Few years ago, I would have described a good organization as one where everyone is on the same page. By it, I would have meant exactly on the same page. I realize now that I was wrong. You don’t need to be perfectly on the same page. Being mostly on the same page is enough, and a little bit a chaos is ok.
Engineers are very well positioned to understand why: to be on the same page you need to coordinate, and coordination is expensive. This holds for actors in a software system (threads, processes) but also actors in an organization (person, teams, units). Coordinating between actors takes time, and as such slows the system. You should first try to design your system so that the need for coordination is reduced, and then if necessary, balance coordination with consistency (being on the same page).
The analogy works surprisingly well (maybe it’s not an analogy but a property of system in general?). Take optimistic locking in software systems: it’s a tradeoff between consistency and performance. Rather than lock the resource on each change, you only check when you do the final write if you’ve been working on the most up to date information. If not, you do a retry. In this case, there’s a performance hit, but overall the system is faster this way. The equivalent in an organization would be to accept that some people somewhere have outdated information. They will work based on this outdated information until a synchronization point happens and they realized the information is outdated. Some work will have to be corrected or redone. It may be upsetting, but should happen rarely.
The art of organization design is to reduce coordination and when needed use the right synchronization points. The goal is to prevent catastrophic mistakes. Some inconsistencies here and there, if timely resolved and with small consequences, are fine. Do not synchronize on everything (it’s way too expensive) but synchronize often enough to keep the risks small. Prefer many small risks than looming, large big risks.
There are lots of patterns in software system to synchronize and coordinate actors in the system. There are also a lot of patterns to synchronize and coordinate actors in an organization: all-hand sessions, company memo, internal trainings, review boards, formal processes, team meetings, etc.
Interestingly, software systems and organizations have different profiles when it comes to the tradeoffs between consistency and speed. For software systems, relaxing consistency beyond simple techniques like optimistic locking is usually hard. Transactional systems are still a lot easier to build than systems with relaxed consistency. On the other hand, an organization will always work with relaxed consistency somehow: it’s impossible for an organization to update the “collective brain” in a transaction. It’s the nature of people to misunderstand information, forget things, or simply take vacations or be sick.
Speaking of coordination and alignment, Elon Musk put it like this:
“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.” – Elon Musk.
What this analogy does not consider is the time needed to align. If lots of time is lost on coordination, the vectors are smaller. You then have to choose between an expensive perfect alignment, or some inexpensive imperfect alignment. Given that organizations constantly course-correct, vectors accumulate projects after projects (or task after task) and there are plenty of opportunities to adjust the alignment, even each time in an imperfect manner. This is why in a good organization, a little bit of chaos is ok.
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