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Abstract: How do you do online governance? This primer is intended to serve as a guided tour through a curated set of readings — based on a year of study by the Yak Collective — to help groups and organizations understand and tackle the challenges of governing groups with varying levels of autonomy and decentralization and using web2 and web3 technologies as primary modes of collaboration.

The Yak Collective started in early 2020 as an online network of indie consultants and people interested in new modes of collaboration. The principles and patterns discussed in this paper shape how we govern and make decisions within the Yak Collective.

Introduction

How should online communities, virtual organizations, and other decentralized organizations be managed and governed?

This question interests members of modern online groups and any organization shifting to online, virtual, and distributed modes of operation. The adoption of these new modes of operation also gives a chance to rethink how governance can work in an emergent environment. At the other extreme, the recent emergence of novel online organizational forms based on blockchain technologies, known as decentralized autonomous organizations or DAOs, has increased the stakes for online governance.

A Yak Collective study group met weekly to explore online governance through the collective’s first year 2020-21. This paper is based on 48 readings studied. The full list is included in the Annotated Bibliography at the end of this document. [[Sachin/Venkat: add in invite here or somewhere else to join the study group? Or maybe not if would cast too broad a net? /j]]

We believe this paper will be of value whether you’re part of a mature traditional organization just beginning to develop an online mode of operation or a decentralized organization just starting out. The readings surveyed are not meant to be exhaustive or even representative. Our goal is to teach you how to fish in the waters of online governance for yourself. To the extent that we succeed, after reading this primer you will have developed a basic literacy around the topic.

Our readings in the first year cast a wide net ranging from academic papers and excerpts from books to corporate presentations and blog posts. We read articles about paleolithic farming cultures and medieval guilds, modern open-source movements and platform ecosystems. We read thought-provoking bits of fiction, sampled manifestos, and even discussed essays about biology and wildlife management. Along the way, we began developing an idiosyncratic, but powerful, internal vocabulary for talking about online governance, drawn from our readings, which we believe has helped us level up the sophistication, immediate practical utility, and interestingness of our discussions. A glossary of our favorite terms and concepts can be found at the end. We encourage you to use our glossary to jump start your own organization’s glossary, and also welcome your suggested additions to ours.

Governance Regimes

The studies in our first year led us to develop a shared map of the territory. Near the end of the first year we carried out a 6-week collaborative sense-making exercise to discuss, sort, cluster, and summarize our readings. From that exercise, we identified two principal axes:

• from low alignment to high alignment in terms of the intentions and interests of the participants
• from managed to wild in terms of the structures and processes of interaction.

The 2x2 captures the logic of our scheme. In the following sections we discuss each of the four regimes in turn:

• Hobbesian: Governance ideas responding to wild defaults and low alignment that attempt to foster progress despite conflict and chaos (12 articles)
• Gaia: Governance ideas responding to wild defaults and high alignment that attempt to foster progress using the patterns and harmonies of nature (15 articles)
• Muddler: Governance ideas responding to structured management with low alignment; commonly known as “herding cats,” attempts to foster progress by structuring local activities (7 articles)
• Citadel: Governance ideas that assume a consciously architected and structured context, usually with top-down alignment forces (18 articles)

Quadrant 1. Hobbesian: Wild and Low Alignment

Where a group with wild and low alignment has thrived, it seems to have been started by people who found high-alignment cultures to be antithetical to their goals and personality. The Hobbesian Governance Regime takes the form of Ernst Junger [00]* whose identity cannot be pinned down to an organization or ideology and whose actions and principles were driven by a pragmatism that served both him and the common good. Hobbesian groups are lower in energy and cohesion. They run the risk of isolation, which means they could be scapegoated, similar to how Junger was persecuted by both Allies and Nazis.

*[[suggest we leave the numbers out till last since the order of the list is in flux /j ]]

Early on a wild and low alignment organization/culture has to solve for trust and common knowledge. Trust would generally be low among individuals who are reluctant accept an ideology or are do-your-own-research types. Common knowledge [00] is needed for a culture/organization to be functional. Many online communities [00] tend to take their goal to be creating tools for people to be in the same place and don’t build trust and common knowledge.

One of the risks to wild and low alignment organizations is emergent behaviors of people or nature that could infest the organization similar to the bears of Grafton [00] or like John McLane in Nakatomi Plaza [00], this tends to happen in low-trust, low-common-knowledge environments. You can tell you are in a dysfunctional Hobbesian community if it is operating under the influence of charismatic figures—the Intellectual Dark Web, QAnon, and others could be good examples of wild, low alignment, and dysfunctional organization. This type of charismatic influence but with higher alignment is how a Hobbesian group could become Gaian, see Quadrant 2 below.

The libertarian New Hampshire town of Grafton is an example of an organization that began with a goal of being Gaian (wild and high alignment) but became Hobbesian because of their low alignment with people of the town and emergent behaviors in nature (bears). The Hobbesian way to go about this would have been to take the approach of Musical.ly founder Alex Zhu [00] who analogizes joining a new social network to moving to a new city—“come for the utility, stay for the community.”

Wild and low alignment also works during the early years of a subculture or a social network but fails when it scales or becomes popular. David Chapman [00] attributes this to an invasion of people who seek social status or even worse seek to exploit the organization/culture. This seems to have been a common trend in wild and low alignment cultures going back to the early 20th century, such as how the anarchists of China got infiltrated by communists who had a more top-down structure [00].

20th-century organizations have also been trained to believe that growth for its sake is a good end goal. The accepted metrics for growth are number of people, revenue, and impact on the wider culture. As Sarah Constantin [00] points out the relationship between hierarchy and wealth. Nonhierarchical cultures tend to be poorer; hierarchy is expensive because it requires systems and people to manage it. At the same time, an emerging form of nonhierarchical organization could potentially offload much of the functions of hierarchy to low-marginal-cost automation. This is something we’ve been exploring in Yak Collective.

If a Hobbesian organization produces enough utility/common good, it starts to have the characteristics of an organization with Muddler governance characteristics (see Quadrant 3 below).

A functional Hobbesian subculture takes time to build because it is lower energy and requires a high level of trust and common knowledge. It will likely go through cycles where it drifts into Gaian and Muddler governance regimes without hesitation because Hobbesians are concerned with pragmatism and survival.

Hobbesian subcultures work if people share the same level of common knowledge about what the common good is. Remaining relatively below the public radar can help prevent being overrun by sociopaths or ideologies.

Quadrant 2. Gaian | Wild and High Alignment

Gaia was the Greek goddess who personified Earth. She was the inspiration for James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis [00] about the way that living things adapt to and transform their environments. The complex process of coevolution means ecosystems are always optimizing for life to exist. The same can be said for groups of people who gather in pursuit of a common goal in a Gaian Governance Regime. The question becomes: will the organization become ideologically opposed to any form of structure even when it improves their quality of life?

It’s important to understand the distaste for structure. We can look to the philosophy of Ivan Illich, who’s views have been analyzed in Ivan Illich, The Progressive-Libertarian-Anarchist Priest [00]. Modern society is made of institutions, from education to medicine to defense and beyond. Those institutions are a result of economic specialization. There needs to be a way to organize large swaths of people to remain productive. But there’s a dark side to this process, which leads to a loss of dignity at the individual level. Eventually, institutions are dominated by the cult of expertise which leads to cartel-like behavior. The experts look for every reason to justify and strengthen their existence. Entire systems are built to create a pipeline of experts, but in reality their knowledge has become commodified: a ticket to enter the status-seeking game. This entire process is counterproductive. Instead of existing to be effective, institutions become focused on proving their righteousness.

People often gravitate to anarchic ideas as a response to the burden of institutions. Jo Freeman’s essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness [00] outlines what happens when organizations favor an ideology of anarchy. First, informal structures will emerge with unclear norms and unwritten rules. The authority within the group will be concentrated to a select few elites and status games will ensue as individuals in the group jockey for position. Once this happens, the group loses focus on its original goals, making progress next to impossible.

In order to overcome the bias against systems of control and the pitfalls of informal structures, organizations must get buy-in from the group. If everyone can agree on both the mission and the means of accomplishing that mission, individuals can then decide if they’re willing to give up a certain level of freedom in order to reap the benefits of being in the group.

A minimum viable structure is a prerequisite to keeping everyone in the group aligned towards their shared goals. This is the case in many organizations that claim to be structureless. Most of them may be flattened hierarchies, but they leverage many of the forms of structure noted above to keep themselves firmly in the Gaian governance regime.

The most important thing a Gaian organization can do is clearly define the measures of success. Often, there is a tension between the goals of the individual and the goals of the organization. When the tension is too great, imbalance threatens the stability within the organization’s environment. Another advantage of setting the terms of success is that it provides a simple criteria to filter potential additions to the team.

Once everyone has an idea of what success looks like, it’s possible for individuals to understand how they fit into the bigger picture. Morning Star employees [00] create a letter of understanding, which outlines their personal responsibility and means for being held accountable. This letter is renegotiated every year. Everyone in the company gets an opportunity to define how they contribute to the success of the organization.

Transparency is valuable to Gaian teams. GitLab [00] models itself after open-source software projects. With employees distributed across the globe, the company has imposed structure to make some order of the chaos. Their employee handbook stresses the importance of documenting decisions, communicating in public spaces, and breaking apart work into the smallest piece possible. Combined, these things give everyone the ability to see the whole picture of the company’s operations and how it impacts their own role.

Organizations must understand that there are limits to structure: it will not always work as intended. Even the most aligned teams will have dissent. In their culture deck, Netflix [00] recognizes this and provides employees with a process for resolution: they must be willing to voice their dissent and be able to articulate why they disagree. An “informed captain” will review the issue from all sides and make a decision. The captain, who often will have to tease out these frustrations, makes a decision and documents it for the entire organization’s review. Captains are trusted to make informed decisions and don’t need consensus to move forward. However, it is expected that the team rallies around the final decision so that the objective is as successful as possible.

Gaian organizations tend to discriminate against candidates that don’t have a shared understanding of organizational values. Valve [00] believes that the Gaian model is scalable, so long as they are particular about the people they add to the company. Making the wrong hire can be an expensive mistake: either you let an extraordinary talent get away, or you miss the warning signs and a new team member wreaks havoc on the organization.

Organizations should delegate tasks and authority, expecting a commitment from an individual in return. With that assignment come criteria for success—individual responsibilities should be switched up over time to avoid hoarding of knowledge; information should be freely available; decisions should be documented to provide context to the rest of the team.

Quadrant 3. Muddler | Managed and Low Alignment

The Muddler Governance Regime quadrant represents a condition of shared and commonly acknowledged ignorance, rather than common knowledge, with expectations set accordingly. The critical insight regarding this quadrant is that self-deprecating humility and a sense of humor in approaching decentralized orgs is a superpower. When a group sees itself as “ordinary people muddling through in ignorance, doing their mediocre best” rather than “Chosen Ones constructing a utopia,” things are seen in the right proportions. The 7 readings of this section help foster and anchor the attitudes necessary to wield the power of this regime of organizational behavior.

The quadrant label comes from Charles Lindblom’s 1959 article, The Science of Muddling Through [00], and the method of successive approximations (an early precursor of what we now recognize as agile thinking) he identifies as characteristic of successful organizations. The muddling-through organization is the opposite of the optimized, machine-like organization. Frederick Laloux [00] characterizes this condition in terms of loosening optimality criteria, and appreciating how “fatter” unoptimized systems operate. An example can be found in the interview with Tobi Lüttke, founder of Shopify [00]. The key is understanding the organization as a complex system, and being non-deterministically in harmony/attuned to what’s going on, but also oriented towards a purpose rather than surrendering to the system’s natural evolutionary tendencies.

You can tell you’re in this quadrant if you seem to be making progress, but in a confused, near-random walk way, with many misunderstandings between people due to misalignment at the level of information rather than values. But over time, net positive movement emerges anyway. You get frustrated, and impatient, and forbearance and patience achieve a lot. There is a sense of inefficient and sloppy relentlessness. Knowledge retention and transmission will be lossy processes, naturally producing the muddling-through process, and killing any attempt to do the rational planning process. A key risk in this quadrant is bureaucratic capture, Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy [00], and Jo Freeman’s Tyranny of Structurelessness [00] both argue that “management” effectively emerges for better or worse even if looks unmanaged. Anarchy in the sense of chaos is unstable

The temporality of the muddling through regime—staccato stop-go janky progress—is captured by two short readings. The Hurling Frootmig principle, derived from a passage in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [00]—that most work gets done by random people wandering in at lunchtime and seeing something worth doing, and the Wind in the Willows principle [00], which asserts that people can vanish abruptly and reappear at any time, and that the system should be able to make use of their unpredictable availability anyway. The two principles suggest a key tension between being, on the one hand, open to the serendipity of creative contributions from unexpected new participants, and on the other hand, forgiving of unreliable participation by existing participants, caused by the uncertainties of individual life.This idea harmonizes with one covered elsewhere in this paper, Postel’s Law, from the Tao of the IETF [00], which argues that you should be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you put out. Applied to attitudes towards participation, muddling through requires being liberal in the participation you accept and conservative in what you police.

Muddling through is a low-energy condition because there is a lot of acknowledged uncertainty, and decisions/actions happen despite this uncertainty. Time is spent in confusion and rework, as well as in sorting out tactical confusions. There is a lot of interleaved discovery, which is a lower-energy activity than execution.

At the Yak Collective, the Muddler quadrant is the default quadrant. Other quadrants are inhabited by exception. For example, within a well-defined project, we can drive up to Citadel or Gaian levels of energy, but much of the time we are muddling through.

What works in the Muddler quadrant is that it actually works to expectations based on good-humored cynicism. The challenge, though, is that these expectations are typically low. The Muddler quadrant can yield somewhat desultory, stop-go progress. Staying permanently in the Muddler quadrant, without spikes of more energized action, equals death.

Quadrant 4. Citadel | Managed and High Alignment

Platforms and ecosystems seem to be everywhere these days but still can be a bit confusing even for their participants. Management consultants define ecosystem as “a dynamic group of largely independent economic players that create products or services that together constitute a coherent solution” [00]. So the questions of why and how exactly these independent players can collaborate, what keeps them together, and how do their products and services compete bear some significance.

One of the problems most platform builders face is that intuition developed while running a traditional organization frequently fails them. One case in point: the name Citadel selected for this governance regime implies rather strong walls to protect an ecosystem or a marketplace from external threats. Seems logical, but misses the point. Ecosystems and marketplaces do need some protection, but dynamic, rather than static protection. It is their openness that makes them stronger. What may need protection is not a perimeter, but an economic engine, which can be defined via network effects. One can not hide the engine behind the walls. And the law of unintended consequences can break even the strongest of them.

A key tension of an emergent ecosystem is typically determined by an interplay of two forces: one force is trying to limit variety, so that establishing a hierarchy becomes reasonable; the other force leads to proliferation of new rules, new teams, new and unconventional ways of working, and thus clashes with hierarchy.

These forces operate at different tempos. Hierarchical one works on a linear time scale and wants to perpetuate itself. Emergent one uses organic cycles. It is slow in the beginning, but can learn and accelerate. Uneven tempo is a feature, not a bug, but can be attacked by hierarchical forces for being too slow or too fast. If this attack is successful, the most likely outcome is not even a muddler, but a far away corner of the quadrant we can call a ghost town.

You can be sure you are in the Citadel quadrant when the tension is very visible. It is exactly this tension that produces ecological surprises. In scientific terms, the idea of ecological surprise hinges on an observer. An ecological surprise can be defined as a turn of events that can’t be predicted based on traditional logic. This happens when people either are wrong about the future, mismanage the system, or discover something surprising about it.

Surprises are inevitable. You can either fight them or learn from them. Some organizations are even making this process of constant discovery into an element of its economic engine.

In this case it can be called “a serendipity engine” [00]. For people with developed platform thinking most surprises are serendipitous. For people with a hierarchical mindset (brownnosers all the way down), every surprise is likely a zemblanity.

The whole idea of governance in the case of an ecosystem is about nurturing and protecting network effects. It can be counterintuitive at times: hoarding power and value is not very helpful, but can lead in the wrong direction. Both power and value should be distributed in an intelligent way. And it is rather hard to discover which one. Universally applicable governance principles do not exist. Winner-take-all or -most dynamics prevails. And thus every winner is one-of-a-kind.

Any attempt to accurately describe what’s going on inside a sufficiently developed ecosystem frequently fails. You can, of course, read the principles honestly written down by the insiders, but they are impossible to copy or use in other settings.

Principles, like those of IETF [00], make sense only in their entirety. You can’t take anything out of the doc. They don’t stay the same, but kind of unfold with the development of an ecosystem. Every set of principles is a snapshot in time of this unfolding process. Case in point, “the IETF recognizes leadership positions and grants power of decision to the leaders, but decisions are subject to appeal.” The authors of the principles kind of admit that it is meaningless to go into further details, but without details it can’t really be used anywhere.

In a speech delivered in 2014 and turned into a blog post, Frank Chimero, a brand and product designer, makes a distinction between wolf management (“shooting the source of the problem”) and bear management (“investing in a process to keep things open and adaptable”) [00]. Good designers, points out Chimero, should always ask themselves: what am I being asked to do? Do I need to shoot wolves or manage bears? In the case of designing an ecosystem governance model the answer is rather clear. You can’t really create anything of value via the wolf management model. Bear management is the only way to go.

Known Unknowns aka Traps

As we think about and take part in online organizations, we notice that there are two traps that people tend to fall into: one overindexing on technology and the other overindexing on traditional institutions.

Techno Utopia trap

Many who participate enthusiastically in online communities approach online governance as though the mere use of the newest media—whether it is messaging apps or blockchains—changes almost everything, creating a blank slate where ideal visions of organization can be realized. To the extent historical experiences (including older online experiences over the past 40 years) inform or inspire governance ideas at all, they tend to do so in the form of biases inherited from particular romanticized historical eras favored by early members of a given community. Favored historical reference points include medieval guilds, 60s counterculture, and early 90s USENET culture.

While this blend of tabula rasa thinking and romantic cherrypicking of reference points can occasionally lead to refreshing new insights and much-needed shedding of historical baggage, it can also lead to naive idealism and utopian, wishful thinking, and governance attempts that fail through inevitable disillusionment.

Grand Old Institution trap

Those invested in long-running traditions of scholarship and research relating to questions of governance and management (often from academia) often approach the question as though the context of new digital tools, information ubiquity, and unusual organizing aims changes almost nothing. Such individuals often have limited experience of deep, extended, skin-in-the-game participation in online, virtual groups. They often assume that the new governance principles can be inferred through relatively shallow “field research” in a conventional anthropological mode, coupled with the application of well-known ideas. Perhaps most importantly, they are often blind to the biases they inherit from their own home institutional forms such as universities, corporations, nonprofits, or public sector institutions.

While such a tradition-bound approach can occasionally cut through simplistic utopian thinking and introduce much needed sophistication to active online governance efforts, it can also lead to entirely missing the essence and power of online modes of gathering, organizing, and doing, and governance attempts that fail through lack of imagination.

Patterns worth paying attention to

While writing this we saw there were heuristics that emerged in each governance regime that affected how organizations in each quadrant evolved. We believe that paying attention to these heuristics will help orient organizations towards problems and potential challenges:

temporality—the seasons, cadences, events that are unique to the group or organizationenergy—the energy level of the group which decide the type of projects and work it will engage incommon knowledge—shared level of knowledge in the organization

Conclusion

For the Yak Collective, the ideas we have surveyed in this primer are not mere stimulating fodder for intellectual curiosity. They shape our own ongoing attempts to govern ourselves better, and do more, and more interesting things with ourselves, both individually and collectively. While we ourselves are mostly situated in the wild and low-alignment quadrant of our map, we draw freely from all parts of it.

The original loose goal of the Yak Collective was to create an online network and community for indies to collaborate on independent projects, pursue gigs together, trade leads and subcontracts, and generally pursue personal and career development in a welcoming, friendly context. This goal continues to evolve, guided by our ongoing studies, and we continue to muddle through ourselves.

Over the first year of its existence, members of the Yak Collective took on and executed multiple in-house projects, a significant client project, and developed a sophisticated support infrastructure integrating a variety of cheap and free online tools, as well as custom automation. Besides these organized activities, a stream of informal activities has also developed—we trade warm leads and subcontracts, swap notes, and help each other with both practical, money-making concerns, as well as passion projects and lifestyle enrichment activities.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been gradually converging towards exploring the web3 stack, both in terms of organization and publishing projects. We feel that the web3 layer of technologies align well with our current projects, goals, and organizational behaviors. This paper has been an experiment in collaborative writing and discussions that has spanned one and half years and over a dozen Hurling Frootmig lunch break contributions. This is why publishing this as an NFT with split contracts, with X going back to the Yak Collective common fund makes sense for us.

Our own studies and readings continue in our weekly online governance meetings which are free and open to the public. You are welcome to join us. You are also welcome to reach out for help and consulting support for your own online governance challenges.

The format of this primer is also loosely inspired by the format used at those meetings—the well-known “Amazon 6-pager.” If you are part of a group or organization learning to govern itself online, we highly recommend reading this paper as intended—in a small group of 8-10, at the start of a meeting to discuss it. It should take about 15 minutes to read. If you’re interested, one of us will be happy to join you for your session.

To the extent the collective has succeeded, much of the credit goes to ideas we have picked up and tried out from elsewhere. To the extent we have struggled, it is due to the difficulty of the challenges and the extent of things we don’t know or understand—and which we suspect nobody else does either.

Glossary

Hurling Frootmig Wind in the Willows In group contrarian BDFL Root cause vs Muddling through Anarch vs Anarchist (Junger)

Annotated Bibliography

1. The Limits of Peer Production: The authors take a skeptical view of utopian claims about the vision of peer production and argue that it has less revolutionary potential than claimed, and requires more critical scrutiny. They see it primarily as an extension of existing modes of production, with all the baggage that entails.
2. Doctorow Metacrap article: Barriers to making useful metadata (c.2001)
3. The Town That Went Feral: Libertarians flock to small New Hampshire town to live as they please, but lack of organization and alignment made life worse for all.
4. Ernst Junger: Core ideas of Ernst Junger. Anarch - anarch can take any form and does not actively resist tyranny, is pragmatic , sees what can serve him and common good but is closed to ideological excess
5. Nakatomi Space: Like in Ender's Game, breaking out of common understanding of barriers and standard processes enables greater degrees of freedom toward achieving a desired goal or outcome.
6. Common Knowledge Problem: Working in groups requires common knowledge to be built and dissipated across time. new members find it harder to join a group when they dont have the common knowledge of the rest of the group
7. Picking the Right Approach: About trust and common ground: There are a lot of tools being developed for collaboration but many of them don't solve the problem. Themain problem seems to be lack of knowledge where the expertise lies and how to find it.
8. Anarchists in China: A history of the Chinese anarchist movement in the 1900s with strong parallels to current times. This movement coincided with late stage industrial revolution, tension between individual freedom and uniform moral code that is imposed top-down
9. Geeks, MOPS, and sociopaths in subculture evolution: Subcultures are subject to forces that put them on a predictable trajectory, which can be managed if the subculture is willing to see their thing for what it is and Be Slightly Evil to defend what is good.
10. Relationship between hierarchy and wealth: Structurelessness in orgs is hard to maintain. There are examples of stateless anarchies which built bronze age level cities such as in Iceland, Harappan civilization etc but there are no examples of it in industrial societies. Hierarchy is expensive, more freedom causes poverty.
11. TikTok: It is very hard to change human nature. We should follow it instead of fighting with it. "Come for the utility, stay for the community."
12. Netflix Culture Deck: Netflix deck on being an individual contributor without a lot of centralized management and avoiding chaos with increasing complexity—core tenets that resonated are —functioning like a pro sports team, highly aligned loosely coupled
13. Ingroup Contrarian: Assuming a Durkheim-Girard approach to analyzing group dynamics in terms of mimesis and effervescence, the article explores the phenomenon of scapegoating of the ingroup contrarian
14. Free-rider problem: Classic principle (Mancur Olson) of collective action that develops a model of free-riding behavior in primarily a game-theoretic way as a problem to be solved
15. Ivan Illich: The Progressive-Libertarian-Anarchist Priest: "Institutions create the needs and control their satisfaction, and, by so doing, turn the human being and her or his creativity into objects. Illich’s anti-institutional argument can be said to have four aspects: a critique of the process of institutionalization, a critique of experts and expertise, a critique of commodification, and the principle of counterproductivity."
16. Do you need a business ecosystem?: The authors defined a business ecosystem as "a solution to a business problem, as a way to organize in order to realize a specific value proposition," and aimed to flesh out that definition by examining how it differs from other governance models, basic types of business ecosystems when it is an effective governance model and the associated drawbacks.
17. Technology, Innovation, and Modern War: Examined the ways new operational or organizational doctrines are created, and the factors that contribute to the timing of such a change. Especially in the public sector, doctrinal changes are aimed toward gathering buy-in from a large bureaucracy of politically motivated executives. When implemented from the top-down, such directives are at risk of being out of touch with the realities of those on the front line. This divergence then causes innovative pressure to build from the bottom-up in the form of hacked together solutions, and when the tension is no longer sustainable, conditions become ripe for an organizational sea change.
18. GitLab's Approach to All-Remote: A whitepaper examining GitLab's asynchronous work model and the main practices that are implemented to create an effective environment for work. Primary thrust seems to be premised around a strong shared culture of self-contained, legible communications and how operational autonomy can be attained at the cost of lower strategic autonomy a la modeling workflows after CI/CD.
19. Morning Star case study: Self managing principles of worldwide market leader in tomato processing.Colleague Letter of Understanding (CLOU) - t’s a short document that details an employees' personal commercial mission and all the commitments they have made with employees who are affected by their work. All employees also go through an onboarding process which seems to involve unlearning previous habits
20. Valve Employee Handbook: Valve, the video game studio, provides principles for employees to operate without managerial oversight. Topics include choosing projects, performance reviews, self-improvement, and growing the company.
21. Carrier Bag Theory Of Fiction: Le Guin claims that fiction is predominantly hero-centric: it begins with struggle and ends in triumph or tragedy. But she also believes that there's another way: telling the stories of ordinary people instead of heroes, which we can store in our own containers to reflect upon in the future.
22. Haraway on Chthulucene: Haraway proposes an alternative concept of the anthropocene called the Chtuhlhucene, based on a local-global entanglement with nature, and contrasts the concept with the Lovecraftian cosmic-horror version of Cthulhu (different spelling, same Greek root inspiration)
23. Introduction to Kropotkin: Kropotkin wanted to base anarchist theory around biology - the idea that animals have a higher chance of survival by collaborating than being competitive. His ideology was reactionary to the growth of centralized governance. His theory was that "mutual aid" was responsible for the growth of mankind till the medieval ages when centralized ideas such as that of the church and state started to take hold
24. Hoe Culture: Hoe culture maximizes production per hour of labor, and is not physically demanding. This leaves lots of time for leisure, and also enables women to be economically productive and enjoy other freedoms. Plow culture maximizes production per unit of land, which has historically required the strength of a man to quickly turn over fields. Men support women, and culture becomes deferential to the producers. The author makes no claims of right and wrong, but uses this model as proof that non-patriarchal societies have worked in the past.
25. Cognition All the Way Down: Authors look at parts of organisms as agents, detecting opportunities and trying to accomplish missions. They admit that it can be risky, but it is a worthwhile thought experiment. "Treating cells like dumb bricks to be micromanaged is playing the game with our hands tied behind our backs and will lead to a ‘genomics winter’ if we stay exclusively at this molecular level."
26. Wind in the Willows Principle: Create group norms that allow for showing up when you can without guilt. "...and the Mole recollected that animal-etiquette forbade any sort of comment on the sudden disappearance of one's friends at any moment, for any reason or no reason whatsoever." Suggests making explicit a group norm of join when you can for voluntary alliances.
27. Hurling Frootmig Principle: Develop work processes that are sufficiently granular that group members can grab a task and contribute as they are able. The group doesn't need tight control for the project to continue. "...the role of the editorial lunch-break which was subsequently to play such a crucial part in the Guide's history, since it meant that most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing."
28. The Tyranny Of Structurelessness: Women's movements in the counterculture era viewed structure as a form of tyranny, so they prided themselves on being structureless. That works well to bring people together, but falls apart when it's time to take action. Informal political structure begins to take hold, and distracts the group from being productive. This classic article advocates for experimentation and willingness to have structure, and provides 7 operating principles for healthy organization.
29. Tobi Lütke on Org. Design & Gaming: Founder of Shopify, Tobi spoke about how he has designed Shopify's culture to be generative and led from the bottom-up, as informed by his background in playing games such as Starcraft and Factorio. His emphasis has been on creating effective structures to manage people's time and attention in a way that's just-in-time.
30. Lindblom on Science of Muddling Through: Lindblom contrasts two methods for working through complex, messy problems: rational-comprehensive or "root" method, and successive limited comparisons, or "branch" method. The latter is "muddling through." He argues that the latter is both more effective, and more used in practice.
31. Frederic Laloux on what lies ahead for business: Platforms and Ecosystems are more robust in turbulent times but can become fragile when everything is steadyPournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: Very short assertion: people dedicated to perpetuating an organization will eventually overwhelm those who want to pursue its stated mission.
32. The relationship between hierarchy and wealth: Is it possible to create non-hierarchical social systems for humans? Power Distance. Lowest in Nordics, Israel and highest in Arab, Southeast Asian and Latin America.Structureless orgs work when it is small and people are similar. Interesting example of medieval Iceland as a stateless society that lasted ~3 centuries. A good question is "Is Hierarchy the Engine of Growth or a Luxury Good?” Top Down control and dominance hierarchy has problems like inaccurate knowledge transmissions and principal agent problems. "By default an organization will succumb to inefficient hierarchy, and structureless organizations will succumb faster and to more toxic hierarchies. When designing governance structures, the question you want to ask is not just “is this a system I’d want to live under today?” but “how effective will this system be in the future at resisting the guys who will come along and try to take over and milk it for short-term personal gain until it collapses?”
33. Steve Yegge's Rant: On micromanagement and one thing that can really really make up for ALL of the political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.
34. Benevolent Dictator for life (BDFL): open source software leaders who have the final say in settling disputes. Famous examples: Vitalik, Guido Van Rossum (Python). Closely related to single wringable neck in a software development project
35. Expert crowdsourcing with flash teams: The authors describe a system called Foundry designed to create block-structured workflows allowing automated management and clean handoffs to allow expert teams to do paid, coordinated work at scale
36. The guilds reappraised: Guilds in pre-industrial Italy helped improve productivity, innovation, and quality of output. They were controlled by the most competent master-craftsman, who did a lot of the economic organizing, but also set up apprenticeship systems to pass on knowledge. Industrial changes and consolidation of government power led to the decline of the guild system.
37. Bear Management: Growing Roses out of Bullshit
38. Underutilized Fixed assets: It is very hard to find a marketplace that wasn't built on Underutilized Fixed Asset
39. Dynamic Capabilities: Capabilities that are unique to an organization (the way things are done around here) that enable the organization to thrive. organizations need the skills for Sensing, Seizing and Transforming to take advantage of dynamic capabilities
40. A Systematic Logic for Platform Business Models: An ontology of business models based on 3 major categories: firm-centered networks, solution networks, and open networks. A forward-looking normative view based on S-D logic (service-dominant) is proposed as the best way to build platform business models
41. The Tao of IETF: Describes the "ways of IETF" and how a newbie could contribute to the RFCs. Founding beliefs: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code" and "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept".
42. The Future of Platforms: There are 2 types of platforms -- transactional and innovation, with some hybrids. Hybrids are increasing. The article analyzes platforms from a conventional business lens in terms of market performance, but doesn't say much about their intrinsic nature or how to manage them.
43. Bonnita Roy: Any Open Architecture for Self Organization: A view of self-organization based primarily on a metaphor of fractal "network place", with 2 kinds of places -- core and network, and four macro-zones: access, incubation, support, and adaptation, that create a sort of canvas for fluidly evolving governance. The key insight is that embodied thinking about change, as in Stewart Brand's how buildings learn, can be applied to abstract things, via the place metaphor applied to org-chart abstractions.
44. Single wringable neck: Who is the scapegoat when it comes to the success/failuire of a software development project? Closely related to "BDFL"—see this reading in the current sheet . Success has many authors but failure only one?
45. Do we need a business ecosystem: Ecosystem is defined as a solution to a business problem. It is a specific way to organize and a specific governance model, contrasted with a vertically integrated organization, a hierarchical supply chain, or an open-market. According to authors, ecosystems work the best in unpredictable but highly malleable business environments. The key benefits of ecosystems are: access to a broad range of capabilities, the ability to scale quickly, flexibility and resilience.
46. Amazon Shareholder Letter: Be original. Create more than you consume. An org that doesn't create value for everyone it touches, even if it seems to be OK, is on it's way out.
47. The Hierarchy of Marketplaces: marketplaces get to product market fit by creating minimum viable happiness - solving a particular problem really well. Increasing happiness means more customers and more transactions.
48. Defining interactive e-commerce (Pinduoduo): PDD pioneered a new kind of social ecommerce based on serendipity and discovery. It was built around team buying but more personal than things like Groupon. Middleman layers were removed by substituting social interactions where there would traditionally be sales etc. People convince each other and their friends to get deals. There is explicit modeling on "costco + disneyland" and inspiration from older models like tupperware parties, but the basic experience is online + mobile and genuinely social. inspired by IRL patterns like "night market" or "sushi boat" or "girls' day out"