Why is everything so hard in a large organization?
Ronald Coase won the nobel prize in economics for his &quot;transaction costs&quot; solution to the &quot;why do firms even exist&quot; question. A lot of economics is about asking a question the right way.<p>He started with &quot;if markets are so great and stuff, why do companies run like soviets &amp; chiefdoms in practice? Why doesn&#x27;t the product team just contract a UI designer, a testing team and such. Hi solution was &quot;transaction costs.&quot; IE, it&#x27;s too hard to find a designer every time you need a button.<p>Economics and social science generally is prone to a &quot;defend my model&quot; problem. Once you have a model, there&#x27;s a tendency to see everything in terms of that model. A Coasian sees everything in transaction costs terms. Coasians ran around<p>This author seems to see everything in incentive &amp; game theory terms. Management theory often prefers group psychology explanations like Dunbar&#x27;s number.<p>IMO, you should probably keep all in mind at once, and remember that none are entirely true. Even if you see the problem as &quot;Prisoners Dilemma,&quot; the solution may not be &quot;breaking the prisoner&#x27;s dilemma.&quot;<p>Human cooperation in groups to achieve aims is basically the secret sauce of human civilization, culture &amp; what makes us different from other animals. If it could be predictably engineered, a lot of problems would have been solved already.<p>Most, seemingly common sense solutions fail miserably. Trying to break prisoners&#x27; dilemmas by nailing all responsibility to someone (a) may be a lot more disruptive and aggressive than you imagined and (b) will often result in elaborate CYA responsibility avoidance. See enterprise consulting for a snapshot of a mature system described this way.<p>One way or another, this problem has occured to many people over the years. It&#x27;s not an easy one. Perhaps, it&#x27;s <i>the</i> hard question of social science.