Raemon’s recent post reminded me that I’m unsure how best to think about bureaucracies and apparent organizational friction, and that I keep meaning to explore why something about my intuition rebels against the “Maze” framing. I’ve read a bit of economic and public choice theory, and worked in for-profit organizations very large, large and small, and been exposed to (via friends’ work) nonprofits medium and small. I kind of think it’s a working equilibrium, that’s likely to reoccur or become worse if we disrupt it.
Most people are … not particularly great at coordination or even surface-level alignment. And not all that motivated to spend more energy than needed on abstract concepts like mission or utility. Hierarchical mechanisms for coordination are lossy and annoying, but the best we know how to do, once we’re doing things that take an order of magnitude bigger than Dunbar’s number, and require imperfect people (all of us) to spend much of our time and energy doing things we don’t particularly enjoy, but that improve someone else’s life enough for us to get paid. “Get paid”, of course, is shorthand for “hard-to-fake signal that someone values our behaviors more than they value that money”.
Certainly there’s a large variance in just how “mazey” an organization is, even within a size and mission-category group (say, comparing local governments of similar-sized populations, or tech companies of a given size range). But I don’t know of any over a few thousand that aren’t mazes to some noticeable extent. Do you?
[Question] {M|Im|Am}oral Mazes—any large-scale counterexamples?
Raemon’s recent post reminded me that I’m unsure how best to think about bureaucracies and apparent organizational friction, and that I keep meaning to explore why something about my intuition rebels against the “Maze” framing. I’ve read a bit of economic and public choice theory, and worked in for-profit organizations very large, large and small, and been exposed to (via friends’ work) nonprofits medium and small. I kind of think it’s a working equilibrium, that’s likely to reoccur or become worse if we disrupt it.
Most people are … not particularly great at coordination or even surface-level alignment. And not all that motivated to spend more energy than needed on abstract concepts like mission or utility. Hierarchical mechanisms for coordination are lossy and annoying, but the best we know how to do, once we’re doing things that take an order of magnitude bigger than Dunbar’s number, and require imperfect people (all of us) to spend much of our time and energy doing things we don’t particularly enjoy, but that improve someone else’s life enough for us to get paid. “Get paid”, of course, is shorthand for “hard-to-fake signal that someone values our behaviors more than they value that money”.
Certainly there’s a large variance in just how “mazey” an organization is, even within a size and mission-category group (say, comparing local governments of similar-sized populations, or tech companies of a given size range). But I don’t know of any over a few thousand that aren’t mazes to some noticeable extent. Do you?