Inspired post by Dave Pollard today on the challenge of scale and the confusion of control. Complicated systems require few connections in order to be manageable:
It is because business and government systems are wedded to the orthodoxy of hierarchy that as they become larger and larger (which such systems tend to do) they become more and more dysfunctional. Simply put, complicated hierarchical systems don’t scale. That is why we have runaway bureaucracy, governments that everyone hates, and the massive, bloated and inept Department of Homeland Security.
But, you say, what about “economies of scale”? Why are we constantly merging municipalities and countries and corporations together into larger and ever-more-efficient megaliths? Why is the mantra of business “bigger is better”?
The simple answer is that there are no economies of scale. In fact, there are inherent diseconomies of scale in complicated systems. When you double the number of nodes (people, departments, companies, locations or whatever) in a complicated system you quadruple the number of connections between them that have to be managed. And each “connection” between people in an organization has a number of ‘costly’ attributes: information exchange (“know-what”), training (“know-how”), relationships (“know-who”), collaboration/coordination, and decision-making. That is why large corporations have to establish command-and-control structures that discourage or prohibit connection between people working at the same level of the hierarchy, and between people working in different departments.
Why do we continue to believe such economies of scale exist? The illustration above shows what appears to happen when an organization becomes a hierarchy. In the top drawing, two 5-person organizations with 10 people between them have a total of 20 connections between them. But if they go hierarchical, the total number of connections to be ‘managed’ drops from 20 to 8. Similarly, a 10-person co-op has a total of 45 connections to ‘manage’, but if it goes hierarchical, this number drops to just 9.
This is clearly ‘efficient’, but it is highly ineffective. The drop in connections means less exchange of useful information peer-to-peer and cross-department, less peer and cross-functional learning, less knowledge of who does what well, less trust, less collaboration, less informed decision-making, less creative improvisation, and, as the number of layers in the hierarchy increases, more chance of communication errors and gaps.
But, what about complex systems?
So back to the purpose of this post, to answer these questions: 1. What is it about the ‘organization’ of the Internet that has allowed it to thrive despite its massive size and lack of hierarchy? And: 2. What if we allowed everything to be run as a ‘wirearchy’?
To answer the first question, the Internet is a “world of ends“, where the important things happen at the edges – and everything is an edge. “The Internet isn’t a thing, it’s an agreement”. And that agreement is constantly being renegotiated peer-to-peer along the edges. If you look at the diagram above of the co-op with the 45 connections, you’ll notice that the nodes are all at the circumference – around the edges. There is no ‘centre’, no ‘top’. And the reason the organization isn’t weighed down by all those connections is that they’re self-managed, not hierarchically managed. The work of identifying which relationships and connections to build and grow and maintain is dispersed to the nodes themselves – and they’re the ones who know which ones to focus on. That’s why the Internet can be so massive, and get infinitely larger, without falling apart. No one is in control; no one needs to hold it together. It’s a model of complexity. And, like nature, like an ecosystem, it is much more resilient than a complicated system, more effective, and boundary-less. And, like nature, that resilience and effectiveness comes at a price – it is less ‘efficient’ than a complicated system, full of redundancy and evolution and failure and learning. But that’s exactly why it works.
via What If Everything Ran Like the Internet? « how to save the world.
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Nice little video which demonstrates factors which enable creativity and those which impede it.
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Today was a day of hosting on webinars, with a group looking at the emerging edges of the non-profit sector in BC and with a group od UNited Church ministers and lay leaders who are hosting transformation and learning together in a community of practice. At the end of our second call, this Thomas Merton quote was shared with us:
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
This resonates strongly with the tack Meg Wheatley takes in her no book, So Far From Home, which is a call to spiritual warriorship, despite everything.
Several really stunning insights fell at me feet today, from this five hours of online discovery. Forexample, a friend working with victims of sexual abuse in northern BC talked about how people who do this work are not burnt out by the work – humans have been caring resliiently for each other for eons. What burns them out is maintaining the systems that formalize that work of community. As humans we are easy in relationship, but our energy and lives are sapped by turning away from what nurtures us and tending nto a system of professional practice, regulations, administrative accountabilities and resource deployment that leaves us tapped out.
Or another insight today that the real practice of making change is making space for dissent so that there can be an authentic yes from the centre of the work. Or that evolution is a difficult metaphor for change work, because so much of what we are aiming to change has been put in place intentionally and which purpose.
We are one learning journeys with these groups, and these little insights trickle in like sunlight when you are listening openly and sharing in each other’s discovery. Nice way to end the week.
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All things come and go and especially in the world of professional helping (otherwise known as “consulting”). I’ve been around the world of enghagement and consultation long enough that I have seen various names for this work: focus groups, advisory groups, public participation, consultation and now community engagement.
Mostlyover all those years, my practice and the practice of the field in general has gone from monolithic broadcasting of ideas to “tell and sell” consultation to much more complex dialogue based work. And now I think I and we are coming to a more seismic shift in how community is engaged. Since the dawn of the social web, citizens and stakeholders have been able to access as much or more information than proponents of engagement projects. It is wise when planning these kinds of things to assume now that your audience and your advisors know more than you do. it was always the case but now it is much more evident.
And so it is occurring to me, after working with some boundary pushers on this stuff that we are at the point where the term “community engagement” is now redundant. If you have community, you don’t need to do engagement. And if you have engagement, you have community.
My friend Tim Merry has taken to saying that we can’t do community engagement we can only do community. Or not. I think this is a compelling idea. Engagement is meaningless now as a term. We are seeking real community, a genuine sense of being in this together. Whether it is public policy or building infrastructure you have the choice to do it to people or do it with people. Just using the word “engagement” is not enough.
Time to put real power behind the idea of community.
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A little reflection today about social change and Occupy coming out of a conversation yesterday.
When I was a young man we talk about “movements” like we were on the go. From whatever place we were in we will move to another. And we marked this action with marches and demos, dancing and action. The feeling of action was powerful and palpable.
Once in a while we occupied a place and sat there for a while. But in general we were all about the movement. We made ourselves different from those we were working against and we moved.
Occupy did two things to change this, or at least introduce some new strategies. For one, they began by staying right where they were: occupying the place where you already are seems like not a very radical form of action, but fully occupying a space, living there, governing yourselves, creating services: that was somehow new, and over the past year I have thought about what it means to choose simply to be present and fully occupy your own space.
Second, the occupy movement in it’s declaration of “we are the 99%” played at a halfway gesture towards thinking about what social change looks like if you first have to build relationships with many who are your traditional “enemies.” The 99% contains a lot of people that you and I would rather not be associated with in any way. The choice was a conscious practice of seeing each other together. Occupy breaks down, as has always been the case, when difference drives people apart. If difference could drive people together, if we could practice handling difference with a container of relationship, then something new might be born.
And third, Occupy gave up the idea that any of us know exactly what changes are required in the world to make it better. Obviously there are strategies, tactics, policies and experiments that can be tried, but there are no answers. Refusing to publish demands is a key piece of this acknowledgment that a) the world is too complex to direct its evolution and b) any action that does not work with existing power in some way is easily crushed. Once demands are issued, the anti-Occupy narrative can be framed and the movement is marginalized and dissolved.
Occupy was, and continues to be, an experiment. It is not a new experiment but it is a recent iteration of an age old experiment to see what happens when we choose to stay where we are and deepen relationships. It continues to share learning, but for me these three practices of occupation, building a common container to hold difference and staying together in no knowing continue to echo in my own work and practice with groups trying to affect changes.