Scale efficient organizations

The authors suggest that scale efficiency in an organization is the result of four constituents: autonomous agents, parallel activity, asynchronous communications, and certain consensus-producing mechanisms. The first three of these constituents are reasonably easy to obtain using existing computer technologies. The authors conjecture that the consensus-producing mechanisms can be very simple. Two that have been identified are social instincts (where agents adopt the approaches of their most successful neighbors) and a destructor mechanism (where a subset of agents is made responsible for destroying work they deem to be inferior). The destructor mechanism has been demonstrated with the traveling salesman problem.< >