Coordination

• Human coordination in groups (Teamwork, Cooperatives, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) to achieve aims is the secret sauce of human civilization. If it could be engineered, a lot of problems would have been solved.
  • Coordination problems are a constraint to production of all kinds of economic value.
  • All problems are coordination problems. Moloch is at the end of all!
  • The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.
• Coordination, the ability for large groups of actors to work together for their common interest, is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It can be improved in many ways:
  • Faster spread of information.
  • Better norms that identify what behaviors are classified as cheating along with more effective punishments.
  • Stronger and more powerful organizations.
  • Tools like smart contracts that allow interactions with reduced levels of trust.
  • Governance technologies (voting, shares, decision markets…)
• Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local. If possible, factor work products into independent modules; if not, grow slowly and optimize.
• Trust increases coordination. To increase trust:
  1. Repeat interactions.
  2. Look for possible win-wins.
  3. Communicate clearly.
• The best process is no process! In an ideal state it all just works and everything flows. Adding a couple of checks seems simple but that affects everyone in that process.
  • No processes requires trusting other people. More trust means better coordination without processes. Trust is the currency of interactions.
  • When a process becomes the proxy for the result you want, you stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right.
  • Every process will slow you down, and some will make you better.
• If we imagine human society as it's own organism. We need processes and other coordination tools to make it remove the hand from the fire when it starts to burn.
  • The hand doesn't know what to do, but relies information to the brain, that makes the appropriate changes.
  • Something similar could be achieved at a society level, where pain triggers processes that make it stop.
• Only a few bits of information are possible to reliably convey to a large number of people. The larger the group, the smaller the message needs to be.
• The requirements to govern a commons without tragedy:
  • Clear boundaries.
  • Managed by locals.
    • In a small community, everybody knows everybody, and can keep track of what they do. This makes small groups iterated games which rewards trust and penalizes sociopath behavior.
  • Community makes its own rules.
  • Community can monitor behavior.
  • Graduated sanctions for those who violate community rules.
  • Cheap, accessible means of conflict resolution.
  • Self-determination.
• There are many coordination mechanisms. Choose the appropriate one for your situation.
• There is no such thing as a structureless group.
  • We are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds.
  • The idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, it becomes a way of masking power.
  • Make the group structure explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. Having an established process for decision-making ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.
• The more you need consensus, the less work you can do.