Do organizations have to get slower as they grow? (with Alex Komoroske)
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Alex Komorosky about why organizations get slower, strategic empowerment, and optimizing for collaboration. They discuss challenges like N-squared scaling, the fundamental attribution error, and tribalism, proposing solutions like fostering serendipity and strategic empowerment.
Deep Dive Analysis
18 Topic Outline
Understanding Why Organizations Get Slower
The N-Squared Rule and Coordination Overhead
Fundamental Attribution Error and Trust Issues
Tribalism and Fostering Cross-Team Unity
The Slime Mold Model: Decentralized Adaptive Systems
Balancing Top-Down Control vs. Bottom-Up Innovation
Strategy as Creating Conditions for Success
Fostering Serendipity and Autonomy (20% Time)
Why Organizations Resist Long-Term Investment
Mitigating Risks of Decentralized Empowerment
Increasing Organizational 'Luck Surface Area'
The 'Doorbell in the Jungle' Experimentation Model
Challenges in Adopting Vulnerable, Experimental Approaches
Essential Components for Tackling Complex Problems
Organizational Risk Aversion and Incentive Alignment
Navigating Super Critical States and Misaligned Strategies
The Adjacent Possible and Directed Incrementalism
Specialization, Generalists, and Cross-Pollination
7 Key Concepts
Fundamental Attribution Error
This is the tendency to attribute one's own failures to systemic, external factors, while attributing others' failures to their intrinsic qualities or lack of effort. In large organizations, this bias can erode trust and make coordination difficult by leading people to assume others are not caring or trying hard enough.
Slime Mold Model
This model describes organizations as complex adaptive systems, similar to slime molds, where individual agents (cells) without central intelligence collectively solve complex problems. It emphasizes bottom-up dynamics, resilience, and adaptability, contrasting with rigid, top-down command-and-control structures.
Doorbell in the Jungle
This metaphor suggests implementing cheap, low-effort experiments or 'signals' to gauge actual demand for a novel idea or feature, rather than engaging in endless debates about its potential. If highly motivated users 'crawl through the jungle' to find and use it, it indicates genuine demand that can then be scaled.
Luck Surface Area
This concept refers to stochastically increasing the probability of 'lucky breaks' or significant innovations within an organization. It involves fostering diverse social networks, encouraging dabbling in various projects, and allowing space for intrinsic motivation and 'weird' ideas to combine and blossom.
Super Critical State
This describes an organizational condition where individual members privately disagree with the overall strategy or direction, but the system as a whole continues to move in that direction due to individual incentives (e.g., fear of not getting promoted). Such a state is unstable and prone to massive upheaval from an 'inciting incident'.
Adjacent Possible
This refers to the set of plausible actions an entity (person or organization) can realistically take in the immediate short term, after considering all current constraints, power dynamics, and existing beliefs. This set is often smaller than people assume, and taking an action shifts the adjacent possible, opening new avenues.
Directed Incrementalism
This approach suggests that significant progress and innovation are often achieved through a series of small, intentional actions or experiments that explore new directions, rather than through massive, pre-planned leaps. It involves planting many 'seeds' and nurturing those that show promise, effectively finding new 'hills' to climb.
8 Questions Answered
Organizations get slower due to a super-linear increase in coordination effort, roughly proportional to the square of the number of people, as more individuals and teams need to share information and context amidst inherent uncertainty and changing conditions.
A lack of trust, often exacerbated by the fundamental attribution error, leads to people blaming others' intrinsic qualities for failures rather than systemic constraints, creating a default state of distrust that compounds and slows down collaboration.
Organizations can learn to embrace bottom-up, decentralized dynamics where individual agents make locally optimal decisions or follow simple rules, leading to emergent, resilient, and adaptive behaviors across the whole system without central planning.
Organizations can foster serendipity by creating space for autonomy, allowing people to pursue 'hobby projects' or 'extracurriculars' (like Google's 20% time), and encouraging the building of diverse social networks that facilitate information flow and novel combinations of existing ideas.
Organizations can use the 'doorbell in the jungle' approach, which involves deploying cheap, low-effort experiments or 'doorbells' in various directions to see if highly motivated users or developers express concrete demand, allowing for reactive scaling rather than proactive, speculative planning.
Large organizations face increasing downside risks, leading to a natural tilt towards risk aversion. Individuals also face personal disincentives, as the upside of a successful new initiative is often not fully captured by them, while the downside of failure can lead to negative consequences like being fired.
A super critical state occurs when every individual privately disagrees with the overall strategy or direction, but the system continues to move in that direction because no one wants to challenge the perceived consensus, often leading to eventual upheaval.
It's hard because many constraints are not obvious or legible to everyone, and people often propose 'heroic' plans that are not within the 'adjacent possible' – the set of truly plausible short-term actions available to the organization.
20 Actionable Insights
1. Enable Bottom-Up Innovation
When facing high uncertainty, focus on creating conditions for bottom-up innovation by planting many diverse ‘seeds’ or ‘bets.’ Once an idea shows promise, invest energy to fan the flames and accelerate its growth.
2. Place “Doorbells in Jungle”
Instead of endless debate, deploy cheap, low-effort ‘doorbells’ (e.g., hidden features, signup forms for specific interests) in various directions to sense concrete user demand. This allows for reactive investment in ideas that show organic traction, rather than guessing perfectly ahead of time.
3. Allocate Autonomy for Serendipity
Create cultural space for autonomy, like Google’s 20% time, to allow individuals to pursue diverse interests and low-priority items. This fosters high-trust social networks and enables the planting of ‘seeds’ that may yield significant indirect value and innovation over time.
4. Cap Downside Risk
To enable decentralized autonomy, cap potential downside by maintaining a high hiring bar and designing infrastructure that inherently prevents catastrophic errors, especially with shared resources like brand or sensitive data.
5. Fan Intrinsic Motivation
Avoid relying on extrinsic motivation; instead, identify individuals whose intrinsic motivation aligns with interesting directions and provide encouragement to ‘fan the flames’ of their work. Facilitate connections and collaborations among them.
6. Stochastically Increase Luck
Actively build diverse networks across different levels, functions, and product areas within the company to stochastically increase your ’luck surface area’ and the likelihood of discovering high-impact ideas. Engage in novelty search and dabble in various interests.
7. Continuously Rebalance Trade-offs
Recognize that most organizational challenges involve fundamental trade-offs, not single right answers. Continuously assess if the current balance (e.g., top-down vs. bottom-up) is contextually appropriate and make small, continuous nudges to maintain equilibrium.
8. Foster “Us” Mentality
Actively shift language from ’they’ to ‘us’ when discussing inter-team issues to foster a unified mindset. Organize offsites with ample low-stakes social interaction time (hallway conversations, dinners) to build trust and shared identity.
9. Assume Good Faith & Constraints
Default to compassion and assume others act in good faith, recognizing they operate under unseen constraints. Being curious about these constraints can reveal the right solutions.
10. Maintain Positive Reputation
Always act in a way you’d be proud of and avoid treating others poorly, as your reputation precedes you and you’re likely to work with the same people again in large organizations.
11. Encourage Generalism & Mobility
Counter the liability of over-specialization by encouraging generalists and promoting internal mobility. Allow employees to switch projects or roles after a year or so to foster cross-pollination of ideas and adaptability.
12. Align North Star & Path
Ensure your organization has a plausible, coherent North Star that everyone aligns with. Balance this long-term vision with a clear understanding of the ‘adjacent possible’—the small, iterative actions that can realistically move you towards that North Star.
13. Practice Directed Incrementalism
Adopt a strategy of ‘directed incrementalism’ by taking small, intentional actions that explore new directions and plant ‘seeds’ for future growth. This approach, rather than large leaps, is how most significant innovations occur.
14. Mitigate Speculative Downside
Counter the default win of concrete downside arguments over speculative upside by setting checks or gates for new initiatives. This allows for small, experimental bets with potentially large upside, with a plan to re-evaluate only if they become significantly successful and threaten existing business.
15. Identify Supercritical States
Be aware of ‘supercritical states’ where individuals disagree with the overall organizational direction but the system continues. These states are ripe for massive upheaval following an inciting incident, presenting an opportunity to position yourself to guide the company toward a better outcome.
16. Cultivate Trusting Networks
Build a dense network of trusted individuals across the organization, as these ‘gossip networks’ are highly effective for efficient information transfer and pattern recognition.
17. Lean Into Positive Weirdness
Embrace and lean into your unique ‘weirdness’ or niche interests, as these often lead to innovative ideas and interesting combinations when connected with others. Don’t be ashamed of what makes you different in a positive way.
18. Engage in Self-Experimentation
Regularly conduct self-experiments by systematically trying new things to improve aspects of your life (e.g., sleep). Even with imperfections, this habit can lead to significant positive changes over time.
19. Monitor Social Influence
Pay close attention to how people around you influence your behavior. If they make you act less like the person you want to be, question whether those relationships are truly beneficial for you.
20. Avoid Creating Enemies
Actively avoid creating enemies unless absolutely necessary (e.g., combating evil or standing up for someone), as it leads to negative-sum activities, drama, and wasted time and energy.
6 Key Quotes
Try to default to a perspective of compassion and assuming that they are acting in good faith and doing a good job and that they are, they're under constraints that I can't fully sense and try to be curious about what those constraints might be.
Alex Komoroske
Gossip is a really efficient information transfer mechanism behind the scenes.
Alex Komoroske
Strategy often is creating the conditions that make it way more likely that you will have success.
Alex Komoroske
The weird stuff is where all the cool things happen.
Alex Komoroske
If you have concrete examples or concrete arguments about downside and you have speculative or abstract arguments about potential, the concrete downside argument will win by default.
Alex Komoroske
Having a plan that is official, that everybody pretends that they believe, but actually nobody believes is worse than having no plan at all.
Alex Komoroske