How to Combat Tribalism at the Extreme

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There's lots of little tricks you can do for this kind of thing, like come up with a team name that everybody uses. Do an offsite where you're all together for a day. What's most important is the hallway time to make sure you have lots of it. And then also the dinner and the sort of low-stakes interactions after the fact before, you know, at night between the two days. But if you're going to be working together, you actually don't not have time for that. You have to do these kinds of things because it will significantly improve the expected success rate in collaboration.

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Why do organizations get slower as they grow? What can organizations learn from slime molds? What are the advantages of top-down organization versus bottom-up organization, and vice versa? How can organizations encourage serendipity? What use are doorbells in jungles? Why is it so hard for organizations to set a "north star" that is at once plausible, coherent, and good?

Alex Komoroske has over a decade of experience in the tech industry as a product manager focusing on platform- and ecosystem-shaped problems. While at Google, he worked on Chrome's Web Platform PM team, Augmented Reality in Google Maps, and Ambient Computing. He's fascinated by how to navigate the emergent complexity within organizations to achieve great results. You can find some of his public writing at komoroske.com.

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