One thing I would note on your YC community, is that you need a way to "make it easy to join and easy to remove" (or you will have a "tragedy of the commons at hand" and will really struggle with communication and culture)
here is the model/conundrum:
- If you don't make it easy to join, you gain some initial quality control, but lose on diversity, community, value creation, trust, alignment, and fun/friendship
- but if you make it easy to join, you will find the right talent/people/individuals, but they will be in the middle of lots of other "not good fits" for your particular community
- the key is to create a good, pragmatic and logical way to remove the ones that don't work out (i.e the one you mentioned that "...seem not so good right now (maladapted, 'low quality')..." , and eventually given some time ,you will find amazing teams, environments and individuals
Btw, I don't like the term "quality" to classify the ones that are a good fit or not, since "quality" is already quite a loaded term. I prefer some like "culture fit and alignment" . In our Upwork model, we basically measure the deliverables, the culture fit and ultimately who the team want to have in their "dynamic squads"
Basically it should be easy and with no "people drama". i.e. it just works
I'll be happy to expand on this topic , share how the Upwork model works for us and learn from your experiences.
the idea behind amorphous boundaries is that it gets harder to join the closer to the core you get. it isn't a binary in/out state, but instead "closer to core" and "further from core." this allows diversity on the margins and high fit on quality nearer the core (and there can be multiple cores; individual engagement teams or squads are each a core, for eg).
i use "quality" very specifically — the meaning is closer to "configuration of characteristics/properties" and is not intended to have connotations of subjective goodness/badness. the reason i don't use "culture fit" or "alignment" is that sometimes (often!) those aren't the relevant characteristics for whether a person should stay or go.
in any case, it sounds like you may have an implementation of amorphous orgs that works and i'd like to know more
Oddly I had suggested something like this when I was asked to consider how to set up a community of practice in my org. The issue was that no one wanted to join formally for fear to having too much to do (esp all the performative activities that tends to happen with such initiatives). So I had the (more crude) idea of allowing people to have differing levels of participation and responsibility. And those roles could be fluid - someone who is on the periphery today just sharing his thoughts or findings could become a project leader in the future if he comes across a project that he's personally invested in.
First, killer version of Blue Bayou. Second, your piece prompted the question, “are there good organizational inefficiencies, and are there bad ones?”. I would think the answer is yes, but what’s the criteria? Fatness of resources of money and time seems to be a good inefficiency for an org to perpetuate. A bad one might be filtering too lazily for participants(in an amorphous org setting). Thoughts?
good question re: inefficiencies—hard to come up with a blanket applicable answer. initial stab at top-level criterion: resource flexibility in deployment (whether the resource is people, money, time, etc). with that as a filter, a fungible resource like capital/time would be more likely to be a good inefficiency to have lying around. but also—and probably more important—having people who are good at learning fast and organizational structures/processes that are "soft" enough to change when necessary (instead of being rigid, like say public health organizations that have hard-to-change guidelines for approving new test modalities). i think we could characterize bad inefficiencies as being solely rent-seeking.
Hi, thanks for sharing your thoughts, as Nick mentions in https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickdrage_we-are-hiring-freelancers-via-upwork-if-activity-7150472280601509889-uX_Y the environments I have created using Upwork are very similar to the ones your describe above.
One thing I would note on your YC community, is that you need a way to "make it easy to join and easy to remove" (or you will have a "tragedy of the commons at hand" and will really struggle with communication and culture)
here is the model/conundrum:
- If you don't make it easy to join, you gain some initial quality control, but lose on diversity, community, value creation, trust, alignment, and fun/friendship
- but if you make it easy to join, you will find the right talent/people/individuals, but they will be in the middle of lots of other "not good fits" for your particular community
- the key is to create a good, pragmatic and logical way to remove the ones that don't work out (i.e the one you mentioned that "...seem not so good right now (maladapted, 'low quality')..." , and eventually given some time ,you will find amazing teams, environments and individuals
Btw, I don't like the term "quality" to classify the ones that are a good fit or not, since "quality" is already quite a loaded term. I prefer some like "culture fit and alignment" . In our Upwork model, we basically measure the deliverables, the culture fit and ultimately who the team want to have in their "dynamic squads"
Basically it should be easy and with no "people drama". i.e. it just works
I'll be happy to expand on this topic , share how the Upwork model works for us and learn from your experiences.
would love to see your upwork model!
the idea behind amorphous boundaries is that it gets harder to join the closer to the core you get. it isn't a binary in/out state, but instead "closer to core" and "further from core." this allows diversity on the margins and high fit on quality nearer the core (and there can be multiple cores; individual engagement teams or squads are each a core, for eg).
i use "quality" very specifically — the meaning is closer to "configuration of characteristics/properties" and is not intended to have connotations of subjective goodness/badness. the reason i don't use "culture fit" or "alignment" is that sometimes (often!) those aren't the relevant characteristics for whether a person should stay or go.
in any case, it sounds like you may have an implementation of amorphous orgs that works and i'd like to know more
Oddly I had suggested something like this when I was asked to consider how to set up a community of practice in my org. The issue was that no one wanted to join formally for fear to having too much to do (esp all the performative activities that tends to happen with such initiatives). So I had the (more crude) idea of allowing people to have differing levels of participation and responsibility. And those roles could be fluid - someone who is on the periphery today just sharing his thoughts or findings could become a project leader in the future if he comes across a project that he's personally invested in.
First, killer version of Blue Bayou. Second, your piece prompted the question, “are there good organizational inefficiencies, and are there bad ones?”. I would think the answer is yes, but what’s the criteria? Fatness of resources of money and time seems to be a good inefficiency for an org to perpetuate. A bad one might be filtering too lazily for participants(in an amorphous org setting). Thoughts?
linda ronstadt's live versions are also great.
good question re: inefficiencies—hard to come up with a blanket applicable answer. initial stab at top-level criterion: resource flexibility in deployment (whether the resource is people, money, time, etc). with that as a filter, a fungible resource like capital/time would be more likely to be a good inefficiency to have lying around. but also—and probably more important—having people who are good at learning fast and organizational structures/processes that are "soft" enough to change when necessary (instead of being rigid, like say public health organizations that have hard-to-change guidelines for approving new test modalities). i think we could characterize bad inefficiencies as being solely rent-seeking.