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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. 🤔
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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.
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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 study groups.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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