Making systems
Volume 3: People
Richard Golding
Copyright ©2024 by Richard Golding
Release: 0.3-review
Table of contents
Part XI: Team organization
Chapter 39: Team introduction
9 March 2024
- Basic collective action problem is related to the equilibrium
between contribution and resulting common good
- Depends on fungibility and homogeneity of contribution and good
- Collective good is homogeneous: a successful system
- More specifically, good decisions, designs, and implementations
that lead to the system as a whole working in a way that meets its
purposes, which will in turn provide individual goods like pay,
satisfaction, status
- The cost is heterogeneous: each person should be doing different
things to contribute to the good; this is about sharing out work,
with different people doing different tasks
- Modeling contribution as effort (time spent) is not helpful,
because if everyone does the same thing with their effort, the
result will have zero value
- Perception of what one person should do (is incentivized to do, is
assigned to do) does not necessarily result in an optimal common
good
- Value is related to satisfaction of the system structure
constraints
- Value of one contribution can be low if someone else does something
not consistent with it; the same contribution can have high value if
the other does something consistent
- Free rider problem (not contributing full share for the good
received) increases with size of group
- Detection of free rider becomes harder
- Perception of value of contribution decreases because it is a
smaller share of contribution, and share of common good is lower
- Work (cost) in a team is transferable, so if one member tries to
be a free rider, someone else will have to pick up the work. This
creates an incentive for enforcement
- If contributions are not homogeneous and shared equitably, is there
increased motivation to free ride? Is there greater motivation for
the “greater” contributor to dictate?
- Common interest of a team: pay, satisfaction in work, product
- Pay and satisfaction are private and excludable; product is neither
- Organization interest is the product, which may or may not be an
interest of the members
- Within the team, common interest can be about ability to work on
some part or make certain decisions
- Antagonistic interest in that people want more scope or to do less
work
- A successful system product is a common good (public good);
non-exclusivity of the result
Consider, for example, meetings that involve too many people, and
accordingly cannot make decisions promptly or carefully. Everyone
would like to have the meeting end quickly, but few if any will be
willing to let their pet concern be dropped to make this possible. And
though all of those participating presumably have an interest in
reaching sound decisions, this all too often fails to happen. When the
number of participants is large, the typical participant will know
that his own efforts will probably not make much difference to the
outcome, and that he will be affected by the meeting’s decision in
much the same way no matter how much or how little effort he puts into
studying the issues. […] The decisions of the meeting are thus
public goods to the participants (and perhaps others), and the
contribution that each participant will make toward achieving or
improving these public goods will become smaller as the meeting
becomes larger. It is for these reasons, among others, that
organizations so often turn to the small group; committees,
subcommittees, and small leadership groups are created, and once
created they tend to play a crucial role.
[Olson65, p. 53]
that needs careful design just as must as the system product
- This is the “machine” that, when run, builds the system product
- People form organization whether given or not
- Required in order to divide up work and to share things
- Know who is working on what, to avoid duplicated work and so direct people to the right person to talk to
- Know how to escalate issues when needed
- Know when a situation is exceptional and should be escalated, so that delegation can work
- Know that escalated issues and side-channel reporting will be dealt with
- Know how checks and approvals happen
- Ensure that no work or system parts fall through the cracks
Part XII: Team members
Chapter 40: Team roles
- the roles people fill in the team
Chapter 41: Skills
- important skills and abilities
Chapter 42: Leadership and culture
- team leadership and culture
Chapter 43: System-building ethics
18 September 2024
43.1 What is ethical work about?
- accuracy and truth, especially when there is counter incentive or politics
– Responsibility to protect the world, people, the team, stakeholders
– Responsibility for safety and security of system
– Responsibility not to build a system that works against law, morality, safety
– Honesty about how much one knows and can do, about experience
– Maintain confidences and secrecy when promised and not against law or ethics
– Fair broker/translator/representation
– Unique privilege of perspective across parts and disciplines
– Responsibility to detect, explain, and resolve errors in system and similar problems in execution and team
– Treatment of persons with respect
– Caring for people and helping them grow or cope; acting as a responsible part of the small society that is a team
- Responsibility to call people when they have deluded themselves into
believing something, especially when they believe it’s different
this time or are ignorant of the past
43.2 Organizational versus personal ethics
- ethical behavior is an emergent property of the behaviors of all the
people involved
- organization should behave ethically in aggregate: take on projects
that do no harm in the world; treat other stakeholders honestly and
fairly; treat the team with respect; don’t promise what cannot be
delivered; set the policies and the example for individual ethical
behavior
- an organization can behave unethically even if all the individuals
in it behave ethically. for example, if no one has the
responsibility to check accuracy or to consider the effects of a
decision
- individual should behave ethically in specific. Responsible for
their own actions, treating others honestly and fairly
- an individual can behave unethically because of ignorance, not only
out of malice.
- example of someone who put another team member in potential
physical danger because they did not know how to work through safety
evaluations
- an individual, especially in leadership, can behave unethically
because of motivated reasoning. example of someone who was
committing fraud because they really wanted their off-the-shelf
product flown
- Interplay
- organization sets the environment for individual ethical
behavior, but must add ideas of completeness
- individual ethical behavior is necessary to organization ethical
behavior, but not sufficient
- individuals are responsible for checking on organizational ethics,
protesting, refusing, or whistle blowing when there are violations
43.3 Case studies
43.4 Supporting these principles
- avoiding conflict of interest, which leads to violating fair broker and honesty
- Selection of employer and projects based on their ethical positions
- Constant vigilance against motivated reasoning and similar biases
What can one do?
- The choice to refrain or to control one self as a basis for ethics
- Trying to persuade as a response
- Whistle blowing as a response
- Walking away as a response
- The complexity of the choice to continue or not, or to be a
whistleblower
43.5 Commentary
- the impossibility of perfection in acting ethically, especially when one cannot have all information
– Danger of inflexible opinions or priggishness
Bibliography
| [Olson65] |
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Harvard Economic Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965. |