49 chunks · 38 episodes
...ue, but will almost always be below the line of worth doing. Either because the coordination cost to build them is too much. Or because the feature isn't worth complicating the UI for the benefit of only some users. The line gets higher the larger...
...in their development. Being able to separate subcomponents' development reduces coordination costs super-linearly.
...oblem largely goes away if everyone is a clone of each other. A worker bee. The coordination cost goes away because it's no longer a swarm. But is it possible for that non-swarm intelligence to be resilient and adaptive enough? If everyone is a cl...
The thing that makes companies hard to run is not CEOs being smart enough, it's coordination cost. Coordination cost scales at a super-linear rate, but intelligence in an individual scales at linear rate.
Decentralization has significant coordination costs. Coordination costs scale super-linearly. The benefits of decentralization are abstract for most people. They're more about downside capping of tail...
... have to communicate it with enough clarity to a team of people to execute. The coordination cost dominates the cost to create. But if you could have it one head, you could get away with significantly less coordination for a given magnitude of out...
...up, the scale of the downside goes up. But also as the company gets larger, the coordination cost gets super-linearly higher. That means that as the amount of usage scales, the Coasian Floor of a feature goes up at an accelerating rate. That means...
...further away from the solution Complex problems are convex.[oo] Anything with a coordination cost, or interdependencies between decisions, have this characteristic. Any situation that involves humans making decisions with any degree of autonomy is...
The faster people move, the more coordination cost there is. You have to chase your peers to coordinate to get them to do something that coheres. People are chasing you as you chase others. … ad infin...
...use they have no downside, only upside. Fast because they have practically zero coordination costs. Sometimes crazy is how you break through to the next thing. The vast majority of crazy, fast companies are like sparks flying through the wind, snu...
...ur beliefs and wants, and verifying the quality of the output, is a non-trivial coordination cost, even if you assume human-level common sense.
...head than in the world. If you have a nuanced idea in your head, either pay the coordination cost to write and communicate concretely enough, or do it yourself. A superposition takes exponential complexity to write down, and then it's no longer a ...
...al. Command and control: effective at achieving the ends, quickly. Cuts through coordination costs: "simply do the thing the boss says". But can never rise higher than what the boss planned. If the boss is wrong, or didn't communicate properly, th...
...Coasian theory of the app. That is, the app size is determined partially by the coordination cost of integrating your app with another party's system. Code is unforgiving; when two systems need to interact it's like finely machined gears that have...
...tion, creating less and less value. When a big monopoly doesn't innovate due to coordination costs, if they capture regulators, it makes it so the whole market also doesn't innovate. Society does better when organizations need to compete to stay h...
...t and email history. But also, the aggregators are large companies with massive coordination costs. This means it's very very hard for aggregators to coordinate around anything but massive use cases. The PM would have to corral dozens of overworke...
...e you more likely to die: More sclerotic. Harder to coordinate and adapt, since coordination costs rise superlinearly with size. Trapped by a Lilliputian web. More leverage. Leverage allows efficiency… but also more risk. If the underlying source ...
.... A swarm doesn't have a coherent vision of itself to coordinate to. All of the coordination cost evaporates away. For large systems the coordination cost is the vast majority of the cost to build something.
...s to coordinate to do the tasks at the right time. In a large organization, the coordination cost will be many orders of magnitude more than the actual focused implementation work. So even if the individual tasks are all easy, the likelihood of pr...
...ources can smother a thing. They create eddy currents of possibility. Swirls of coordination costs. Instead of focused, laminar flow, you get turbulent flow. It's much harder for anything to cohere and then be built on top of.