Balancing Starfish and Spider

The Starfish and the Spider champions the counterintuitive capabilities of decentralized organizations. Authors Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom are startup entrepeneurs. The opening chapter grabs you with two salient examples: MGM fighting peer-to-peer outfits such as Napster and its quick-mutating cousins; and the Apaches successfully fending off the Spanish conquistadors where earlier tribes had speedily succumbed. The common thread? A smaller, seemingly weaker, decentralized organization somehow holds its own against the behemoth. Echoes of David versus Goliath.

Brafman and Beckstrom have chosen the spider and the starfish as the archetypes of centralized and decentralized organizations. To determine whether an organization is more like the spider or the starfish, the authors ask a series of questions. Is there a person in charge? Will it die if you chop off its head? Are knowledge and power concentrated or distributed? Can you accurately count its ‘membership’? Are working groups self-funded? The spider has a central nervous system with a controlling head. Chop off its head and the spider dies. In the starfish, a chopped-off piece can regenerate a whole new organism that can further proliferate.

The book is organized around starfish examples such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Skype, Wikipedia, Craigslist, and investigates how these organizations ‘function’. Instead of a centralized Big Kahuna CEO, decentralized organizations grow because of people called ‘catalysts’. The catalyst acts as a peer rather than the boss. Collaboration dominates over giving directives. There is a high tolerance for ambiguity and less-than-orderly situations. Catalysts are inspirational rather than powerful; they work behind the scenes rather than ham the spotlight; they trust rather than attempt to control.

That being said, the authors recognize that whether an organization will be more effective centralized or decentralized depends on its mission, its environment, and a host of other factors. There is a sweet spot, that changes with the times. Evolve and adapt, or die. Many organizations are spider-starfish hybrids. Where is the sweet spot? The authors suggest the following broad principles. “In any industry that’s based on information – whether it’s music, software, or telephones – these forces pull the sweet spot towards decentralization… [also] if there’s a reason for anonymity… But at the same time, other forces nudge the sweet spot toward centralization… the more important security and accountability become in a given industry… when services are unfamiliar…”

I’m in the higher education industry, and my organization is a traditionally organized university. At the moment, much of the bread-and-butter of my job is decentralized. I decide what content to teach and what pedagogies to use. I have some choice over when I teach time-wise, and how to allocate my time amongst different activities. I decide what research to pursue, how I will mentor my students, which students I will accept into my research group, what committees I am willing to serve on, and what I do with my time when school is not in session. But there are constraints, and those constraints are increasing over time. Higher education is increasingly centrally organized with an increasingly powerful central administration. You can tell by the increase of sheer paperwork, not to mention being constantly invited to participate in extra meetings. Higher education is being financially squeezed here in the U.S., and not surprisingly, it has responded by further centralization. Brafman and Beckstrom explain why this happens through many examples. (You can read their book!) If you’re in traditional academia, I bet you’re seeing increased centralization as your institution unveils new approaches to ‘maintain its competitive edge’. More tracking. More assessment. Amass more data.

The Starfish and the Spider also made me think about the chemical origins of life, which happens to be one of my research interests. As molecules self-organize into systems, heralding the beginning of metabolic cycles, there is likely a sweet spot between centralization and decentralization. Life operates at the edge between order and chaos. An overly centralized system will be wiped out at the next catastrophe, scattered to the wind so to speak. An overly chaotic system achieves no lasting mission as it careens from one state to the next. Different organisms have their niche sweet spots, at least until resources run scarce or a new predator arrives on the scene. Catalysts are also the heroes of biochemistry. Without them, the richness of life as we know it would not exist. The origin of metabolism is rooted in catalysis. Energy transduction drives chemical evolution – and we have it decentralized in mitochondria throughout our cells.

What does decentralized chemistry look like? It’s messy, complex, seemingly chaotic, and difficult to analyze. In chemistry lab classes, students much prefer the ‘clean’ chemical reaction. Avoid contaminants. Reduce the unwanted side products. Prebiotic chemists are increasingly exploring messier conditions, because interesting life-like systems do not emerge from clean reactions. These messy systems are seemingly inefficient at least when compared to a clean system. But perhaps efficiency isn’t always the goal. My students would like their learning to be efficient. So would I. But I find that students often use strategies that lead to efficiently learning at a superficial level. They want to know the superficial answers more quickly and efficiently. Deeper learning is likely a messier process of grappling, sometimes in the dark with slivers of occasional light. And once I’ve consolidated my learning, I’m not even sure I can articulate how exactly I’ve done so. Yet somehow I trudge on trying to be a catalyst for my student’s learning. One thing I enjoy about teaching – it’s never boring.