Alex Komoroske

Also recently submitted & on thr same topic of effective innovation driving & organizational wayfinding, "Andy Grove on dynamic dialectic"[1], which nicely laid out some of the core top-down vs bottom-up struggles. It pegged bottom-up as "chaotic but smart".

Grove talks about something mentioned very early on in Alex's webpage[2] (right under the top link, to a genericized/not-Google-specific Slime Mold presentation), leadership of the gardening style (although specifically Komoroske is talking about gardening platforms). Making sure those with potential & good ideas are enabled, might be how I'd describe it.

On a personal note to me, it's amazing how much we assume - have left individual isolated groups/teams connected upwards & sometimes side-ways as the organizational structure. Leaving only higher up levels of the org structure to mediate & suss out truth, not having workers also put in their bid for how other projects should execute or where priority should be is the practice. Im fascinated by the potential of trying a more connected & aware org, where we try to spend more effort internally communicating & sharing bids for where we think we ought be placing our efforts, where we ought be redirecting or reshaping efforts.

[1] https://www.leadingsapiens.com/andy-grove-balancing-top-down-vs-bottom-up-approaches-leadership/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381928

[2] https://komoroske.com/

I think the process is poor at accommodating generalists, since most people are not generalists. You might want to design a new feature one day, talk to customers the next, and then refactor your CI system on the third. The org really has no way to accommodate that; the cost to bring you up to speed on all the details is too high and your request is too weird. There is already a product team, support team, and testing team. Nobody has ever wanted to do all those things; all they want to do is show up, work on some technical mumbo jumbo, and disappear at 5pm. Moving the business forward what that at the bottom is what the process focuses on. (And, yes, this is why startups exist and do so well. If you can figure out Capital One or Twitter and pick the 10% that actually matters, you're back to a 2 person team. It ain't easy, though.)

As for top-down, organizations try that approach because it seems like the problems could all be solved if people weren't coordinating with each other, but just did what they were told. It seems like it doesn't work like that; this presentation explains it pretty well (and was on HN last weekend): https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

The answer is some combination of two phenomena:

1. The Innovator's Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

This is the premise that a mature incumbent will usually fail to respond fast enough to disruptive innovations by an upstart because their organization is optimized to continue providing existing customers sustaining improvements to the products they are already paying for.

2. The Coordination Headwind (https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/)

This is the premise that cross-functional coordination difficulty grows superlinearly as the organization scales.

The relative influence of these phenomena is a matter of debate. And, there may be other factors at play.

But, the mix of needing to respond (against organizational incentives) to a disruptive innovation while also trying to align long-established factions, product teams and PAs - many with a motivation to have an outsized influence over the new effort - within the organization presents a Herculean challenge.

The commenter is referring to the following talk by the same author as the document: https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

Slime molds are a type of organism that can expand quickly as each entity within the mold is independent. As a result, the mold as a whole can resist any one actor being removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold

The analogy used by the talk is that a slime mold is the polar opposite of a top-down control hierarchy although I haven't read the whole talk (yet)

Anyway, the commenter is saying that Google (like a lot of tech companies) is comparable to a slime mold in that it's greatly distributed causing it to be closer to "messy and uncontrollable".

In the same breath however, the author of the document is part of said mold acting in their own capacity. By definition, they can't speak for the entire organisation (or necessarily even observe it) because well, it's a slime mold.

There is some criticism of Dunbar which I can't evaluate. Even if the specifics are inaccurate within it, there seems to be some truth to how sets of humans scale. I like the Alex Komoroske presentation below about "coordination headwind" as an explanation that doesn't need evolutionary psychology to work. It is easy to understand and deep enough to be well worth paging through periodically.

https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

The ideas started when I was studying the emergent power dynamics of Wikipedia's user community in undergrad, and were also informed by participating in web standards. I believe they are not specific to any one context, but rather emerge inherently any time there are individuals with autonomy who care deeply. Instead of ignoring these dynamics, I think it's important to acknowledge and embrace them with a sense of compassion and openness.

Lol I feel the similar, I signed an earlier version when the Manifesto was far different but since they've changed it from that I now want my name removed >:(

One of the creators is Alex (former Google Chrome Project Lead ~ https://komoroske.com/) and we spoke on a Google meet call recently. He's currently trying to hype up confidential computing which is a cool technical challenge but I have my doubts in regards to confidential compute being super feasible/realistic. I suspect crackers/hackers will always find a way in