Coordination Headwind: How organizations are like slime molds | Hacker News Reader

Coordination Headwind: How organizations are like slime molds

komoroske.com

77 pointsfixel10 comments

Unfortunately almost nothing my org does is "self service" we rely on shared service orgs to provide hosting, sysadmin, production support, software procure, hardware procure, platforms, security, etc.. This makes it almost impossible to get anything done since the shared manager is so many steps away and priority of each task for the shared service org is so low.

(somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not totally misrepresenting, either...)

Unfortunately almost nothing my org does is "full service", we rely on every functional group to figure out their own solutions to hosting, sysadmin, production support, software procurement, hardware procurement, platforms, security, etc... This makes it almost impossible to get anything done since every team starts from scratch on every one of these things, doesn't have a driving interest to cooperate or interoperate with other teams, doesn't have the expertise in-house as it's not a core part of their function, farms it out to high-priced consultants who then roll off at the end of their contract, taking any learning and institutional knowledge with them each time.

yes that and cost savings is why we have them in the first place but the effectiveness is low so there needs to be a tweak.

This slide deck is somewhat popular as an internal resource that gets shared around within Google. Does anyone know if it's by the same author? He has 13 years of Google experience on his Linkedin so there is probably some sort of connection here.

Yes, this is the website of the author of the Google-internal resource.

This is a great, insightful presentation. I would add one more thing you can do about it. Namely, organizations work fast and best when they are small. To the extent you can, make sure it's really clear what each team does, and provide the leader of each team as much responsibility and 'skin in the game' as possible. Make your company many smaller companies, maybe even have some in competition with one another. That way each smaller organization operates as independently as possible. Try to break out cross-functional departments that serve all companies with their own incentives. This will preserve a startup mentality and culture.

From today's Coinbase announcement:

> We have seen ourselves slow down considerably due to coordination headwinds, and difficulty fully integrating new team members.

https://blog.coinbase.com/a-message-from-coinbase-ceo-and-co...

I didn’t have the patience to click through hundreds of tweets. Why not just put the text in a document so someone can read and understand it?

And the author clearly has no miltary experience yet is comfortable describing it as an organizational straw man. The description is closer to the Russian and Chinese model, which indeed lacks resilience, as demonstrated in Ukraine, whose military has been adopting the US model of decentralized authority.

Am I missing something?? This deck is 170 slides to say management 101 - coordination gets harder as you get bigger.

There is no mention of the value that an effective manager can provide. High Output Management by Andy Grove is a much better guide to fighting complexity and inertia.

Great presentation, but it neglects one fix: go join a smaller, newer organization. All of these issues are a function of scale and time.

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