In my mind, the ongoing birth and re-birth of the knowledge economy is causing a radical decentralization in western society.

Rising egalitarian values, the decline of mainstream media, demographic shifts (there are now more millenials than baby boomers in N. America), the advent of social software and mobile communication technologies, and the decline or outsourcing of the manufacturing sector – are just a few trends that are making our institutions look like dinosaurs.

Tall concrete buildings where people put on ties and pant suits — or more often collared shirts and jeans —  and work side by side in cubicles during standard, non-seasonally adjusted, hierarchically prescribed work hours, under the careful tutelage and supervision of ’superiors’ and ‘peers’ is still commonplace. Sadly.

But at the same time, this post-war industrial work ethic seems to be giving way to a new critique.

I am increasingly meeting people who claim that their iPhone has ‘liberated [them] from their desk’, and others who question the need for the workplace at all.

At first I was skeptical of this idea. Of course, I thought, every company needs an office. We need to work together on things, and the office creates a layer of direct accountability that independent off-site work could not afford.

But the concept of workplace oversight, and the fact that we feel we need to be embedded in a normative environment that pressures us to performance, is kind of old-school, in my mind. If people need extrinsic motivation in order to do their job, then maybe the wrong people have been hired.

The workplace comes with a heavy cost. In Vancouver, for example, an office space is easily one of a standard knowledge organization’s highest monthly expenses, next to labour. And to what end? So that we can talk about the sports at the water cooler, and have a shared printer? After spending a good part of the last eighteen months working mostly without a fixed office space, it seems somewhat absurd to me.

I currently work across several teams, and with people in Vancouver, Argentina, Chicago, Boston, London, and Madrid. I feel a strong bond with the people I work with, and we are high performance teams, solving, as one person — okay it was me — put it ‘problems that no one has ever solved before’ on a daily basis.

This is increasingly the fate of the knowledge worker – problem solving in an increasingly service based global economy – in a state of perpetual and exponential change, requiring agility, fluidity and radical collaboration without barriers. Distributed teams are becoming the norm in the knowledge economy. And they make a lot of sense.

People talk a lot about the knowledge economy, the conservation economy, the green economy, the renewal economy, etc. And these are good labels.

But I think we are also headed towards the intrinsic economy, where knowledge workers are self-motivated, intrinsically rewarded individuals who — after being liberated from the chains of the post-war industrial office — have learned to operate as free social good agents, building soft networks and collaborative entities via digital mediums, and discarding the concept of the office, and the high fiscal, social, and environmental costs that go with it.

I honestly can’t think of very many knowledge organizations that truly need an office. Can you?

But I also realize this type of thinking may be slightly ahead of its time.