Beware of coordination headwinds

https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

Review by VGR:

Coordination Headwinds - by Venkatesh Rao - Ribbonfarm Studio - Summary - In any organization, things that work at small scale, where individual competence is the limiting factor, slow down and stall as you scale the activity and the systems/organization become the limiting factor. The problem occurs in two flavors — the slime mold flavor and the military hierarchy flavor. The latter is worse, so you should try to be like slime mold. - There is no villain responsible for this. Coordination simply becomes vastly more difficult far earlier along scaling trajectories than people realize. Things get worse than you expect, sooner than you expect. This is coordination headwind. It’s an exponential snowballing phenomenon. - There are many sources of coordination headwind — execution uncertainty, ambiguity of goals, effort fragmentation, cost of deconfliction through escalation, sensitivity to small misunderstandings, attribution errors, obstacles obscuring goals and timelines, negative network effects, and so on. - All contribute to create a superlinear relationship between scale and coordination headwind intensity. This happens with mathematical inevitability via multiplication of long chains of numbers that are individually high (like say 0.95) but net out to a rapidly falling probability of accomplishing anything. - People routinely and radically underestimate the massive size of this effect, and misattribute it to bad management, individual incompetence, or malice, and systematically under-react to it, doing too little, too late, and letting the problem grow to crippling, existentially threatening levels before even recognizing it. - When things stall due to coordination headwinds, people predictably pull out a variety of responses that at best don’t work, and at worst, make things work. These responses include: excruciating process discipline (spreadsheets!) to control uncertainty, heroic dragon-slaying efforts, simply ignoring it, leaders “diving in” to “help out,” and of course, throwing more people at the problem. - There are no easy answers, but one general approach is to replace big, brittle long-term goals that are fragile to coordination headwinds with a process of iterative retargeting (Komoroske uses the metaphor of “roof sighting”). - Komoroske’s analysis is a generalization of Brook’s Law (adding people to a delayed software project delays it further) that accounts for many more sources of increased coordination load besides adding people - The idea of “iterative roof-sighting” is very closely related to the one articulated in a famous paper by Charles E. Lindblom, The Science of Muddling Through, where he calls it the method of successive limited comparisons - the popular heuristic that important problems have to be solved anew at every scale is basically an acknowledgment of coordination headwind effects. Each new scale boundary is marked by the collapse of the coordination approach used at the lower level