<story><title>Why is everything so hard in a large organization?</title><url>https://graphthinking.blogspot.com/2021/09/why-is-everything-so-hard-in-large.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ZeroGravitas</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s like the complaints about Wikipedia you read on Hacker News.&lt;p&gt;Someone smart who knows something wants to add it and gets tangled up in &amp;quot;useless&amp;quot; beaurocracy. Why can&amp;#x27;t they just let me do it!?&lt;p&gt;Because if they did just let people do stuff, then lots of other people you consider idiots would have already done things you consider stupid and or bad.&lt;p&gt;Basically everyone wants rules for the idiots so they don&amp;#x27;t ruin things and at the same time to not be included in the list of idiots.&lt;p&gt;That would sound harsh though, so mostly people just moan about rules, rather than them not being exempted, but I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone genuinely wants the rules to be dropped for everyone.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s hard because it&amp;#x27;s meant to be hard.&lt;p&gt;Once you have a large org that&amp;#x27;s making money, you don&amp;#x27;t really know exactly why it makes money. Sure, there&amp;#x27;s annual filings and there&amp;#x27;s still the elevator pitch of what the org does. But the actual how of how it works is difficult to describe in causal terms: if team X or Y was not there, the business would do better&amp;#x2F;worse? How does this team interact with that? It&amp;#x27;s really a bunch of informal relationships between different people, and both the people and the relationships change over time.&lt;p&gt;So what you want to do when you know the whole sorta-works and you want to keep it that way is you pour glue all over it. You try to formalize processes, you give people titles and you make hierarchies. That way you attempt to stop the firm from inadvertently slipping into dysfunction.&lt;p&gt;The side effect is of course that everyone who works there can see ways to improve things, but they can&amp;#x27;t see a way to get those improvements implemented.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>detaro</author><text>The main criticism of wikipedia here afaik is of &amp;quot;deletionism&amp;quot;, and I don&amp;#x27;t think that framing fits for that - most people are completely happy if other people also get to make articles about their pet interests.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why is everything so hard in a large organization?</title><url>https://graphthinking.blogspot.com/2021/09/why-is-everything-so-hard-in-large.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ZeroGravitas</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s like the complaints about Wikipedia you read on Hacker News.&lt;p&gt;Someone smart who knows something wants to add it and gets tangled up in &amp;quot;useless&amp;quot; beaurocracy. Why can&amp;#x27;t they just let me do it!?&lt;p&gt;Because if they did just let people do stuff, then lots of other people you consider idiots would have already done things you consider stupid and or bad.&lt;p&gt;Basically everyone wants rules for the idiots so they don&amp;#x27;t ruin things and at the same time to not be included in the list of idiots.&lt;p&gt;That would sound harsh though, so mostly people just moan about rules, rather than them not being exempted, but I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone genuinely wants the rules to be dropped for everyone.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s hard because it&amp;#x27;s meant to be hard.&lt;p&gt;Once you have a large org that&amp;#x27;s making money, you don&amp;#x27;t really know exactly why it makes money. Sure, there&amp;#x27;s annual filings and there&amp;#x27;s still the elevator pitch of what the org does. But the actual how of how it works is difficult to describe in causal terms: if team X or Y was not there, the business would do better&amp;#x2F;worse? How does this team interact with that? It&amp;#x27;s really a bunch of informal relationships between different people, and both the people and the relationships change over time.&lt;p&gt;So what you want to do when you know the whole sorta-works and you want to keep it that way is you pour glue all over it. You try to formalize processes, you give people titles and you make hierarchies. That way you attempt to stop the firm from inadvertently slipping into dysfunction.&lt;p&gt;The side effect is of course that everyone who works there can see ways to improve things, but they can&amp;#x27;t see a way to get those improvements implemented.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>im3w1l</author><text>Wikipedia doesn&amp;#x27;t have an idiot problem. It has a smart people with an agenda problem.</text></comment>