I’ve just finished another compelling piece of writing, by Brafman & Beckstrom called the starfish & the spider.

The powerful analogy the book is built on is a comparison between the two creatures; cut off a spiders head, and it dies (as those of us who live in houses inhabited by spiders know too well.)

However when you slice up a starfish, chances are it will reproduce a new leg to replace the one that has been severed; and in some cases, given the right conditions, that severed leg will grow into a whole new starfish.

Transfer this analogy to organizations; some are built on a powerful, top-down leadership model, like banks, telcos, record companies and movie studios.

Those at the top fire their orders down the chain of command, and the organization rises and falls on their abilities. But what happens to them when the leader retires, or information can’t get to the top quickly enough?

Take the Victorian Bushfires, or Hurricane Katrina as an example: in both these instances, tragedies unfolded so quickly that emergency responses couldn’t cope.

Those on the ground knew what was happening, but due to the top-down leadership employed by both the Victorian Government and the US Government, no-one on the ground had the resources or authority to muster an appropriate response.

Meanwhile those who did have resources & authority – the heads of the spiders – took far too long to gain an accurate understanding of what was happening, and what was needed in response.

It just takes too long for accurate, insightful information to move all the way to the top of chain, and in the case of these tragedies, those at the top had too little time to mobilize those under their command.

Compare this to the neighborhood fire-fighting model my suburb embraced in the wake of Sydney’s most recent bushfire disaster. They raised funds to equip every street in fire prone areas with fire-trailers, filled with hoses, helmets and other gear needed to fight fires.

They then trained residents in that street to fight fires, to use the equipment, and to evacuate not a whole suburb, but just their own street. If another bushfire flared up quickly, those closest to the action (and therefore closest to danger) did not have to rely on external structures to provide them with leadership; they could do it themselves.

Put simply, organizations that embrace the principles of the starfish are changing the way our world works. Companies and groups that continue to embrace top-down leadership are essentially falling behind; it’s not that these types of structures don’t work, but rather that the starfish-model has an inbuilt advantage that the spider-model does not; try to kill it and it grows.

Take the music industry as another example of a spider-type organization. In the early parts of this decade, the music industry was being slaughtered by the spread of the internet; music lovers everywhere were fed up with having to pay full price to listen to songs that were part of bad albums. So they began swapping files online for free.

MGM launched legal proceedings against Napster, and the other record companies lined up to help them; they wanted to take the head of this spider once and for all, sending a message to the freeloaders who had plundered the profits.

But the freeloaders responded by getting smarter.

Rather than storing music files in a central database, that could be searched out and destroyed, they began creating file-sharing services. They eliminated the middle-man, and began to recover, just like a star fish that had lost a leg.

It’s almost impossible to track who has downloaded what in the world of Kazzaa and Limewire, and literally impossible to find out who is in charge; because nobody is.

The six major record companies, rather than plugging their leaks, have instead had their cupboards raided by pirates, and by the looks of things will never return to the glory days where they dominated the music business.

Here is one last example for you about the power of leaderless organizations.

Put your hand up if you’ve heard of Skype? A few years ago, when Skype first came up with the idea of internet phonecalls, they struggled to raise a few million dollars worth of investment.
How would anyone be able to compete with telcos that have invested billions of dollars in establishing communications networks? Today Skype is worth over $4 billion.

I don’t want to tell you how much a $1000 investment back in the day would be worth now. Skype is fueled by the principles of the starfish; no centralized leadership, just common values. Users connect to each other, and each user stores a section of the skype directory on their own PC, eliminating the need for the kind of central database that costs Telcos billions of dollars to build.

Most organizations are willing to invest an incredible amount in great leaders; but the principles of the starfish seem to suggest that building a brilliant organization, with common & explicit values, might be a better investment than a CEO who is one day going to be asking for a golden parachute.