Fight for the things you care about
Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Common knowledge as a solution to the coordination problem
When everyone knows the same thing, everyone can make aligned decisions. When different people know different things, they make different decisions.
This is why communication is so important in modern (non- command and control) organisations. Without this tacit means of coordination, the only thing that can happen is misalignment.
More options
More, better options lead to more successful decisions. So, when faced with a decision try to think of as many options as possible.
Junctions and boxes
There’s the intuitive idea that if you want to reduce traffic on existing rounds you need to build more roads. The counterintuitive to that is that junctions are where traffic gets blocked and for every new road you create at least two junctions, so more roads creates more traffic jams.
I wonder if the same is true for things we draw boxes around in organisations. The more projects, programmes, teams, groups, committees and communities there are, the more interfacing between them is necessary. Even if there are no dependencies between the boxes (and there almost always is, even if it’s only people’s time and cognitive load) and so very little coordination required, these things don’t exist in isolation, they interface and interact with each other. So, what’s the counterintuitive for organisations?