I’m going to start this latest ramble by paraphrasing a beautiful paper by Laura Valderrama-Ferrando. She talks about diggers and kings, but I much prefer pirates that can use a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle. Here it goes:
Imagine a crew of 15 pirates planning to raid two islands: Mêlée Island, with diamonds aplenty, and Scabb Island, stocked with gold. They could either operate as a pirate democracy, sharing decisions and loot, or sail under the rule of a tyrannical Pirate King who owns the ship and makes all the calls.
On Mêlée Island, only 7 pirates are fit to dig (the grog at the Scumm Bar is a temptation that few resist), and their efforts would be divided amongst productive and unproductive pirates following some proportion. But on Scabb Island, 8 pirates can gather gold, albeit less valuable than diamonds. In either case, who gets the booty? How is the treasure split? And most importantly, who decides?
In the pirate democracy, things are not exactly straightforward. On Mêlée Island, the non-diggers (the majority) force the diggers to accept a smaller cut, leaving most pirates with just a few Pieces O’ Eight. But the hardworking crew keeps most of the loot on Scabb Island, where diggers outnumber the rest. Under the Pirate King, it’s simpler: he takes the lion’s share, leaving everyone else with the bare minimum.
If the pirates vote on which island to raid, they’ll pick Scabb Island - more pirates profit. But the Pirate King? He favours Mêlée Island; diamonds make him richer (you can see the exact calculations on productivity on p.3 of Valderrama-Ferrando’s paper). Oddly, the democratic pirates end up stuck in a less efficient setup because they won’t trade their freedom for better loot under the King’s rule.
And we made it to the point of this post: institutional inertia. The word means nothing more than organisations tend to be stuck in their ways, even though a wholly rational reorganisation would lead to better outcomes.
Now, I hear you screaming from the back of the room, and no, I am not arguing for changing our political system to have kings (although I do live in the UK, which has, I heard, a quite famous Royal Family). I am echoing Jeff Roberts in saying that, despite current significant (geo)political instability, most organisations will not be as affected as you’d think - barring, obviously, major regulatory overhauls (i.e., changing the rules of the game and enforcing them) or military confrontations on a scale we haven’t had in half a century.
To be clear, I’m not projecting value judgements on ‘slow’ companies: this behaviour is part and parcel of the Dunbar Number (i.e., we can only keep track of up to 150 people before our brains can’t cope)1. In a mid-sized organisation and bigger, most of the time will be spent making sure everybody knows what they’re doing, oiling the internal processes and tweaking the ever-changing Word templates with updated fonts and logos.
These activities will continue, no matter the prevailing political flavour of the moment, due to competitive necessity, contracts in place and established ‘ways of working’. I do believe in and work towards change. Still, I won’t pontificate on silver bullets, AI agents that will make your workforce automated (and obsolescent) or any other doohickey to turbocharge your decision-making. Change is a practice, and, like anybody who has ever tried picking up an instrument, practice never finishes; it just gets slightly less painful with time. But the reward is deeply meaningful.
Yes yes, Dunbar’s number has been ‘debunked’, as the statistical confidence intervals range between 2 and 520 people. This means two things to me: (i) Hurray, we’re all different, and you, the reader, can probably keep track of more people than me, and (ii) my point stays, but the number might not be 150, but 300ish. ↩︎