meta-team
- (aka $1TMC in my personal notes)
- Collecting resources, partially for myself
- the book Team of Teams seems potent & very relevant
- recommended by East Rock Capital, whose founder Graham Duncan is into Peter Koenig's Source model, which is itself very relevant to the meta-team
- Oh man, Graham Duncan gets it
34 linked references
January 2nd, 2023
- Polywork seems like a useful tool for Work With Me & meta-team
October 4th, 2022
- relates to meta-team
- > I love the collaborative work principle that you can ask someone for a deadline, or a specific outcome, but not both.
August 7th, 2022
- #2tweet part of the whole point of my meta-team concept is that there are lots of skilled people (eg @BlackForestBoi's collaborator Vincent) whose most important negative-effort skills aren't needed full-time by most companies, and it would be cool to have a better scaffold to share them between companies
- part of the whole point of my meta-team concept is that there are lots of skilled people (eg @BlackForestBoi's collaborator Vincent) whose most important negative-effort skills aren't needed full-time by most companies, and it would be cool to have a better scaffold to share them between companies
February 1st, 2022
- Dan Luu has a thread related to the whole meta-team thing, specifically much of human collaboration scales sublinearly but it's possible to scale superlinearly
January 28th, 2022
- this halfhour youtube video connects memory reconsolidation & business, so is probably relevant to meta-team
- "Lasting Change of Limiting Patterns: Why Memory Reconsolidation Matters to Business Leaders" - Bruce Ecker
January 21st, 2022
- A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
- huh, in the later Ender books, the pequinhos are also interestingly relevant here
- maybe even a The Master and his Emissary thing going on there, though I'll say no more than that here
Podcast summaries
- Keywords - barn-raising collecting barn-raising resources metaphor meta-team meta-vision Goal-Crafting Intensive Intend Philosophy & Paradigm Intend Philosophy & Paradigm Intend Philosophy & Paradigm me as project advisor / biz consultant / design jammer / co-visioner steward ownership What are the components or dimensions required for collaborative culture? Self-Organized Criticality Everything is a Remix how do we arrange the world so that I get to eat bananas in Canada and everyone is satisfied with the arrangement? UBI
- 40:51 - 58:00 - My long term vision of what I want the meta-team to eventually look like focus on what you want meta-team meta-vision collecting barn-raising resources how do we arrange the world so that I get to eat bananas in Canada and everyone is satisfied with the arrangement? UBI
December 26th, 2021
- > If you'll pardom me going all economist for a bit, two interesting parallel things that occur to me that this links up to...
1. This is a classic market for lemons. From the outside you can't tell how good a specialist is, which drives down price, pricing good specialists out.
2. This makes me think of Kenneth Arrow's "The Limits of Organization", in which he argues that one of the main benefits of organisations is creating high trust low information friction environments. In an organisation you (ideally) *can* tell who is good.
Putting (1) and (2) together, one of the big reasons it's hard to find good specialists is that they mostly go work for organisations where they can be accurately valued rather than striking out on their own where they're subject to the whims of the market for lemons.
And the only people who go against that are ones where they've got enough initial capital and enough demand to weather out the building reputation period safe in the knowledge that once they have that reputation they can charge appropriate and still get enough work to net win- from David MacIver
November 14th, 2021
- Related to meta-team & emergent organizing
October 15th, 2021
I read a bit of Books/Scale by Geoffrey West by Geoffrey … › I may break it down but the main jist is that companies g…
- at any rate, it does broadly seem like the thing I'm pointing at with the meta-team is more city-like than company-like in the first place
- I was initially thinking that maybe I would conclude from reading Books/Scale by Geoffrey West that I would want to make it more city-like vs company-like, but it's already kind of that
- and I guess I had been thinking of it as almost like an economy
September 29th, 2021
- ESR
- workwithsource.com
September 28th, 2021
- list of projects in the meta-team as of today (from my perspective)
- active and/or completed
- George Woodliff-Stanley as cofounder of Complice-the-startup
- hackday with Andrew Schreiber on WebRTC
- metacog module makeathon
- Contextual Eyes podcast with Eric
- EMS Culture Consulting crew
- art collabs with Silvia Bastos
- Work With Me page
- NNTD - why the name? post
- gathertown art
- album art for Superorganism song ♫
- < & more underway >
- < & more as-yet unconceived >
- some music collaborations (Luc, JK)
- barn-raisings
- Priya Rose & Andrew
- he made a summary of all my tweetstorms
- he transcribed a thing
- PCT project w Rachelle
- he's doing his own whole meta thing
- he seems to want to have a bunch of plug & play standardized ways he can help people
- eg "want a virtual assistant for a month"
- or "want Rachelle to help you set up a budget"
- the @bettermoveproj guy
- future possibilities
- visakanv marketing stuff
- nibras design stuff
- barn-raisings
September 23rd, 2021
- Huge day for @CompliceGoals—team page now tells our story in more detail, the primary impetus being that @joyurge is now fully on the team! He's essentially my cofounder in the next phase of Complice, as we prototype non-coercive teamwork principles & practices.
complice.co/about-the-team
September 22nd, 2021
- related to the meta-team and infinite games
meta-vision
- the meta-team concept is one such thing
August 1st, 2021
- diagnosing part of why the meta-team wants to exist
June 26th, 2021
- hm do I want to read Team of Teams - relevant to meta-team
Work With Me
- one approach to the overall meta-team puzzle
Malcolm podcast appearances
Other recorded conversations of me online: › February 9th, 2021 (this is mostly me informally intervie… › Malcolm Ocean & Richard D. Bartlett talk about Enspiral &…
- relates to the meta-team
Manual of Malcolm
- relevant to self-energizing meta-team
me as project advisor / biz consultant / design jammer / co-visioner
- this is a self-energizing role for me - see meta-team initial public articulation
- I'm happy to be paid for it if that's a thing that makes sense to do, but I also love doing it especially if I vibe with the person and the project
January 26th, 2021
- a major momentum downer is putting balls into a slow court - momentum sinks - relevant to self-energizing meta-team &
- this needs a way better name but the gist is a pattern I noted with TWO of my goals today
- a goal involving paperwork is delayed because a lawyer hasn't replied to my emails
- a music-recording goal is delayed because the guy I was hoping to collaborate with has been super busy so
- the interesting phenomenon here is that part of the delay is literal, but a lot of it is psychological!
- in both cases, there's still lots of stuff that could be done without getting more contact from the other person, but nonetheless in both cases almost nothing has happened for a week or a month respectively!
- there's something about like, putting the ball in someone else's court and then hoping they'll return it with even more energy, but instead you get nothing or maybe a small trickle.
- re getting more energy, see this slingshot thing:
- getting back a firm "no" would be way better, because it would put the ball clearly back in your own court. even if a bit of momentum was lost from the excitement not being returned, at least you have the ball again!
- interestingly, part of the damper for me with the music thing may actually have come directly from a message he sent saying something like "yeah I want to mix one of your tracks. I feel stoked about it. I think we could even get it in like films or something". this was initially exciting, but it now meant that one of the more exciting things in relation to this goal was a thing I was now waiting for him to do
- whereas if he'd just sprung it on me, that might've worked differently? idk
- at any rate, it's underscoring to me the value that it is to give a clear, warm, "no" or "not right now" when that's what's so, vs ghosting or vacillating
- at least in certain situations.
November 1st, 2020
- meta-team notes
- Failed #SquadGoals: Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you.
- what happens when "Everything is deeply intertwingled" meets much of human collaboration scales sublinearly but it's possible to scale superlinearly?
- > Every responsibility a team cedes to increase its focus becomes a new cross-team dependency.
- > Most businesses can only sustain a few areas of innovation. Internal process rarely is a primary area of innovation that differentiates a company in the marketplace. Studying the past allows businesses to pick better areas for innovation.
- this is very relevant to the meta-team, which is actually intended to have internal process as its primary area of innovation
- and everything else downstream of that
- and the innovation involves stuff like
- and then finding a way to organize people around doing such things
- this may require also finding some people who have "can't not do" energy about helping others or filling in the cracks
- which I strongly suspect exists, as I've felt it myself at times, as an expert generalist
- > A few of my recommendations related to the topics covered by the Spotify way of working:
- > More than 200 people in your product—engineering—design organization? The Scaled Agile Framework worked well for Fitbit when I worked there.
- > Less than 200 people? Shape Up by Basecamp is how I intend to structure my next startup.
- It seems to me there are deeply deeply 2 core questions here:
- 1. what general factors make for a collaborative cultural platform, and how does one bootstrap that and train it within the context?
- a few fairly mainstream books on this would be
- The Fifth Discipline - about creating a "learning organization"
- An Everyone Culture - about creating a Deliberately Developmental Organization
- this is one of the highest leverage points - which is not to say it's easy - because the capacity for effective collaboration & generalized trust allows conversations to redesign anything on any other level.
- Specifically, this involves these 2 leverage points from Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows
- this is the same, in some sense, regardless of scale/context...
- ...although in practice a different emotional/relational toolkit is needed here depending on whether the team/group involved is
- a company, a family, a community, etc
- very diverse in object-level culture or not
- doing intense urgent firefighting vs research vs art
- small and all knows each other, dunbar-sized, or huge
- and I think that noting those differences is also really important, even if there are commonalities & generalizeables across them
- 2. what specific organizational structure is appropriate to a given team of a given size and purpose?
- here, tons of different specifics could make sense.
- an independent research group might just have a bunch of loosely affiliated folks doing a kind of scenius thing
- a family would be very different from any company
October 19th, 2020
- While writing a twitter thread about the meta-team concept, I made these pages:
- and wrote this thread:
- copied here:
- and I'm going to copy the original thread here: