81. Committees vs. Satrapies 🔗

Formal units of internal organization like committees and councils seem to have fallen out of favor except where they are continuing legacies like in politics or old companies. Now we seem to just leave these things loosely structured and call it a “group” 🤔

I haven’t been in a meeting of any size run on a formal procedural basis in like 20y. I think really only board meetings are run that way in the private sector anymore. Public and nonprofit worlds like formality more but I don’t work in those. I’m guessing DAO/NFT people do too.

My dad, an old school organization man type, was always going off to “committee meetings” for both his work at a steel company and stuff he did for the local Institution of Engineers. World of minutes and memos. Some valuable discipline there that may have been lost. 🤔

In our own informal times, where everything is in some uncertain, entangled state in spreadsheets and slack/discord threads, we easily see the risks of rigid bureaucracy and cronyist self-dealing but we easily miss the value of disciplined process.

The closest thing to a modern structured unit I’ve seen is the Amazon meeting: 2-pizza limit, start by reading a longform 6-page document together. Telling that it doesn’t even have a name. It works great btw. We use it for @yak_collective study groups.

There’s also been a shift from stock to flow. Committees and councils are relatively strongly persistent bodies in membership terms. You have to be appointed or voted in. The meetings are cleanly mapped to a hard-to-change standing body. Composition doesn’t change fluidly.

There’s usually a correlation to budgets or permissions. Now budgetary authority and permission to do things (like say release something to public, approve an application etc) tends to rest with individuals. Org man world has given way to a hierarchy of autocratic satrapies.

“Stuck in committee” used to be a thing everywhere, now it’s mainly a government thing. It was a peculiar kind of stuckness since certain decisions could only be made by empowered committees which only met on a schedule, with a formal agenda you had to get on.

In modern managerial culture if a thing needs action fast, you flag it for a sufficiently empowered individual manager who just makes the call. In committee era, the equivalent was convincing the chair to call an “extraordinary meeting” (for the kids: yes, literally called that)

Clearly this is both a faster OODA loop and a more agile one (reorients faster with fast transients), which is why satrapy-stack companies outcompeted committee stack companies comprehensively for 30 years. Thank you Jack Welch and deregulation. Still…something bothers me.

A world of committees when well run, takes itself and its work seriously. It manages risk differently. It tames individual egos. Innovation and competitiveness sucks in committee world, but defense against other kinds of uncertainty is sometimes superior.

Since I’ve been learning a bit about radiation hardened electronics for the @yakrover project, an analogy occurs to me. Committee structure is radiation-hardened org structure. It’s 20 years behind on performance… but it can function in outer space.

For eg Perseverance operates on 1998 vintage radhard chips while the Ingenuity helicopter runs on unhardened modern chips. But Percy is both more mission critical, and unlike Ingenuity, also had to run compute during the Earth-Mars journey in open space.

I have no idea why this is on my mind 🤔

Another analogy. Committee vs satrapy structure is like oak tree vs bamboo strategy for resistance to strong winds. Oak trees will resist rigidly up to a point, but when they topple they’re done. No fast regrowth. Bamboo is the opposite.

Modern stuff is 100% bamboo, in part thanks to Japanese methods. Quick fail/fast regrowth under stress maps to how andon cords and minimizing mean time to recovery (MTTR) work. Oak tree is maximizing mean time between failures (MTBF). Today they are Good and Evil respectively.

Aside: strikes me as weird that Japan, which we tend to think of as a conformist culture, was where this essentially individual-agency style of management emerged. An individual decides to pull the andon cord. An individual supervisor is responsible for acting. Samurai culture?

But… did we throw out some baby with bath water along the way?

The lean vs fat tradeoff in supply chains is an obvious dimension where we’re doing a double take. Are there other dimensions? Are there regimes where maxMTBF is better than minMTTR?

Where committees>satrapies?

This is well known history for anyone who tracks this stuff. But the Juran/Deming American influence is vastly overstated IMO. Americans making a fundamental attribution error and the Japanese flattering that conceit. The bigger factor was the receptivity of Japanese culture. tweet^[1]

The decisive factor in what I’ve been calling satrapy culture is chains of individual accountability for outcomes. What agile types call “single wringable neck” but in a stack from janitor to CEO. Committees otoh follow the principle of collective, procedural accountability.

Satrapies are consequentialist: was the outcome good or bad? If bad, who in the accountability chain fucked up? In Japan that person would be expected to put on a self-abasement apology show for the whole company but wouldn’t be fired unless it was an egregious moral failure.

In the US, there would be no apology theater, and that person would be more likely to be fired. And more likely would be a scapegoat rather than the real culprit.

But either way, individual chain of accountability for outcomes

A committee culture org is deontological ethics. Whether the outcome was good or bad is irrelevant. The question is, did the stack of collectively accountable committees follow due process, including escalations and exception handling? If not, which procedures are flawed?

The assumption is, individuals do the right thing competently and if outcomes are bad, either it was just sheer bad luck or the procedures are wrong. Hence fact-finding committees. In this model, managers especially can never be wrong, only the procedures can be.

Even when individuals “fail” like “pilot error” the focus is on why the procedures didn’t build in protection against that pattern of error.

All the decisive and risky intelligence is presumed to be in the system itself, not the heads of individuals.

In 2015 all this would sound obviously Evil and Wrong. In 2021, I’m not entirely sure. I think committee-based and satrapy-based management and organization have distinct strengths and weaknesses that are more complementary than in zero-sum competition for monopolistic supremacy.

Satrapies btw, for those who don’t know the history, is an ancient org structure. It’s like a cross between feudalism and monarchy with strong elements of clientelism.

Satrap - Wikipedia

The key diff from feudalism proper is that you don’t own your assets or have political autonomy. You’re an agent of the next level up leader and serve at his pleasure. Creates very different dynamics.

One theory of Mughal decline was that it was due to replacement of a proper feudal model (jagirdari system) with a more satrap type system (mansabdari system) by Akbar. Exacerabetes personal profiteering motives. Same happens in overly strong satrapy companies.

When you can’t pass on your wins to your children (= favored crony-proteges in corps) and could be moved around like a chess piece arbitrarily, and potentially killed or fired for a failure somebody above manages to blame you for, the incentive to make bank while you can ruses.

Worst case: everybody above VP is watching stock value and vesting cliffs with hawk eyes, they know they could get blamed and axed arbitrarily for the next fuck-up, the managers below don’t expect them to stick around long anyway. So you solve for lucrative exit not legacy.

The result is, the theater of individual accountability chains actually creates conditions where nobody can actually build, manage, or lead at all, and everybody is looking for the smart exit moment. So risks of failure actually increase.

Is it worth 10xing failure rate simply so there’s always someone you can blame?

Sometimes yes. When the environment is chaotic and illegible, and knowledge is too hard to codify into systems. Which means the person with the right tacit knowledge in their head is priceless.

Under such conditions the system is stupid, the right barbarian wins, so you should keep firing the wrong people till you find the right person with an uncanny win percentage. And you do that up and down the stack. This actually kinda worked ~1980-2010. Hobbesian barbarian world.

TIL about Quaker management 🤓 tweet^[2]

I think Covid caused Satrapy failures AND committee failures all over the world. Neither systemic knowledge nor tacit barbarian knowledge proved entirely adequate despite all the cross-accusations. And both had successes as well.

State responses worked to the extent long-term pandemic preparedness — committee stuff — produced capabilities that hadn’t been decimated by privatization. Also original R&D into mRNA etc was committee world. Points to committee world.

Bad messaging, slow responses… points off.

Satrapy world gets points for Zoom, rapid rewiring of broken supply chains, high speed transition to remote work, improv mask production, rapid vaccine dev from the basic science.

Points docked for running way too lean, profiteering, stealing PPP, terrible worker conditions.

But I think we’re moving into a fundamentally tougher environment. It is synthesize the two systems or die.

And yeah, DAOs are promising as a synthesis mode, but most people I hear rhapsodize about them seem to have zero experience managing anything of consequence with or without them, in either satrapy or committee mode. They’re code-happy. So I’m just observing for now.

The core problem is psychological, social and epistemic. Not tech. Satrapies solve for special Great Man approaches and they mostly turn out to be ordinary egotists or have feet of clay. Committees solve for ordinary people approaches and stifle genuine greatness where it exists.

My bias is towards ordinary because I think most people are ordinary, including me. The percentage of genuinely great people (either intrinsic or circumstantial) is overstated by a factor of 10,000x especially in the US. For every Steve Jobs there are 9999 Elizabeth Holmeses.

Fun fact, thus thread inspired by mild annoyance at the proliferation of useless collective nouns in English which got ne thinking about the opposite phenomenon where we erase genuine distinctions between collective forms.

I’ll leave you with a factoid. There’s 2 collective nouns for geese. A gaggle is when they’re on the ground, a skein is when they’re in the air. In this case, it’s a useful distinction.

Yet another thing to file under “thing I’d turn into a course if I had time off from making money to develop one”