> All in all, once an organization gets big enough, power does what power wants, and power wants what is good for them in the short term, regardless of what is good for the organization.
This has the ring of truth.
Has anyone solved this problem?
Is anyone trying to solve this problem? (Or is everyone in a position to work on the problem just playing the game?)
Valve? Though I have no idea how they're going now with the anarchy-as-an-organisational-structure thing these days.
If i’m honest I feel the issue is all the humans with human motivations.
An AI run organisation may solve it?
>> power does what power wants
> Has anyone solved this problem?
You're asking if anyone has solved the problem... of human nature? I don't think it's at the top of most people's lists of action items.
> Is anyone trying to solve this problem?
Your nearest meditation center, I suppose.
I wonder what happened with Frédéric Laloux’s “reinventing organisations”? Seemed to have so much promise at the time when Ruby on Rails was a new thing and people were laughing at DHH’s joke essay on the “Emotional Programmer”…
This all seems like a failure of incentives - the hard truth is that organisations that survive long enough all end up valuing only the survival of the organisation itself - and structure incentives accordingly. But maybe there is a way to modify these incentives somewhat?
Humanity all thought that monarchies are the only way of ruling successful states for _thousands_ of years … but now they are almost gone, and people live much more happy and productive lives.
Maybe we can figure out a way to shape institutions to not only have an “executive branch” but some other institutions that can also govern it.
We kinda have the idea of CEO and “board” which share power, maybe there is one or two more power centers that we can add that will ultimately prolong the life of an org?
On smaller scales.
I suspect alignment to long-term profits weirdly solves it at larger scales, but that kind of unbridled greed is weirdly hard for large organizations anyway.
The thing it wants is usually continuation of certain hierarchies, and singular long-term goals toward anything tend to disrupt that.