I don’t think this model helps with very many decisions or predictions. You need to model diffuse cooperation much more finely—there are lots of small organizations where the leader(s) are not particularly powerful, but there are shared beliefs among participants which make the group pretty effective. Most church congregations fall into this category—there’s often people in leadership roles, but they’re beholden to the members rather than controlling the organization.
For larger and more commercial/political organizations, the founder has moved on (or not), and power is shared among dozens or thousands of more committed or tenured members, and no one of them is critical to continuity of mission.
Even for the strong-leader model of startups and small-to-medium companies, succession is less of a problem than growth. How to increase in size, beyond the capacity of the single leader to know and influence everyone, is a problem that kills many organizations.
I don’t think this model helps with very many decisions or predictions. You need to model diffuse cooperation much more finely—there are lots of small organizations where the leader(s) are not particularly powerful, but there are shared beliefs among participants which make the group pretty effective. Most church congregations fall into this category—there’s often people in leadership roles, but they’re beholden to the members rather than controlling the organization.
For larger and more commercial/political organizations, the founder has moved on (or not), and power is shared among dozens or thousands of more committed or tenured members, and no one of them is critical to continuity of mission.
Even for the strong-leader model of startups and small-to-medium companies, succession is less of a problem than growth. How to increase in size, beyond the capacity of the single leader to know and influence everyone, is a problem that kills many organizations.