49 chunks · 38 episodes
...he problem is the people being lazy or incompetent. The problem is the inherent coordination cost scaling super-linearly., a law of physics. There are ideas that are so big that they can't be done inside a company, where everyone can veto. Large o...
...yers are centralized. Decentralization is expensive; it massively increases the coordination cost of adding coherent improvements to the system. Even if the underlying components are decentralized, if the top layer (the way that all users access t...
... isn't one. There's a swarm of small issues, each of which requires independent coordination costs to chase down, convincing tons of different teams to do a thing that isn't a priority for them." "Hmm, have you tried simply being more bold?" You c...
...f employees significantly more leverage, you increase output without increasing coordination costs.
...sible environment to do platform design. Maximal decentralization means maximal coordination costs. The fact everything is directly financialized means any zero-day could drain billions of dollars in the blink of an eye. It all adds up to massive ...
...t step (coordination) has super-linear costs. So sometimes it's best to pay the coordination cost once for a big boulder, but at the cost of adaptability / resilience. This "small number of pivots" logic is the "big rig" style of organizations.
... allow building trust and non-transactional relationships. They also have lower coordination cost; everyone can know everyone else as an individual, not a transaction. Humans were not naturally equipped to be parts of large complex social systems,...
...his has some upsides: a coherent vision that the whole team agrees with reduces coordination costs by huge amounts. But it also has many downsides: You have to do the work to identify the counterparties. You might compel their superficial cooperat...
...ay to erase the visibility of the org chart externally is via coordination. But coordination costs scale super-linearly with the number of entities that need to coordinate. If you can live with your organizational boundaries being visible external...