Society · Coordination
PeripheralHitchhiking
Unplanned but necessary information travels on top of regular primary communication
Definition
Mechanism
Much of the information an organisation needs is not known in advance to be needed, or not known to whom: a new starter whose role signals a change of approach, a dependency nobody mapped. Neither party sees it as important enough to send on its own, so it is rarely sent deliberately. It does get through when it rides on communication that happens anyway for another purpose, such as a regular meeting between closely related teams, where people naturally add more than is strictly needed. Peripheral communication is therefore plentiful between units with low Laterality and frequent contact, and scarce between distant ones. It cannot be replaced by broadcasting everything, which drowns the organisation in internal spam. The term comes from genetic hitchhiking.
Invariants
- Peripheral information needs an existing primary channel to ride on
- Its rate rises with the frequency and bandwidth of primary contact
- Its importance is often not recognised by sender or receiver when it is sent
Risks
Failure modes
Cutting regular contact as wasteful and losing the peripheral information it carried
Placing units that must exchange uncertain information far apart in the structure
Trying to replace hitchhiking with mass broadcasts
Relationships
Builds on
References
The number of functional units that must coordinate for an action to happen; the more units, the less likely it happens
Used by
References
Redundancy in communication is inefficient for one message or interaction but efficient for a space in which many interactions keep taking place
Every organisational structure makes some tasks 'losers' with high laterality and weak communication; reorganising only moves the problem