Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Organizations slow down over time due to coordination overhead, mirroring slime mold behavior.
The slide deck argues that successful organizations inevitably slow down as they grow, not because of individual incompetence but due to increasing coordination costs. It draws an analogy to slime molds, which efficiently solve problems without central control. The presentation suggests that organizations can learn from how slime molds self-organize, but many orgs become trapped by bureaucratic processes that multiply faster than the value they add. The deck includes examples from Google (where the slides originated) and other large organizations, showing how trust erodes as teams scale beyond Dunbar's number, forcing layers of process that become the majority of project effort.
What commenters are saying
Commenters largely agree with the premise but find the analysis incomplete on practical solutions. Top comments argue the real axis is distributed vs. centralized decision authority, not top-down vs. bottom-up. Several cite Dunbar's number and Conway's law as key frameworks. A common observation: trust scales inversely with company size, and process inflation is a symptom of broken trust. Two camps emerge: those who think leadership culture is the root cause (and thus hard to fix), and those who see it as an information-theory problem solvable by team topology. One commenter notes the military's squad structure as a successful model for decentralized authority with aligned goals.