13 posts tagged with "Culture"

You've seen it. Every team is shipping. Every sprint has velocity. Dashboards are green. And yet somehow, the organisation feels slower than it should. Everyone's busy, but nothing moves faster.

Here's a clue from an unexpected place.

Picture a motorway at rush hour. Every driver is making the smartest choice for themselves — fastest lane, shortest route, optimal speed. Nobody's doing anything wrong. And yet the whole system grinds to a halt. More cars, more rational decisions, more gridlock.

This isn't a failure of individual intelligence. It's a failure of coordination. Game theorists have a name for it — the Price of Anarchy — and it might be the most useful mental model for understanding what management actually is, when it matters, and when it doesn't.

Look, I get it. Someone at a conference said "InnerSource" and now Slack is buzzing — or is it Teams? Honestly, who can keep track anymore. People are sharing links to the InnerSource Commons, talking about "breaking down silos" and "cross-team collaboration" like they've discovered fire. Let me save you the trouble — here's why you should absolutely, categorically, never do InnerSource.