Decentralization and centralization in sociocratic organizations [pdf]

Ultimately reality will select classes of optimally adapted organizational patterns for a species that dominates and is constrained on a finite planet.

This unavoidable constraint sets global boundary conditions that will disallow much of the theoriticking (and politicking) that happened in past centuries, including the shape, size, legal structure and function of corporate entities.

The tangible evidence of that "weeding-out" process is the emergence of accountability frameworks for environmental and social impacts. One quickly realizes that the autonomous corporate unit ceases to be a useful abstraction, suddenly the "supply chain" and propagation of responsibility between nominally independent entities becomes central.

It doesn't mean that decentralization is doomed. From a systems perspective it is both more resilient when facing unknown-unknowns and it also happens to cater to our antediluvian historical experience of open horizons and unlimited possibility. But we can only split hairs about how much decentralization is viable when we have gotten on top of the known-unknowns.

In a simplifying analogy using a sphere/globe metaphor, centralization is a vibration along fundamental modes in which everybody participates (whether they like it or not), a bit like the tidal cycle, whereas decentralization is a localized excitation, a bit like wind induced surface waves.

I'll spam my comment on the recent, latest repost of "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285097 here, because it's relevant and because someone ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shanusmagnus ) posted a sociocracy link ( https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ ) in response to this my comment:

> This is really a good essay and surely deserves a high profile, but it's disappointing that it, and some bits of angst about Valve's internal situation, seem to be the only discussions of organisational structure that get widely shared these days. Back from about the '70s to the early '90s it seems that there was quite a lot of management-theory/theory-of-the-firm research into different organisational structures and how they affected innovation, ability to change and other desirable or undesirable characteristics of organisations. And it didn't just stay hidden in academia, as the results got a fair amount of coverage in newsmagazines and the like in the early '90s. (Which is how I heard about it: I'm no expert.) As you might expect, the findings on relatively "structureless" orgs seem to have been pretty compatible with Freeman's observations. But there was also research on many other unusual forms of structure and hierarchy, for example the "matrix management" which famously got implemented at Dow Chemical in the 1970s https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations .

> But for some reason interest and attention seems to have completely faded out, at least at the popular level, by about 2000 or so. So the Valve situation gets reported on as if it's some kind of unprecedented novelty, and not an example of a sort of situation whose outcomes had been hashed out pretty thoroughly a decade or more earlier.

The key insight for me with sociocracy was consent based decision making instead of consensus based. Then it clicked for me how to scale this. Now I’m starting to build a worker coop.

Decentralization seems to me like a goal that most people's focused ideologies (libertarian minded conservatives, unionist progressives) could and should agree on. The best thing about it is that if it allows all parties to agree to disagree on most subjects because they are more autonomous but still have to negotiate because they are interdependent.