The cathedral approach is over-represented in large organizations.

Both the cathedral and bazaar approaches can create massive amounts of value.

A true cathedral approach is extremely rare and hard to execute.

If any point doesn't execute properly, or turns out to be non-viable, the whole plan is at risk.

If multiple people are executing on different, non-coherent cathedral plans, you will achieve nothing.

A cathedral plan is default-dead.

A bazaar plan is self-healing and self-improving; as long as there is a viable ecosystem, the swarm will automatically create antifragile outcomes… just ones that don't necessarily fit any grand plan.

But the trappings of a cathedral approach are easy to execute and very common.

The performative cathedral playbook.

You get the worst of both worlds:

The constraints and overhead of the cathedral approach

None of the sublime beauty of a high-quality and valuable vision made real.

With the cathedral approach, you'll likely fail, but at least you can show to others that you tried.

With the bazaar, if you fail, observers might say "what did you even do?"

You have to defend your approach to someone else, and if they don't get it, you could be knocked out of the game.

The bazaar requires multi-ply thinking to even grok in the first place.

Organizations are chaotic and busy; few people have time for multi-ply thinking.

This gets even more true as you go up the hierarchy and leaders' attention gets more and more distracted.

With the cathedral approach, you'll have heaps and heaps of paperwork, blueprints, coordination materials.

It will be very clear that you worked hard.

"We don't know if it's working, but you can see clearly that we did something."

With the bazaar, the value comes from the swarm; any individual component of the swarm, or unit of work you did, will look inconsequential on its own.

The bazaar technique is likely to work, but unlikely to give individuals credit for their effort.

The cathedral technique is unlikely to work, but likely to give individuals credit for their effort.

Each individual in an organization, in order to survive, needs to get credit for their work.

This is part of "the game".

So each individual has a default pull towards the cathedral approach.

Small asymmetries in incentives, if they are consistent across the swarm, create massive changes at the level of the swarm.

This means that organizations are way, way more likely to apply a cathedral playbook than its actual efficacy would imply is warranted.

Each individual is less likely to die within the system by playing the cathedral approach.

But the system itself will be more likely to die if everyone within it uses the cathedral approach.

No one individual will get fired for doing the cathedral approach, but if the organization dies because of lack of innovation, then everyone will be fired anyway.