Do Organizations Have to Get Slower as They Grow

Spencer Greenberg
From across the company who trust each other are, you know, like very savvy and very good at picking up patterns. And that is a really effective mechanism for traveling, sending lots of information well throughout the organization.
Alex Komoroske
So going back to the main thread, you were mentioning at the fundamental attribution error, you want to tie that in with the sort of issues of large companies operating slowly?
Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, it just, I think that it is when everybody’s working really hard in these large organizations, everybody’s, you know, got 150% of like their overcapacity. They don’t have time to think about it. It’s really easy for people to jump to the conclusion of, oh, that other team, those people just don’t care enough or they’re just trying to get out of extra work or they just don’t understand X. It’s really easy to jump to that conclusion. What a convenient conclusion of, oh, it’s the other person’s problem. And so that creates that leads to this almost default state that if you aren’t careful, you’ll lead to lack of trust. And then over time that will compound, it will get worse and worse and worse and worse. And an ambiguous environment is fast moving. If you’re already looking, already assume it’s so another team or another person isn’t going to do a very good job, you’ll find all kinds of signal in the ambiguous, you know, cloud of All the ambiguous stuff that’s happening that will reaffirm that hypothesis. So it’s really easy to get stuck in this trap where people aren’t trusting one another across the large organization.

Spencer Greenberg
To die as one way of putting it. Whereas top down control can create shelling points very actively, very, very straightforwardly, very cheaply for things accorded around, but they can get very caught off guard By things. I think a lot of things are trade offs, fundamental trade offs that we treat as black and white or there is some right answer. And when you see that basically everything is a trade off, then when to realize it’s a trade off, you can start asking yourself, are we contextually at the right balance point right now? Because there is no one true balance point for every context. It is highly contextual. And so then you get a sense less of like, oh, you feel like you’re surfing that balance point. Hey, are we a little bit too top down right now or are we a little bit, if we were to choose a little bit too top down or a little bit too bottom up right now, which one would you say? And then if everyone goes, yeah, I feel a little bit too top down right now. Cool. Let’s nudge a little bit towards that as opposed to people think of it as being this binary thing, this big, huge shift that has to happen, but doesn’t have to be actually can be relatively Small nudges continuously, can keep a system in balance.
Alex Komoroske
So how do you see this slime mold idea applying in organizations?
Spencer Greenberg
I think that people think that organizations are much more top down coherent. And they actually are like these bottom up dynamics are way more prevalent and way stronger than people expect them to be. And that creates a lot of surprises where people, you see this all the time, these environments are inherently complex.

Spencer Greenberg
Market fit and it has exponential growth. It’s going spreading very broadly based on word of mouth or some kind of network effect being this exponential growth and it’s great, we found this amazing hill, we should start climbing This and you climb it as hard as you can and you make efficient processes. At a certain point, every exponential curve has to hit its asymptote to some point. They can’t keep on growing exponentially forever. This is not enough space in the universe. And so when you start hitting that, what happens is the hill starts dropping away from you and you start thinking and feeling on those organizations, oh my gosh, we must have lost our Mojo. The things that we’ve been doing in the past that have worked really, really well. They’re no longer working. And at that point, what you do want to do really is start investing in long-term stuff, start seeing what kinds of like, how you can plan for this product to get to the point where it’s kind Of like a mature product that you look at maintenance and as opposed to fast growth. And in addition, looking around for other seeds, other hills that you might be wanting to climb. And perhaps what happens is people freak out and they say, everybody is all hands on deck. You’ve got to work harder to extract more from this thing. And so then as the hill continues to drop away from you further and further and faster and faster and faster, the organization does exactly the wrong thing and it starts focusing more And more and more at driving efficiency. And okay, we’re going to have every

Spencer Greenberg
A little bit more of those kind of interesting ideas to bubble up.
Alex Komoroske
It seems like if you empower people to have more decision making at a lower level, it has these advantages as you point out. But it also seems to bring on greater risks, right? Like it has risks that people end up like implementing bad ideas that you maybe didn’t get approved at a higher level or the people are just kind of like growing in different directions Because everyone has their own idea what to do. So how do you mitigate those risks or maybe you don’t think those are risks?
Spencer Greenberg
I do think they’re risks and they’re non-trivial ones. So the first one, the way I look at this is capping downside. How can you get a finite caps downside? Well, still some exposure to kind of uncapped upside and the potential for upside. So one way you can cap downside is make sure you have a really great hiring bar where everyone can safely assume that everybody there is very good at what they do, very collaborative, Very hardworking. That saves a lot of problems if you can assume that everybody is actually as a baseline assumption. You also find, I used to work on the web platform team on Chrome and there you hear quite a bit about security models. Every single web API that you add, you have to assume the content, the web page is actively malicious and trying to hurt the user and that forces you to be really, really, really careful About how you design those APIs. Obviously, that’s done in collaboration with many other browser vendors. So if you cap the downside, you make it so it’s not possible for teams to make that

Alex Komoroske
Right? If you have such strong top-down controls where everyone’s been told what to do, you miss out on opportunities for new ideas to blossom or unknown unknowns that take the organization Really good direction. So how do you think about fostering that kind of culture where you can have new ideas and serendipity occur?
Spencer Greenberg
I think it again gets to allowing people to have this space and to feel able to do, for many years, I’ve talked to a lot of different people across many different teams across Google. I’ve mentored hundreds of people over the years. And at various points, I felt like it was just self-indulgent. I felt like, I don’t know, I like talking to people. So I’ve just taken some time between me and other more serious meetings to talk to people. And it wasn’t until many years later that I realized, wait a second, this is actually me almost sarcastically increasing my luck surface area for the company. So the more the diverse network of people that you know across the company, where you were working lots of different levels, functions, product areas, what have you, the more likely That you will be at the right place at the right time where you find the idea that has a huge impact for the company. So yeah, you don’t know what thing is going to end up being the miracle, but you can stochastically increase the likelihood of miracles by doing things like novelty search, allowing Yourself to spend some time building other networks of people and gossip networks and getting to know different

Spencer Greenberg
Years, I’ve talked to a lot of different people across many different teams across Google. I’ve mentored hundreds of people over the years. And at various points, I felt like it was just self-indulgent. I felt like, I don’t know, I like talking to people. So I’ve just taken some time between me and other more serious meetings to talk to people. And it wasn’t until many years later that I realized, wait a second, this is actually me almost sarcastically increasing my luck surface area for the company. So the more the diverse network of people that you know across the company, where you were working lots of different levels, functions, product areas, what have you, the more likely That you will be at the right place at the right time where you find the idea that has a huge impact for the company. So yeah, you don’t know what thing is going to end up being the miracle, but you can stochastically increase the likelihood of miracles by doing things like novelty search, allowing Yourself to spend some time building other networks of people and gossip networks and getting to know different people across the organization, dabbling in things. If you have a lot of momentum, you have a lot of idea allowing yourself to go. One thing that plays really important, when people have intrinsic motivation, oh my gosh, it’s unstoppable. It’s amazing. They get in these flow states to do all kinds of cool stuff. When it’s extrinsic motivation of like, well, you have to do this to get promoted, it really messes with it. And you get like much less value out of it. So like, my rule of thumb was don’t try to make people

Alex Komoroske
Right? And then maybe also strategic empowerment where people feel like they have the ability to act on ideas, right? They just have ideas and then they can shut down immediately. But what are some other ways you’re thinking about increasing this luck surface area?
Spencer Greenberg
I think a large portion of it is a lot of innovation, I think, comes from people combining existing stepping stones, existing ideas into novel combinations. In the more diverse those things are, the farther I feel those existing stepping stones are that are duct-tipped together, the more likely the insight or the innovation is significant And game-changing. So a lot of it really does come down to allow people to indulge, do things that feel self-indulgent about like going down rabbit holes that they’re super into or doing these kind of extra Curriculars or hobby projects. A lot of it really does come down to that. And I think that it sounds so simple, it’s like, that can’t possibly be it. I don’t know, that’s certainly what I found is creating situations where people feel that they’re able to thrive, that they’re able to not try to be a cog in a machine, but rather to be The best versions of themselves and to lean into the things that makes them weird. Like, I think that people look at weirdness in a large organization. Weirdness is bad. Weirdness means that you don’t fit in, that you don’t want to measure you. The weird stuff is where all the cool things happen. And so I kind of encourage people to be like, what is the thing that makes you weird in a positive way? And like, lean into that. Like, don’t be ashamed