Essays and occasional newsletters about the future of organization design.
The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Gifts for the systems thinker/tinker-er in your life. Or for yourself, if you fit that description!
TL;DR: We lack a shared, rigorous way to assess an entire organization – most tools either miss key drivers or apply only to specific domains. By meta-analyzing 102 criteria from 14 seminal sources, from Rams’ Design Principles to the Agile Manifesto to Jane Jacobs' Generators of Diversity, this post
Hundreds of thousands of hours are getting wasted on bad decision-rights. It’s got to stop. (Contains at least two good ways to fix this problem.)
Company as code; a city is not a computer; AI as cybernetic teammate; a field experiment rewires the org chart; when it starts feeling like a video game
Selling personal super-intelligence; trust & safety heading for the exits; raw compute vs. the junk drawer; Wall Street loves shrinking payrolls; the first targets are email jobs
Krugman on enshittification; a mission-driven reset at Microsoft; how Y2K wasn't a thing because of massive multiplayer cooperation; Medium's reboot story; Figma's S-1
Pattern languages and org analysis; RTO is bad, even if offices are good; old maps made 3D; diverging values worldwide; exit interviews
Challenges facing creativity; owning ideas from beginning to end; opinionated palettes; are we doing zines again?; randomness that didn’t fit in the first four categories
Daily observations on organization design.
