In the process of summarizing my last post, Jeff Jarvis suggested I was “searching for a metaphor for what I’ve been calling beta-think.” He’s exactly right — though I wasn’t aware of it when I started writing — so I’m going to take that up with a bit more brevity and focus.
The search for a “beta-think” metaphor builds on a more fundamental one I worked out last year, when I proposed that relevance will become the key to a new theory of human motivation:
I may not have realized it at the time, but my intellectual project was being supplied by metaphors from the internet — and more importantly, from the social web, or “Web 2.0.” The old dichotomies were inspired and perpetuated by mechanical metaphors — collisions and friction, turning gears, pressurized steam, etc — so it’s perhaps inevitable for us to conceive a new theory (or at least attitude, or vocabulary) of human nature using the marquee technology of our age. [...]
So I stumbled on the term “relevance” to replace “power.” It’s essentially in the same spirit as Nietzsche’s original, but “relevance” changes the connotation from domination and control to connectedness and meaning…
Google’s search engine acts as a metaphor for this theory the same way that mechanical engines provided metaphors for nineteenth century psychology, and, for that matter, the same way that older computing vocabularies in the mid-twentieth century provided metaphors for cognitive psychology.
So what’s the improved metaphor for beta-think? I don’t know yet — but I do know how we can work it out: by simply doing and making things in beta: prototyping and adapting and reiterating, etc.
By developing more open organizations and processes — based on the idea that people are motivated by relevance, not just money, power, and prestige — we’ll get progressively better metaphors and models for imagining how the mind works; as we get a better understanding of how the mind works, we can develop more effective organizations and processes… and so on, heuristically & recursively.
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The problem you’re having in finding a metaphor may be due to overloading. You seem to be trying to make one metaphor serve two ideas: first, an idea about failure leading to good; and second, the idea that failure should be encouraged.
For the first idea there are plenty of obvious metaphors; evolution and business most prominently. Evolution generates a constant churn of new mutations, business generates a constant churn of new business models. Most mutations, and most business models, fail; but, from the perspective of life as a whole, or the economy as a whole, in the long run the successes more than make up for the failures.
But the fact that failures lead to good isn’t enough to encourage people to take risks. Evolution and business are merciless, after all, and punish failure with extinction and poverty. What you’re after is a way to cushion the dangers of failure without discouraging risktaking. This is a hard problem. The question of where to calibrate a free market that makes innovation easy but dangerous versus a social safety net that makes innovation safe but hard, has no clear answer. Lacking certainty, different countries set that calibration on the basis of values rather than analysis.
Now that I think of it, though, evolution may be the right metaphor. One could argue that evolution found a solution to the problem of risk versus safety: intelligence, which lets one species try all potentially useful behaviors, without the failure of any of them endangering the species as a whole.
Perhaps what you’re after is a comparable layer of abstraction, one that lets individuals and organizations try out all potentially useful behaviors in a way that isolates the failure of any one from the failure of the whole. I submit to you that the necessary platform for this abstraction exists in the Internet, but that the necessary rules have yet to be invented. Relevance may be a good place to start.
Paul: You’re right about the distinction: the system needs individual failures but it isn’t necessarily desirable (or even possible?) for people to assume they’re likely to fail. It works best if everyone assumes they’re going to be astonishingly successful.
We’ve pretty well mastered that part — to say the least — but what we need to work on is a) the means of informing people exactly when and how they’ve failed so they can learn from it and move on; and b) as you pointed out, ensuring these individual failures are effectively isolated.