alt Hacker NewsCoordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
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It's interesting to fit my own experience into this - one of the biggest projects I worked on was created by this sort of coordination failure that got so big that it threatened millions of dollars in revenue.
It wasn't even that technical of a problem to solve, it was just making sure that everyone was on the same page for everything so that when we executed the solution it wouldn't explode in our faces.
I guess this is why in big tech, you level up in your politics skills much more thatn you do in your technical skills, but in startups you level up the technical skills much more.
Also true at the macro level. Human civilization and infrastructure resembles slime mold from space. Also, apparently the cosmic web: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/03/cosmic-web/
It's been a long time (5 years?) since I encountered this last. Despite the idea making total sense to me, I am no clearer than I was then on how to actually do this in any org I have been a part of or managed. Where does this work? How did you do it? Does it work?
What is extremely valuable in slime mold organizations is clear direction from above on the relative importance of different objectives.
This doesn't have to be very specific - senior people often aren't in a position to decide on specifics. But even very general feedback can help the rank and file cut through "what should we do?" disagreements. In my experience those disagreements drain productivity faster than anything.
An aspect that’s missing from this analysis is distributed vs centralized decision authority. In militaries and in tech startups a “squad” or “two-pizza team” are empowered to make decisions for their local domain because they have the real-time context. The decentralized decision authority that happens with matrix-style management is a much higher contributor to coordination overhead than the top-down or bottom-up axis described here.
An autonomous team that does what they are told or an autonomous team is free to pursue opportunities as they see fit are both useful and can react quickly. The question is how much scaled alignment you need to execute a particular goal.
You can’t invade a country with one squad of 10,000 soldiers or 1,000 squads of 10 that do as they please. You need to delegate execution authority to small teams who are aligned to a shared goal.
Similarly, you can’t expect one group 10,000 devs with no internal structure to explore and find interesting opportunities to explore; you’ll just get noise. Nor can you try to manage 10,000 devs directly. You won’t be able to grok the context.
Complexity management in organizations follows the same patterns as in code. Single responsibility, don’t repeat yourself too much, encapsulation, etc.
It’s really a function of information theory, the more people you have to ramp up or keep current on context, the lower your ability to make and stick to decisions.
Is there a version of this that doesn't force me to click through slides with very little content on each one, as if I were in kindergarten? To whoever wrote this: I can read.
Great content, horrible presentation. This would be much more useful as a document, not a deck.
sounds like a lot of words and strained metaphors for https://enwp.org/Brooks's_law
There’s a lot that’s good here, but you just can’t be slime molds in a modern capitalist corporation.
A substantial portion of company goals is set by a very small group that is far removed from the day to day work, and the goals are often connected to timelines and financial expectations well before any team member gets into the project.
To have slime mold like behavior, a corporation would have to hire employees, give them time and resources, and general guidelines and goals, but let specific targets and projects bubble up.
This is fundamentally incompatible with a next-quarter profit driven corporate financial structure.
Harvesting, cooking, and eating Dog Vomit Slime Mold:
I recommend reading The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay on this particular topic.
A line in this presentation about loosely coupled, highly aligned teams is a major idea straight out of this book.
I saw some questions in threads here about how to achieve this: unfortunately, I have no bulletproof answers on this front, because what I've seen in practice is that large teams really like to talk about ideas/read books/get training on all these great ideas, then pantomime some of the behaviors from source material, then give up shortly thereafter without actually achieving results and only adding to the chaos and dysfunction.
In my experience, it takes hard organizational resets to achieve new results, with either major leadership shakeups or senior leadership truly, completely, deeply buying into a new way of doing things and seeing it through; such successful transformations have been a very rare occurrence across my career.