Coordination Challenges Grow Superlinearly Based on Required Information Throughput

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Organizations become slower due to the fundamental reason of the super linear acceleration in the effort required to coordinate across different priorities, driven by inherent uncertainty, varying information, and frequently changing conditions. The effort and overhead needed for coordination can become a significant portion of the overall effort, making tasks significantly harder. In larger organizations, the coordination challenge increases superlinearly as more people need to share information, context, and trust to see the full picture, and as communication needs to happen across larger teams and multiple teams.

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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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