Coordination#

Human coordination in groups ([[Teamwork]], [[Cooperatives]], [[Decentralized Autonomous Organizations]]) to achieve aims is the secret sauce of human civilization. If it could be engineered, a lot of problems would have been solved.
- Coordination problems are a constraint to production of all kinds of economic value.
- All problems are coordination problems. Moloch is at the end of all!
- The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.
Coordination, the ability for large [[Teamwork|groups of actors to work together]] for their common interest, is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It can be improved in many ways:
- Faster spread of information.
- Better norms that identify what behaviors are classified as cheating along with more effective punishments.
- Stronger and more powerful [[organizations]].
- Tools like smart contracts that allow interactions with reduced levels of trust.
- [[Governance]] technologies (voting, shares, decision markets...).
Groups either coordinate around principles, coordinate around a task (powerful but temporary), or coordinate around a leader.
- Principles are factories of tasks and more resilient than leaders.
Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local. If possible, factor work products into independent modules; if not, grow slowly and optimize.
Trust increases coordination. To increase trust:
1. Repeat interactions.
2. Look for possible win-wins.
3. Communicate clearly and establish common context.
Trust is foundational to civilization, enabling coordination across time and distance. The internet has eroded traditional trust mechanisms by:
- Reducing the surface area for trust-building
- Expanding social contexts beyond our capacity to maintain relationships
- Separating information from its contextual moorings
Radical transparency is not an effective substitute for trust. It often constrains well-intentioned behavior while bad actors find ways to circumvent it.
Trust is built gradually through iterated interactions, with two main shortcuts:
- Credible commitments (escrow, contracts, penalties)
- Common context and proof of historical behavior
Modern trust infrastructure needs to solve three key problems:
- Contextual richness: Sharing metadata alongside information
- Expressibility: Transforming data while preserving meaning
- Audience control: Sharing different information with different groups
The best process is no process! In an ideal state it all just works and everything flows. Adding a couple of checks seems simple but that affects everyone in that process.
- No [[processes]] requires trusting other people. More trust means better coordination without processes. Trust is the currency of interactions.
- When a process becomes the proxy for the result you want, you stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right.
- Every process will slow you down, and some will make you better.
If we imagine human society as its own organism. We need processes and other coordination tools to make it remove the hand from the fire when it starts to burn. - The hand doesn't know what to do, but relays information to the brain, that makes the appropriate changes.
- Something similar could be achieved at a society level, where pain triggers processes that make it stop.
Only a few bits of information are possible to reliably convey to a large number of people. The larger the group, the smaller the message needs to be.
The requirements to govern a commons without tragedy:
- Clear boundaries.
- Managed by locals.
  - In a small community, everybody knows everybody, and can keep track of what they do. This makes small groups iterated games which rewards trust and penalizes sociopath behavior.
- Community makes its own rules.
- Community can monitor behavior.
- Graduated sanctions for those who violate community rules.
- Cheap, accessible means of conflict resolution.
- Self-determination.
There are many coordination mechanisms. Choose the appropriate one for your situation.
There is no such thing as a structureless group.
- We are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds.
- The idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, it becomes a way of masking power.
- Make the group structure explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. Having an established process for decision-making ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.
The more you need consensus, the less work you can do.
A way to coordinate without trust is relying on [[Blockchain]] and [[Cryptocurrencies]].
Coordinating is better than who takes the resources. The more you can coordinate, the more resources you can take (Paretotopia). Keep this in mind when making decisions and negotiating.
Ability to coordinate is a form of power.
Collusion is the dark side of coordination, where a subset of people coordinate against the interests of a broader group.
- Cannot be detected by looking at actions alone, as the same actions can be legitimate or collusive depending on context and intentions.
- Requires specific countermeasures like deliberate decentralization, skin-in-the-game mechanisms, and fostering counter-coordination (e.g., forking in blockchain systems).
- Examples include price fixing between sellers, vote buying, and 51% attacks on blockchains.
- Any mechanism that helps under-coordinated parties coordinate will also help already-coordinated parties over-coordinate to extract value.
Explore Cooperative Governance ideas. It offers an elegant compromise between on-chain and off-chain governance: you have a failure outcome that's enforced and "real", but the process of consensus remains firmly in the hands of people.
There are interventions to help online spaces bring out the best in human nature online (deleting a comment that breaks a forum's rules, a reminder of the community rules, ...). This helps build trust and coordination.