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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.
This is a Google deck as mentioned elsewhere. What's not mentioned is the quality of employees involved in the decision making.
Consider Google's first few hundred employees - people like Urs, Susan W, Marissa M. People chosen by Larry and Sergey for a mix of high impact qualities that made early Google what it is.
Now consider employee #200,000 chosen by employee #180,000 based on some dry rubrick. It's a completely different caliber of person requiring a different amount of coordination.
If you could create a company of 200k Susans, Marissa's, and Urses it would be kne thing. But thats obviously not possible. So size itself is a factor because of how you can get to that size to begin with.
The other problem is that even if there were 200k such employees, there wouldn’t be enough power to go around to contain it and also their skill isn’t necessarily anything to do with IC talent.
The author uses the military as an example of top down and that is true in many cases.
However, after reading the book Corps Business [0] about the United States Marine Corps, you realize that they are VERY big into having a top level mission but almost all of the decision making is pushed down to the lowest levels. In fact, if they do move decision making up the chain, it's usually for non-combat reason e.g. organizing the mess halls is moved up, how should we take that hill is moved "down" and closer to the front line troops.
Several of the other threads have mentioned "but how do we become those orgs??" and my best answer is just to read the book.
NOTE: the book was written in the late 1990s so there are some parts that are dated but the overall concepts are still sound.
The US military does a lot of things right. But not every concept matches over to the world of business.
A tremendous amount of time / money is spent on developing talent. There are way too many officers just for supervision; they are there so that leadership can be practiced, and just as important, so the next levels leaders can be selected. 'up or out' is what makes this work. You can't do this in a business.
(in peacetime) there is no cost of failure. The military can afford to learn. You can't do that in a business.
The book has value. I have read it. But there are several mis alignments across the problem domains.
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/
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.
I don't think the author is really super familiar with some of those other organizations he mentions so he's reflecting how he thinks they work rather than how they work. That said the observations are still pretty good.
> You need to delegate execution authority to small teams who are aligned to a shared goal
It's been a while since I read the slides but this is basically what the author is advocating for and what doesn't tend to happen in dysfunctional organizations.
> Complexity management in organizations follows the same patterns as in code. Single responsibility, don’t repeat yourself too much, encapsulation, etc.
There are a lot of parallels. But organizations have people so that's an extra factor. You can't just "refactor" them without thinking about people's egos, objectives and such. So a lot of thought is needed into how to build effective organizations and sadly not enough thought is given is most companies.
Thanks for the thoughtful write-up. I’m currently working on a journal article about optimizing organizations from first principles, starting with optimized delegation. Would love your thoughts on the paper if you’re willing to take a look.
These are two public previews that we are building off of for the journal:
Squad gets local context, sure, but who decides where domain boundaries sit? Two-pizza team owns "payments" until it needs data another team owns. Boundary-drawing is the real coordination cost, not the authority model layered on top.
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?
I've worked on both sides and I really think it comes down to Dunbar's number [1] and thus the size of the company.
At a sufficiently small company, you can just trust people will generally do the right thing. I ask X to accomplish some compliance goal, I just trust that they'll do it right.
As the company scales, you actually know a smaller and smaller portion of the people you work with. You no longer just trust that they'll do the right thing, because you don't know them. You fix the lack of trust by adding processes that ensure the "right thing" happens, but each of those processes is a friction point. Eventually you have so many of those processes that they become the majority of the effort for a project.
That gets exacerbated by the usual turnover. People pissed off by all the processes they have to comply with will leave, and people who love having their own fiefdom will stay and double down.
That all ends in the evergreen stupidity of "spend $1,800 to have 12 people who make $150/hr argue about whether this app really needs a $5/month Aurora database".
That's a personal pet peeve, but is emblematic of the issue imo. Trust has broken down so severely that the company is willing to spend more than the lifetime cost of compute for the app to vet whether it's "necessary".
A similar vein is the "platform team" where all they do is take an open source project and wrap it in a custom DSL, so you get all the complexity and none of the searchability of the original project, plus the features are almost always a subset. I can't tell you how many times I've looked for solutions to a problem, found a snippet that will fix it, and then had to reverse engineer how to make a stupid DSL output that config.
Only place I've seen this actually shift is when a VP ties their own OKRs to cross-team stuff, not just their team's numbers. We tried a "collaboration score" in perf reviews for a while, mixed results, but it at least gave people cover to say no to hoarding work. Culture change needs a lever, not just awareness.
I treat any organizational theory that has a unidimensional view - like coordination is a good-to-bad slime mold – as incompetent, or at worst, corporate sabotage.
Any active product or business development - builds product/domain/operational depth. That depth feeds back into every decision.
Without taking into account that depth, complexity, competence of Managers and Employees in that depth, headcount invested into automation, etc, just focusing unidimensionally on some behavioral or organizational methodology, IMHO, makes it worse.
It gives CxOs some cute stories to blame someone or something against. If your coordination is slow, then there is a reason behind it. Find it.
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.
It’s clearly a presentation. If you want a different representation, point an LLM at it and ask it to transcribe and rewrite in the form you prefer. I just tried with ChatGPT and it works fine. Retrieve the PDF link (ChatGPT will generate a working link for you - session tied I think). Then proceed to do what you must with it.
Many tools are available today to alter data representation. And frontier LLMs have high fidelity. You don’t have to wait for someone to help you. Claude helps those who help themselves.
Bet only works if someone else already reformatted it and posted a link. Point being: "have Claude fix it for you" isn't an answer when Claude's the one refusing, or when you're not paying for it. Kind of undercuts the "many tools available" pitch.
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.
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.
True. This was written with the context of Google which was, to a large extent and up until very recently, a good example of the resilience and magic a slime mold can be.
It is not true today, and as you mentioned "fundamentally incompatible with a next-quarter profit driven.."
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.
Ran physarum mazes in a bio lab years back – it really does find near-optimal paths by pruning tubes that aren't carrying flow, oscillating every ~90 seconds to sense conditions. The gotcha: overfeed it and it stops pruning entirely. Too much slack removes the pressure that drives good routing. Same failure mode as an org drowning in headcount.
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.