tags: #publish links: [[Organisation Design]], [[Management Articles]], [[Business Strategy and Competition]] created: 2021-10-27 Wed --- # How organisations are like slime mould https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ Two things get worse as projects get bigger, leading to a *headwind hurricane!* - **Focus dilutes:** More people on project, people spread across lots of projects, varying priorities and viewpoints, hence misaligned **time of investment** and **sufficiency of investment** in each project - **Coordination headwind:** Frictions and misunderstandings go up with `O(n²)` of number of people. - More likely with bigger orgs / further apart teams. Distance increases mistrust. See also: [[Fundamental attribution error]] - Harder to resolve the further apart people are / deeper the management chain: - Escalation becomes useless for minor things if hierarchy too deep (too expensive) - People avoid instead of escalating. Mistrust breeds further mistrust Compounding factors for both: - **Uncertainty** (hence also size of the step / number of steps in project) - Larger and more spread out project teams - Bottom-up culture (comes with autonomy/chaos) Inevitable! You can't fix this by having everyone be well-intentioned and trying really hard, nor by hierarchical control because that lacks detail. Only solution: smaller teams, smaller projects, incremental goals. Use strategy to set a common goal. Don't do moonshots - do "roofshots" :D Have projects take smaller incremental steps towards the goal. Accept some misteps and retargetting, it's better than headwind hurricane. Global strategy can get separate pieces to converge over time instead of diverge. See also [[Constellation Software]], perhaps an example of this kind of scaling? See also [[Eventual Inconsistency]] - some problems force (very expensive) organisation convergence, or failure!