Origins of Self Organizing Organizations—Agile, Holacracy, DAOs—My Thoughts and Philosophy

Linking these thoughts back to DAOs, I suspect we are now living in an age where decentralised internet communities that figure out how to organise themselves as an interdependent complex collective of diverse individuals will end up converging on better decisions. This is the next stage of social evolution. And as a consequence, these sorts of org... See more

Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is ... See more

A third approach consists of implementing an existing and proven set of self-managing practices. Holacracy is a natural candidate in this case. It is an elegant and interlocking set of practices for self-management that was pioneered originally with Ternary Software but has now been turned into an “organizational operating system” ready to be adopt

... See more

My goal is to structure teams around minimizing “coordination headwind,” as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (caused by uncertainty and disagreements) increase with scale, and adding managers doesn’t improve things. People’s incentives become misaligned. People... See more

The internet and software is only accelerating this trend: as coordination costs get lower, it becomes easier and easier for companies to use outside services instead of building capabilities internally, concentrating knowledge in fewer and fewer organizations.

So you want to build an evolutionary organization, anon? Start simple. Stop trying to design the most sophisticated governance system. Start with something simple and evolve from there. Fail intentionally. Make assumptions. Test those assumptions. Repeat. Build modular. Think about your organization as a car. You can swap out parts and it’ll still ... See more