Coordination Headwind - How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds

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

Organizations are often spread too thinly across too many priorities, and too many of them are ill defined. Things tend to get added to the pile over time, and before we know it, we have huge backlogs. We're spread a mile wide and an inch deep. The problems with pace and tempo are, of course, related to having too much going on at the same time. It... See more

My observation is that leadership teams get caught in a cycle of addressing long-term risk with rigid, short-term solutions, and in the process they invite entropy. Teams that rely on traditional linear timelines get caught in a cycle of tactical responses to what feels like constant change being foisted upon them from outside forces. Over time, th... See more

It is not a coincidence that humans have developed ever more complex forms of coordination: it unlocks positive-sum dynamics that realize more and more of potential. 

People might be enthusiastic and capable of some level of self organization but they also require directions and guidance and someone to answer their questions. Most successful crowdsourcing efforts are products of a robust collaboration between the crowd and the individuals guiding them. These people focussed the collective and corrected for some ... See more

So as organizations grow in scale, the result, as many of us feel intuitively, is the concomitant loss of creativity, flexibility, curiousity, and humanity. Mega scale organizations are not, generally speaking, very nice places to work at, shop at, or do business with, are they? That is why they are always fighting their very own inertia. Like any ... See more

Coordination Failures occur when a group of humans could achieve a desirable outcome by working together but fail to do so because they don't coordinate their decision-making

The hierarchical world has speed but is less agile and over-dependent on few players, unlike Self Organizing Organizations where the maximum potential of the group could be unleashed and we can make workplaces, our institutions, and organizations a great place to work, discuss and fulfill our goals.