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This essay asks the question, why are larger organizations so bad at performing feats of brilliance most of the time? The author sees two obstacles. One is wha
by cs702 7y ago
This essay asks the question, why are larger organizations so bad at performing feats of brilliance most of the time?
The author sees two obstacles. One is what he calls "the boredom threshold:" The creative individuals who could perform those feats quickly get bored with the mind-numbing minutia of bureaucratic processes at larger organizations and leave.
The second obstacle is "the illusion of certainty:" Conventional operational improvements, cost-cutting efforts, legal reorganizations, etc. can easily be 'proven' to work in advance, but more interesting lines of inquiry come with career-threatening unknowability. Many bureaucrats and businesspeople, the OP argues, are attracted to the illusion of certainty.
Quoting from the OP: "If you engage engineers, you don’t know what you are going to get. You may be unlucky and get nothing. Or their solution may be so outlandish that it is hard to compare with other competing solutions. On average, though, what you get will be more valuable than the gains produced by some tedious restructuring enshrined in a fat PowerPoint deck. But in business, let alone in government, it is only in crises that people find a budget for probabilistic interventions of this kind."
The essay concludes that "one reason why the world is in a mess is because, for a long time, the ratio between 'explore' and 'exploit' has been badly out of whack. Entities like procurement have been allowed to claim full credit for money-grabbing cost-savings without commensurate responsibility for delayed or hidden costs."
- chrisweekly 7y agoThanks for the overview. For those like me who mostly visit HN for the comments, a ~concise summary like this is helpful. Upvoted to counteract the (imho aggressive) down.
- cs702 7y agoThanks. I found the essay persuasive, even if (as others here have mentioned) the anecdote about Formula 1 teams is not entirely convincing. The essay is about much more than that one anecdote.
- LiquidSky 7y ago>This essay asks the question, why are larger organizations so bad at performing feats of brilliance most of the time? I'm not sure I buy this premise: Menlo Park, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, major universities, the US military/government. Giant organizations like these provided enormous innovation and discovery in the last century. Maybe they don't anymore, but the question of why isn't the same as proclaiming "larger organizations [are] so bad at performing feats of brilliance most of the time".
- mellow2020 7y ago"giant" != "brilliant", and the question why something is the case does imply the statement that it is the case. You say you don't buy the premise, but then say that maybe it's true.
- agumonkey 7y ago> illusion of certainty. Never seen that idea summarized before, but it resonates with a lot of thing of how the world works. The system wants some subset of reality and elects it as the reality because the system is stabler this way for a period. I also think that past 2 decades went overboard with that.