Comments on The Structure of Winning

Timothy Wilken, MD

Vincent wrote:

Timothy, Thank you for posting your draft document describing an Organizational Tensegrity. Has anyone attempted to build an Organizational Tensegrity yet?

I have a number of friends and associates that are working towards the creation of Organizational Tensegrities (OTs), but none exist yet.

I really like the idea and I think an Organizational Tensegrity would work well even in its draft form as you have described. I do think it needs more flexibility and more work in the area of compensation, in how royalties are divided. Equal shares is a good first approximation, but not everybody’s action hour is equal, and not every lever is of equal value.

The idea is equality within each base tensegrity. Again, we are talking about a small group of two to seven people. Larger organizations use multiple base tensegrities. Individuals will often participate in more than one base tensegrity. Total compensation for an individual would the the sum of compensation from all those base tensegrities he participated in.

Organizers in multiple level tensegrities by definition always work in two different base tensegrities. The compensation of all base tensegrities will vary based on the value of that base tensegrity’s action and leverage to whole system.

And then of course there is Andrew Galambos’ ARD mechanism (see page 67) which will also allow infinite adjustment based on how much action and leverage is used.

I think a system of what I call gratitude points could integrate well with your Organizational Tensegrity and allow unequal royalty proportions to be determined in a heterarchical manner. In short form, my proposal would be this: each member would list their contributions as they made them. The value of these listed contributions would not be weighted by hours, however, but would instead by weighted on how many points were awarded to the contribution by all of the other team members.

For instance, if you work 3 hours at task X, at the end of that time you list your work, including hours spent and what you got accomplished in the database. At a later time, other team members look through the list and evaluate all contributions on the list and award points to each contribution.

All team members could have equal power and weight in the evaluation of their peers within any given Tensegrity, so this would be heterarchical, yet would allow different hourly rates for different quality work.

However, the only way to get a pay different from the average in a group would be if the other members of the group rewarded it to you. This gets further away from hourly pay and closer to pay that is based on actual contribution. This also increases the sense of interdependence, eliminating a person’s ability to judge and control their own reward by controlling how many hours they report.

Your concept of gratitude points sounds interesting. In the OT, all decisions are made using synergic consensus. This of course could and would be applied to resolving and determining compensation issues.

Generally, the members of a Tensegrity ought to be closely involved enough to be capable of justly evaluating the other’s contributions. The only problem I see with giving them equal power to evaluate each other is that fringe members who are only making small contributions don’t deserve to have equal weight in evaluating the others. Perhaps some kind of recursive weighting could be devised where the weight of a person’s evaluation is proportional to how many points they have already been awarded.

I think these issues may work out more easily than you might imagine. Today all organizations are either neutral or adversary or a combination of neutrality and adversity. In synergic organization there is a strong sense of WE-ness. Synergic consensus and the synergic veto are powerful mechanisms for supporting and re-inforcing WE-ness. I think in practice these issues will work out easily if the guiding principles are sound.

I think I should give a more complete disclosure of my idea of Gratitude Points (maybe with a P superscript).

This is an appropriate use of the Property designator.

This idea came to me when I was in discussion with the Volitional Partners, Pete Sisco and Joseph Hentz. Joseph has disclosed some of their work inpost 1651:

Anyway, in my discussion with them, I had come to the point of realizing the benefit of royalties, unequal and subjectively determined, and the importance of gratitude. I was also pondering, with so many things to be grateful for, how one could divide up a limited amount of money among a huge, almost unlimited number of gratitude recipients.

This problem is what prompted Galambos to invent the ARD accounting mechanism. I discuss that mechanism is my OT paper (beginning on page 67).  Andrew Galambos lectured extensively about ARD. I think it solves a lot of these problems automatically.

The idea occurred to me that you could keep a gratitude journal (possibly in a palm top computer) and just notate points every time you encounter something to be grateful for. The value of the points would remain undetermined until later. Then, maybe at the end of the month or some regular time period, you could allocate a fixed amount of money to be divided among all your gratitude recipients.

You (or the computer) would add all the points you had given in that time period, and then divide the money by the number of points to determine the value per point. For instance, if you had awarded 300 points total, and had allocated 30 dollars for gratitude that time period, each point would be worth 10 cents. You would then make a payment to each person in your gratitude journal in the amount of 10 cents times the number of points you had awarded that person.

The benefit of this method is that you can award gratitude freely without worrying about going over budget. You have an unlimited number of points to spend.

Next it occurred to me that this could supplement incentive programs in companies by allowing workers to reward each other with gratitude points. The company could give employees a limited amount of money to reward other workers with, trusting employees to fairly reward other employees. The money would have to be rewarded to other employees via gratitude points.

Gratitude points cannot be given by an employee to themselves. The rational for this is that employees are more in touch with what their coworkers are doing and in a better position to reward outstanding effort. The gratitude points could be printed out on paper, serialized with barcodes, and handed to other employees immediately after good acts. Employees could later at their convenience take the gratitude points to a scanning station to ‘claim’ them by scanning them into the computer. At the end of each pay period, the value of all gratitude points would be determined and added to each employee’s paycheck.

In a hierarchical organization, this suggestion is kind of a novel fun idea, but doesn’t really fit well with a hierarchical system.

The way you describe this sounds like it fits well with the mechanisms of synergic consensus and synergic veto. These mechanisms are discussed in the OT paper (beginning on page 36).

In a later post, Vincent writes:

I’ve been spending a lot of time pondering the Organizational Tensegrity, and will probably continue to do so. This is a beautiful idea, that heterarchy and hierarchy are comparable to tension and compression in physical structures, and that a tensegrity design is possible.
Tasks have a hierarchical structure, because all tasks are divided into sub-tasks, which have more sub-tasks, etc. This causes a need for some form of hierarchy in organizations. Yet, when people agree to cooperate on a task, they want to relate as equals, and indeed should be regarded as equal. There should be NO TASK ASSIGNMENT. That is where hierarchy needs to be thrown into the garbage can. Tasks and sub-tasks should not be assigned in a hierarchical manner.
Hierarchy and Heterarchy both exist within the Organizational Tensegrity (OT). All decisions are reached in heterarchy through synergic consensus using the synergic veto when appropriate. Action is based on negotiated hierarchy. A football team cannot function without  a leader. For quick action we must have a leader who is directing the other players. Who that leader is is determined by synergic consensus. Sometimes I lead and sometimes I follow. Who is most qualified to lead in a particular task? Vincent continues:
There is this duality, this conflict between capitalism and communism. SCW has noted elsewhere that communism works in small groups, where all members of the group share the same goal. This is the requirement for communism to work, and it works well so long as everyone is in agreement about the goal and how to accomplish it. People have a psychological need to belong, to be part of a group, part of a family. Few people are cut out to be loners. In a small group where all are in agreement, and appreciative of each other, people are happier and will work harder for the group than they will for themselves alone.
I have abandoned the use of the word communism since it is so closely associated with adversary political-economic systems of the former USSR and the current China. The organizational tensegrity is designed to serve both Humanity as Community and Humanity as Individual. It as aspects of both Communism and Capitalism. It has both heterarchy and hierarchy. Vincent writes:
So the ideal design for an organization needs to be hierarchical for task structure, but heterarchical for any given task or sub task.
(snip)
Because all sub tasks would be voluntarily accepted, there would be no command structure, no orders given, no orders taken. Again for every subtask, either the individual could do it himself, or ask for help. If he asks for help, he forms a tensegrity, where all members join voluntarily because they are in agreement with the goal. When a plan of action (list of subtasks) is agreed on for that goal, it is unanimously agreed on by all members. and so on, etc. etc. Thus, any task can be divided into any number of hierarchical levels, but there is no commander.
I think this is an oversimplification of the OT. Tasks could be handled by single individuals or by groups of individuals who organized themselves in a negotiated hierarchy. It is not either/or. Decision making whenever time permits is done in heterarchy with synergic consensus. Action is always individual or in negotiated hierarchy.
Next Stephen writes:
Some tasks are organizational – i.e., requiring a person to handle the coordination of other tasks. Instead of viewing this person as the boss, as you suggest, this person is simply providing a service – same as anyone else on the team. If he does a good job, and the people he is coordinating appreciate his efforts, he’ll get more bonus points. But what happens if the coordinator person is doing a bad job? How do you fire him and replace him? How does that happen? Who decides it? (It is sometimes instructive to look at worst-case scenario.
Perhaps this question was directed to Vincent and related to his concept of gratitude points. I think he answered it, but, from my perspective: The coordinator position requires the continuing unanimous approval of the other members of the group. If a particular action of the coordinator causes some member to lose, that losing member can (and in fact is required) to veto the coordinator’s action causing loss.
If the performance of a coordinator is generally poor, he would get a general veto of his continuation as coordinator. He would then move to a position as a simple team member. If he fails to co-Operate effectively as a simple member of the group, he can then be vetoed from any further participation within the group. Synergic organization is about win-win-win-win. I win. You win. Others win, and the Earth wins.
Synergic veto is only to be exercised to prevent losing. It is not used capriciously or politically. All proposals not vetoed carry. We are seeking the best proposal that accomplishes the most with the least effort in which all participants win.
In another post Vincent writes:
Timothy,  Is anybody working on software to facilitate OT royalty accounting? That is a project I might be interested in.
Not yet! Sounds like a great idea for a project. Thanks again for all the intelligent comments and questions. I see that more comments are being posted and will respond to those when I have more time.

Read More About the OT(PDF)

Thanks to the Volitional Science Yahoo Group