Mind · Strategy
MassAddition
Committing investment (money, matter, energy, people or action) to the information an organisation currently holds
Definition
Mechanism
Mass is any form of investment that scales up an organisation or carries out its current information: concrete poured to a blueprint, energy put into an arrow, money paid out on a line of royalty data, staff added to a team, the uptake of a model. Adding mass scales up whatever information it is attached to, including that information's errors, so a fixed error rate becomes a larger absolute error as more mass is added. Mass can be added suddenly and irreversibly (a decision executed) or gradually with correction in between. It is one of three ingredients of organisation growth, next to control of shape and growth of information, and fast or large mass addition reduces control of shape.
Preconditions
- There is information (a plan, model, record or target) that the investment acts on
Invariants
- Mass scales the information it is attached to, errors included
- At a constant error rate, absolute error grows with the total mass added
- The faster or more irreversibly mass is added, the less chance there is to correct shape along the way
Risks
Failure modes
Scaling an organisation by adding mass without adding information, so problems grow faster than the knowledge needed to solve them
Not knowing in advance how much mass will be added, and so not knowing what error rate is tolerable
Mistaking growth of mass for preservation of shape
Relationships
Root pattern: builds on nothing in this library.
Used by
References
A fixed error rate in a frozen model grows into a larger absolute error the more is invested in that model
Exponential growth curves are better read as loss of shape in the thing being scaled than as a shape to aim for
Risk in organisation growth is the balance of three trading-off ingredients: control of shape, addition of mass and growth of information
Reference