the different.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Connected Curiosity

Organizing Principles

Subsidiarity

Wirearchy

Network Management

Self-governance

Self-organization

Mediated Expertise

Media

Learning

Cognitive Apprenticeship

Hierarchies & Leadership

Managing Knowledge

PKM

Group KM

The Network Learning Model

The Triple Operating System

End Note

– 55 pages