Society · Coordination
ManyWaysReliability
A task with many noisy pathways happens reliably by the law of large numbers, without a single accountable owner
Definition
Mechanism
There are two ways to make something happen. The usual human way assigns it to one accountable owner, equipped and incentivised; that owner is a single point of failure. The way cells mostly work is statistical: many unreliable pathways can each produce the same result, so the result happens reliably in aggregate, as a seven comes up more often than a double six because there are more ways to roll it. An apoptosis signal that triggers only about 92% of the time still reliably clears an infected area of tissue. Actions that need few units to line up, i.e. low Laterality, have more ways to succeed. Businesses already rely on this outside the firm (footfall past a shop) but resist it inside the firm, preferring direct control by goals and instructions.
Invariants
- Reliability comes from the number of pathways, not from any one pathway being reliable
- The result is reliable at the level of the population or the whole, not each instance
- More ways to reach an outcome raise its probability
Risks
Failure modes
Diffusion of responsibility among people who each assume someone else will act
Mistaking unreliable individual pathways for a broken system
Replacing many pathways with one controlled owner and creating a single point of failure
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
Nothing in this library builds on this pattern yet.