Say we want to try out new organizational structures. Zaine suggests that a game might be a good method. However rather than a game to test a specific method of organizing people, I'm going to make a game where different organizational structures can be pitted against each other and statistics about their operation over time can be collected to inform new organisation designs.
Some organizational structures that might be tested include Democracy, Futarchy, Control Markets, Histocracy, some form of Meritocracy and Direct Democracy.
The conditions under which organizations suffer from corruption of purpose more frequently are when the people inside the organization are generally selfish and only moderately interested in the goals of the organization. So it makes sense to concentrate on these sorts of conditions.
I will be using the terminology defined in this article to talk about different facets of an organization.
One other bit of terminology: Team, a group of players given an organizational structure to test.
Although to simplify things we shall ignore Stakeholders, unless they are strictly necessary, instead relying on how well the teams perform in the game as Feedback.
Social Condition Creation
In order to make people selfish we need at least an individual high score table. Also people should be anonymous, assigned their teams randomly and communication restricted between them so that they interact with each other like strangers. This would avoid camaraderie, team spirit and reputation management being organisational factors.
Game play
The design of the game is a tricky subject in itself.
It would need to be:
- Interesting - so that people played it.
- Deep - so that people with more skill did better and there wasn't a dominant strategy.
- Require team work - so that one person can't do everything themselves.
Scoring
I envision the high score table being an average of how you do during each game, with people having to not be below a couple of standard deviations of the average number of games played to be ranked. You couldn't play one game, ace it and retire, you would have to be consistently good.
Each organisation type would have a different scoring method and different high score tables.
Control Markets would naturally have the amount of funge acquired by a team member as a score.
Members of a Futarchy would have their remaining money as a score, perhaps scaled by the score of the team.
Democracies might allow the leader(s) to pick a percentage of the score acquired for a round to disburse to the general team members as an incentive for them to help out and pick a good leader, the rest being kept by the leader(s). Or more cynically the score for a democracy match would be the number of times you got elected. Perhaps both scores could be tracked.
Metrics
The simplest metric to collect would be which organization types did the best on average. But in depth information could be collected on why teams fail in different organization types. The reasons might include in such as lack of engagement, infighting or underhand sabotage. Actor behaviour over different organization types could be analysed.
Downsides
It is a pretty artificial setting, so even if one structure did well in the game, it might not do well in real life. When you add in Stakeholders or an external economy the dynamics may well change a lot.
Comments and ideas appreciated!
Generalizing a bit more: Each player has an effort function E(s) which determines how much effort they exert based on their expected score; they also have a production function P(e) which determines how much they add to the team production based on their effort. (These two functions can probably be combined for all intents and purposes) Further, the team has a score function S(p), describing the total score of the team based on the total of the team member's production.
With a few constraints on those functions, I think I can guarantee at least one solution: All three functions are continuous, strictly increasing, and their first derivatives approach zero as the independent variable tends towards infinity. The form of group leadership divides the group score S among the individuals according to the methodology of leadership: a dictator chooses the distribution which maximizes his own score; each type of democracy selects the distribution which maximizes the score of enough of the team to win the election; a pure socialism divides the team score evenly between the members; a different system divides the score proportionately to each member's production; and the ideal system divides the score in such a manner as to maximize the team score.
Another possible formulation is if E is a function of expected proportion of score. People seem to be interested in relative status and also this would also stop the crazy feedback loop and possible unintuitive things like working harder when someone else is working with you than you do on your own (if they are a lot better at getting score than you and so increase your expected score, even taking a share).
I still favour empirical testing to see how people actually behave.