About planning, growth, and how to avoid entropy creeping into your organization

Before starting in the organization, everyone will have to think when he or she will stop working at the company. The purpose of this rule is to reduce waste in an organization and decrease entropy. In a sense, chaos and randomness is good. This sparks creativity and is a requirement for flexibility. Without random shit, there would be no evolution.

Nonetheless, in every society, 'entropy' and bad stuff creeps in. Under the right (or wrong) circumstances, this can create toxic behavior and people, stifle innovation and will cause the company to stop learning, stop growing, stop adapting, and die.

A proper trade-off should therefore be found in allowing for the good chaos, and cutting down on the non-essentials. In order to achieve this, the following routine(s) are implemented, the most important which being:

• When will the organization fulfill its purpose and stop to exist?

• When will I fulfill my purpose and stop to exist as a functioning member of said organization?

• What is the maximum amount of money I need to make in order to fulfil my purpose?

About Routines & Planning

• Daily - Scrum 8:30 (unit)

• Weekly - Family meeting, 2-5 min (8:30 Monday or week close)

• Yearly - year open & close (big partiesz!!! xxx)

• Maintain fixed periods of renewal (meerjaren en weerjaren). Those are years in which you diverge (expand and innovate) and years in which you converge (focus). General rule of advice, do not change for change’s sake. The below periods are - like everything - more of a guideline.

• 5 YR - 'Klein onderhoud' - APK

  • Create friction and chaos/crisis (Nassim Nicholas Taleb Anti-Fragile)

  • Save up some cash so that you can make people leave (periods of renewal, make room for others)

  • That said, people can also take the cash and create a new Family (only coaches can to become Leadership)

  • Decide, together with the entire Family, to venture into a new market/product for at least 5 years (not new strategy, but simply diversification).

• 10 YR - 'Groot Onderhoud' - Overhaul

  • Everything that accompanies a small APK

  • At least 50% cost reduction

  • People need to leave

  • New purpose and cause if needed

  • Why not stop?

• When needed

  • Make sure to celebrate milestones upon success, but also ceremonial ‘burials’ upon failure. It is ok if something fails. This means you have learned. Make sure to provide closure with the team upon such an occasion (source: Freakonomics).

About Scaling

• Organizations grow. Each size is accompanied by new challenges. That is why everything is decentralized and comes to an end. These rules will reduce entropy, promote self-organizing behavior and ensure that the organization lives on. #Hydra.

• That being said, there is a great deal to be learned about scaling organizations in the book Blitzscaling. For each scale (village, tribe, city and nation state) these non-negotiables and ways of working will need to be adjusted.

• Accordingly, the diversity of the teams will need to be adjusted. The larger the scale, the more need for specialists. For smaller scale teams and families, one would need more generalists.

• The secret to scaling: designers who code, engineers who design, marketers who write SQL, PMs who write copy, customer support folks who open PRs, leaders who do support. The more skills overlap, the less people need to meet, the more gets shipped.