Why Organizations Behave Like Slime Molds
Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
Drawing on the surprising parallels between slime mold behavior and human organizations, this essay explores how coordination costs shape collective action. It argues that the same principles that guide a single-celled organism's collective intelligence—such as information sharing and resource allocation—apply to companies and societies, offering a fresh lens on organizational design and the limits of coordination.
Just as a slime mold optimizes its network to efficiently explore and exploit its environment, organizations must balance exploration and exploitation to survive in a changing landscape.
- jodacola
I recommend reading The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay on this particular topic.
A line in this presentation about loosely coupled, highly aligned teams is a major idea straight out of this book.
I saw some questions in threads here about how to achieve this: unfortunately, I have no bulletproof answers on this front, because what I've seen in practice is that large teams really like to talk about ideas/read books/get training on all these great ideas, then pantomime some of the behaviors from source material, then give up shortly thereafter without actually achieving results and only adding to the chaos and dysfunction.
In my experience, it takes hard organizational resets to achieve new results, with either major leadership shakeups or senior leadership truly, completely, deeply buying into a new way of doing things and seeing it through; such successful transformations have been a very rare occurrence across my career.
- afpx
Also true at the macro level. Human civilization and infrastructure resembles slime mold from space. Also, apparently the cosmic web: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/03/cosmic-web/
- kylepomykala
It's interesting to fit my own experience into this - one of the biggest projects I worked on was created by this sort of coordination failure that got so big that it threatened millions of dollars in revenue.
It wasn't even that technical of a problem to solve, it was just making sure that everyone was on the same page for everything so that when we executed the solution it wouldn't explode in our faces.
I guess this is why in big tech, you level up in your politics skills much more thatn you do in your technical skills, but in startups you level up the technical skills much more.
- beardedwizard
It's been a long time (5 years?) since I encountered this last. Despite the idea making total sense to me, I am no clearer than I was then on how to actually do this in any org I have been a part of or managed. Where does this work? How did you do it? Does it work?
- narnarpapadaddy
An aspect that’s missing from this analysis is distributed vs centralized decision authority. In militaries and in tech startups a “squad” or “two-pizza team” are empowered to make decisions for their local domain because they have the real-time context. The decentralized decision authority that happens with matrix-style management is a much higher contributor to coordination overhead than the top-down or bottom-up axis described here.
An autonomous team that does what they are told or an autonomous team is free to pursue opportunities as they see fit are both useful and can react quickly. The question is how much scaled alignment you need to execute a particular goal.
You can’t invade a country with one squad of 10,000 soldiers or 1,000 squads of 10 that do as they please. You need to delegate execution authority to small teams who are aligned to a shared goal.
Similarly, you can’t expect one group 10,000 devs with no internal structure to explore and find interesting opportunities to explore; you’ll just get noise. Nor can you try to manage 10,000 devs directly. You won’t be able to grok the context.
Complexity management in organizations follows the same patterns as in code. Single responsibility, don’t repeat yourself too much, encapsulation, etc.
It’s really a function of information theory, the more people you have to ramp up or keep current on context, the lower your ability to make and stick to decisions.