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

If you look closely, all these problems fundamentally come from:

1. Decreased skin in the game, which reduces team alignment


2. N^2 communication, which creates need for managers and specialization, which reduces individual agency and breadth of learning


3. Reduced risk tolerance, which slows everything down

#1 and #2 are inevitable results of having more emplo... 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

What do people need to do to succeed? - DAOs are about coordination so think about what is effective coordination - How is authority delegated: empowering specific individuals with their roles and power - Values alignment. Recruiting right people in terms of skills but also vibe - Organic memes alignment. People spending the most time, - Mental and... See more

Left unchecked organizations default to bureaucracy. People default to distraction.

It doesn’t take long for 3 priorities to become 10. It doesn’t take long for 2 people in a meeting to become 8. It doesn’t take long to move from people making decisions to committees.

The most productive organizations and people spend a lot of energy fighting what fe... See more

...we’ve been trained to think of organizations as homogenous and mechanistic, with a clear set of rules, a command-and-control structure, and the ability to leverage hierarchy to get things done quickly by issuing top-down directives to reallocate resources to meet objectives.

With the innovation of the org chart McCallum eased the tradeoff between scale and efficiency that many organizations face as they grow. This new ‘operating system’ for firms operates even more effectively in modern times by leveraging the internet, but the tradeoff between scale and efficiency has not gone away. Structures and processes that work ... 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