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0 pointstalkingtab1y ago0 comments

Our understanding of organizations completely derives from military and manufacturing. It is essentially top down. Heck, our whole society and schooling is top down. Someone else knows more than you and is better at things than you are. So if you want to be good at something, you follow. Guess what?

So what is the alternative to top down? Another model is that the persons in an organization act in two roles. First they effectuate. They take effective action. The people 'in situ' know what the situation is. Secondly they act as sensors. They provide information to others. And groups can act in the same way.

We humans evolved by being very good at this model. There were no CEO's in small communities. There were no schools that taught you how to be a hunter gatherer or make cheese.

Yes I know that large corporations and armies have in the past scaled better. Perhaps that is because we have had better technology to give orders better than to collaborate.

The (mythical) Mythical Man Month tells us that New York City cannot exist. And no corporation runs NYC. So clearly it cannot exist. Right? Yet it does. Perhaps we need to understand how. My attempts have started with 'Hidden Order' by John Holland. Don't follow it. Just use it as a starting point.

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wahnfrieden1y ago

Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow elaborates at length on this, pulling in recent research and reevaluating old anthro and archaeological work

tarcon1y ago

I think the emergent order we see in society and how we could use it to effectively organize our work exists in the background thoughts of Brian Robertsons Holacracy. He mentions it in his introductory talk at TEDx.

bjornsing1y ago

> There were no CEO's in small communities.

Now go tell Sitting Bull.

kragen1y ago

you're describing societies, not companies. societies rely on forms of collaboration that are more resilient than delegated authority. liberals often point out markets—i don't have to depend on the goodwill of the butcher and baker, etc.—but other forms like charity, science (including open-source software), and reputation systems are also crucial to enabling nyc to exist

delegated authority is fragile in the face of people making mistakes or just prioritizing their own interests over the interests of the group—as people often do. markets, published reproducible experiments, generosity, and gossip also suffer from those, of course, but they're better at self-correcting

lifeisstillgood1y ago

Absolutely

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