Starfish Organizations: The Key to Explosive Change

“There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” — Winston Churchill

To predict explosive change before it occurs, you need to be able to distinguish a “spider” from a “starfish.”

A starfish can replicate and spread a fluid set of ideas, beliefs, values, and norms.

This is the hidden power behind things like Wikipedia, craigslist, Skype, and even the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The Spider and the Starfish

Spider and starfish are metaphors for organizations.  A traditional top-down or centralized organization is like a spider, while a decentralized organization is like a starfish.  If you cut off a spider’s head it dies, but if you cut off a starfish’s leg, it grows back.

These metaphors provide an interesting lens for looking at command and control, community organizations, organizational design, and business strategy.

Create Starfish Organizations to Create Explosive Change

These metaphors also help explain why some top-down spider organizations have failed when the head of the spider was removed and why some grass-roots efforts have spread like wild-fire without a clear leader at the top.

The key to creating explosive change, is creating effective starfish organizations.

In the book, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom share the key principles behind starfish organizations and how you can identify and distinguish a spider from a starfish.

Six Principles of Decentralization

Here are six principles of starfish according to Brafman and Beckstrom:

1. The major organs are replicated throughout each and every arm.
2. It’s easy to mistake a starfish for spiders.
3. An open system doesn’t have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system.
4. Open systems can easily mutate.
5. The decentralized organization sneaks up on you.
6. As industries become decentralized, overall profits decrease.

Spider (Centralized) vs. Starfish (Decentralized) Organizations

Here is a summary of the key distinctions between a spider and starfish, according to Brafman and Beckstrom:

Centralized	Decentralized
There’s someone in charge	There’s no one in charge
There are headquarters	There are no headquarters
If you thump it on the head, it dies	If you thump it on the head, it survives
There’s a clear division of roles	If you take out a unit, the organization is unharmed
Knowledge and power are concentrated	Knowledge and power are distributed
The organization is rigid	The organization is flexible
Units are funded by the organization	Units are self-funding
You can count the participants	You cannot count the participants
Working groups communicate through intermediaries	Working groups communicate with each other directly

Share Values, Replicate Success

In my experience, I’ve seen several communities and groups spring up out of passion and common values.

It was the absence of centralized power and the presence of connection, values, and shared goals that spread the their success.

Because they weren’t managed top down like a business that has to make a profit, the autonomous teams thrived and drove from a fluid set of beliefs, values, and norms, and each unit had enough of the functional pieces to support the mission.

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Photo by ciel.o.