Rule 9 - Everything comes to an end
About planning, ‘meetings’, 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 - Try to avoid daily meetings (like scrum) as they can be considered pure entropy. But do what works for your unit. A daily check-up of your personal planning could be advisable. Warren Buffet apparently does this everyday, whereby he also cancels half his meetings.
Weekly - Palantir - “Family meeting”, recorded and to be commented on by everyone, 2-5 min (8:30 Monday or week close, currently Mondays but these are sometimes bi-weeklies as well).
Monthly - Strategy dinner - every first Wednesday of the month there is a dinner hosted by one of the admirals in which strategy, vision and current challenges are discussed. No true agenda for now, goal is alignment, focus and avoiding entropy creep.
Quarterly - PalantirQ - a very important gathering in which quarterly goals are fixed as well as equity distribution determined.
Yearly - Sinterkerst & Niew - A yearly close and opening in which a yearly focus and equity distribution is determined. Also includes 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, it needs to hurt
People need to leave in order to make room for growth. Does not have to be involuntary firing of people, can also be giving people the opportunity to develop their own company within the ecosystem (preferably) or landing them another opportunity where possible.
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 & Entropy
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 behaviour 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.
Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. It is the idea that the work will generally expand to the amount of time, budget, and number of people allocated to it, and no matter how many people you allocate to it, those people will feel busy. They'll feel busy because, due to the excess time/slack in the system, they'll start focusing on less and less important tasks. This is one of the reasons why you need an APK, fire people who are mediocre or think about something else and generally upset things from time to time to make it more anti-fragile.
About Meetings
Meetings are a necessary evil. Necessary, but evil.
Get clear on what the purpose of a meeting is, and make sure the decision holders are included. Focus on removing obstacles, asking for help and providing feedback. Actions and decisions are saved in Notions.
About the End
You will die. Sustainable Ships will die. Most of what we do in life revolves around avoiding this. We accept it.
Think about what you truly want. Would you still be embarking on this journey if you have a billion euros? If so, awesome, you passed the test. If not, what would rather do? You could think how you can achieve this within Sustainable Ships, or how to do it on your own. Either way, know what you want to achieve and know when to quit.