Interesting things happening
Working four days a week opens up mind-space for other projects. There’s a lot on at the moment, some of which will bear fruit soon. Grant proposals, art exhibitions, side projects , alternate workspaces, projects money-making and otherwise. It’s an exciting time.
Want to do something? I’m probably up for it. Email me.
Relationships as synaptic connections
The organisation considered as a brain, people as neurons, their interpersonal relationships as synaptic connections.
When people get it, when they’re working together, connections work well: in fact, what’s important is the connections, not necessarily the neurons.
What happens when a nodal person leaves? When all their synaptic connections go too? Is this the deterioration of dementia? Sometimes new paths are made, routing around lacunae. Other times, something vital is lost.
What about a rogue neuron, spamming the net with bad packets? Is this the wiring-gone-wrong of petrol sniffers and flashback acid trips? Better to excise than to continue?
Startups as hunter-gatherers
In its startup phase, a company is like a small group of hunter-gatherers: food is scarce and appears irreglarly, at which time everybody pitches in to help: roles are vaguely defined and skills are shared across the group. The startup chases work where it can get it, often biting off more than it can chew: it is limited by the skills of small group of people and their ability to work without sleep.
As a company grows, it starts to take on the characteristics of agricultural society: size requires organization, which enables specialization, which creates efficiencies, which provide surplus, surplus which can be used for further growth, for reinvestment in the company, or simply to line the pockets of the farmers.
An insect absorbs oxygen directly into its body from the surrounding air. This is very efficient, infrastructure-wise, but it limits their size: a human-sized ant is impossible (probably a good thing for us!) as it wouldn’t be able to transport oxygen to tissues distant from the surface. A solution is to build a circulatory system, which centralizes the oxygen-exposure surfaces of the body in the lungs and distributes it via red-blood cells to the rest of the body. Similarly, a company requires infrastructure if it is to grow: receptionists, accountants, human-resources managers, team managers and so on. In addition to these roles, none of which are directly related to the company’s business as such, are a host of rules, policies, procedures, forms, meetings and other organizational paraphernalia. These infrastructural supports are required to allow the non-infrastructure staff to specialize.
When it’s just you and two of your friends in a garage, you have to do everything: take phone calls, pay bills, put out the garbage, make coffee – and you might also find some time to write code/design buildings/make furniture/whatever the company ostensibly does in the first place. As the company grows and you outsource the other stuff, you do more of what you’re supposed to be doing, meaning you can concentrate on doing those things, getting better and better at them -which is a good thing, because you need to be efficient so that you can afford to pay for the support staff.
As the company gets even bigger, something strange happens. Now the projects are of a sufficient size, the specialization required to handle them sufficiently great, that one person can’t handle the domain of knowledge required for a given function. So you split your job into a number of functions and hire people to handle each of those functions. If you’re software developers, maybe you have a lead programmer, an interface designer, someone building database code, a business analyst, and a project manager. If you’re a graphic design house, you have someone designing layouts, another concentrates on logos and corporate ID, another on typesetting, another on final art.
But we’re humans, not insects. Specialization is stultifying. People feel trapped in their roles. Worse, if you specialize too far, optimize too hard, you run the risk of your specialization becoming irrelevant – and you’re out of a job.
Where is the sweet spot between between the bacterium and the brontosaurus, between the tribe and the empire? Is it possible to grow an organization such that it maintains that hunter-gatherer vibe?
[there’s so much more to say on this… need to get it out of my head now (it’s been in dev for six months) and say more later…]