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.

Related posts:

1. The Will to Relevance