I don’t see much justification for the word “usually” in the title. And while I’d agree that many real-world communication problems include information issues, I think they’re almost always mixed with alignment (not all participants are fully onboard with the goals) and trust (even if we agree, is it worth my effort if you’re going to let me down) issues.
It’s very hard to tell which of these issues is most important for any given failure, but I’d argue that the alignment and trust issues are causes of the information issues.
“From Personal to Prison Gangs” is my main foundation here. I say real-world coordination problems “usually” look like this, because these are the kinds of problems we’d expect to increase over time, based on the ideas in that previous post.
That said, Personal to Prison Gangs attributes both the information problems and the trust problems to the same root cause: I interact with a larger number of people, with fewer interactions per person. On the one hand, fewer iterations means less penalty for “defectors”, and common knowledge of this fact means less trust. On the other hand, more people + fewer interactions per person means both less time and less mental resources to customize my interaction with each individual person. Thus, in a large company, people are forced to rely more heavily on job titles—and in a larger society, people are forced to rely more heavily on identities more generally.
All the examples listed in the OP are the sorts of things you’d expect in a world with more people, more specialization, and fewer interactions between any given pair. (In some cases, this means zero interactions between a pair which would really benefit from interacting, as in several of the examples.)
I don’t disagree that alignment & trust have a role here. But I do think that the large majority of real-world coordination problems could be solved by sticking the right two or three people in a room and just letting them talk for a full day. And in most cases, I think the relevant people would actually like to talk! The problem is finding the right two or three people and building that communication channel.
I don’t see much justification for the word “usually” in the title. And while I’d agree that many real-world communication problems include information issues, I think they’re almost always mixed with alignment (not all participants are fully onboard with the goals) and trust (even if we agree, is it worth my effort if you’re going to let me down) issues.
It’s very hard to tell which of these issues is most important for any given failure, but I’d argue that the alignment and trust issues are causes of the information issues.
“From Personal to Prison Gangs” is my main foundation here. I say real-world coordination problems “usually” look like this, because these are the kinds of problems we’d expect to increase over time, based on the ideas in that previous post.
That said, Personal to Prison Gangs attributes both the information problems and the trust problems to the same root cause: I interact with a larger number of people, with fewer interactions per person. On the one hand, fewer iterations means less penalty for “defectors”, and common knowledge of this fact means less trust. On the other hand, more people + fewer interactions per person means both less time and less mental resources to customize my interaction with each individual person. Thus, in a large company, people are forced to rely more heavily on job titles—and in a larger society, people are forced to rely more heavily on identities more generally.
All the examples listed in the OP are the sorts of things you’d expect in a world with more people, more specialization, and fewer interactions between any given pair. (In some cases, this means zero interactions between a pair which would really benefit from interacting, as in several of the examples.)
I don’t disagree that alignment & trust have a role here. But I do think that the large majority of real-world coordination problems could be solved by sticking the right two or three people in a room and just letting them talk for a full day. And in most cases, I think the relevant people would actually like to talk! The problem is finding the right two or three people and building that communication channel.