Break Free: Pictures of the week: 3 April 2010

World is full of misery because many times we have common mental models and patterns as the things should be. We want to remain in our comfort zones. We want us to be called "normals".

The theme of this week is "Break Free". This week pictures may not shows any pattern that clicks our minds. I clicked them at most unexpected place, I can imagine.

Let us come out of our daily routines.

Let us love things as they are.

Let us not always remain "normals"

Let us do something different.

Let us break free.

Decentralization: The power of many: Introduction

Decentralization is the buzz word in todays world. There are striking examples of decentralized management and organizations all around. Some of the examples are wikipedia, Youtube, Open Source Communities, Blogosphere and many more.
In my view, decentralization is kind of organization of individuals (I will call them owners) where each owner obey following basic meta rules:

1. They have common values and vision.
2. They strive toward common goals.
3. They are the owner of their own roles and tasks.
4. They are driven by Passion and Choice

Similarly decentralization can be defined on collection of other decentralized teams where each team follow above basic meta rules.

Please note that

1. Decentralization is not alternative to leadership. In book, The Starfish and the Spider, the author has defined new role of leader in decentralization called catalyst.
2. Vision and Values are subjective to change with coarse of time. But once they are updated, every one follow them.
3. Central Authority is replaced by a role, called temporary leader/coordinator. For a particular goal, they provides direction to others.
4. Strengths of the individuals still play a important role in decentralization. Infact owners choose their goal and role based upon their strengths, passion and skill set.

Let us understand, decentralization with example of flocking of birds.

According to wiki, "flocking" of birds is the collective motion of a large number of birds from simple rules that are followed by individuals and does not involve any central coordination.




Probably everyone knows, flock of birds covers thousands of miles every year. But do you know, they do it by just obeying following three simple rules by all individuals:

1. Separation - avoid crowding neighbors (short range repulsion)
2. Alignment - steer towards average heading of neighbors (direction alignment)
   
3. Cohesion - steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction)

Its truly amazing how these small and delicate creatures travel such a large distance. Artic tern birds travel about 22,000 miles in a round trip. It breeds in the summer months in the Artic, then flies to the Antartic to feed during the summer months there.


In this post, I have not tried to define decentralization as a whole but provided some food of thoughts to the reader. Decentralization is nothing new as the whole nature is filled with examples, ant colonies, bee colonies, flocking etc. I would be exploring this topic further in next of my posts.

References:

• Wiki: Decentralization
  
• The Starfish and the Spider (review)
• The Real Warren Buffet
• Flocking