From: jimruttshow8596
Forrest Landry, a thinker, writer, and philosopher, has developed a “small group practice” designed to optimize group decision-making and governance. This practice is optimal for groups up to about 16 people, with some flexibility for slightly larger groups [01:54:00]. The importance of these new governance models stems from the inability of existing processes to address complex, large-scale problems such as ecological issues, global warming, pollution, and sustainability, which require significant human coordination [03:13:00]. Attempting to tackle new challenges within old, pre-designed structures often leads to failure [04:44:00].
Archetypal Decision-Making Models
Landry identifies three archetypal models for human governance: consensus, meritocracy, and democracy [05:27:00]. These three span the total space of how humans coordinate choices [06:31:00].
Consensus
Consensus is a model where all members are peers, engaging in horizontal communication to achieve a common understanding and uniform agreement [06:44:00].
- Strengths: Produces very high-quality choices [09:18:00]. When used for defining internal values or norms, it ensures everyone genuinely agrees with the chosen principles, unlike voting which can leave a disgruntled minority [09:18:00] [21:08:00]. Values, being positively stated and not mutually exclusive, lend themselves well to consensus, fostering coherence [21:54:00].
- Weaknesses: Requires high communicative bandwidth and can be very time-consuming, potentially preventing decisions if the group is too large or choices are needed quickly [09:20:00].
Meritocracy (Hierarchical/Executive)
Meritocracy, or hierarchical structures, involves an unequal way of relating, often with a single elected leader or a defined hierarchy where choices are distributed in a role-specific way [06:56:00].
- Strengths: Can respond very quickly to a large number of choices, is relatively simple, and robust for emergency situations [09:39:00].
- Weaknesses: Highly vulnerable to corruption, where individuals make choices for private interests rather than the group’s benefit (known as “agency risk” or the “principal-agent problem”) [09:50:00] [10:04:00]. Over time, these structures can ossify, becoming non-adaptive to change or less efficient [01:31:45].
Democracy (Voting)
Democracy, falling between consensus and meritocracy, involves debate followed by a vote, where distributed choices are made on a smaller, simpler set of issues [08:48:00].
- Weaknesses: Susceptible to hidden and covert forms of power (e.g., who decides what’s on the ballot or wording) [11:02:00]. Voting can efficiently divide a group into two subgroups, reducing its overall effectiveness and leading to political polarization and weaker, less resilient communities [11:25:00].
Landry’s Small Group Practice: Convolving the Archetypes
Landry’s innovative contribution is a system that “convolves” these three archetypal forms, using each as a check and balance against the others [01:14:55]. The core idea is to balance the strong human propensity for hierarchical organization (preferring skilled leadership) with the need for group wisdom [01:16:44].
The practice distinguishes between internal and external group actions [01:22:18]:
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Consensus for Internal Processes:
- The group uses consensus for inwardly focused decisions related to its core identity, values, membership (adding or removing members), and internal organization [01:57:00]. For example, explicitly stated values or virtues are crafted via consensus, ensuring everyone agrees and feels ownership [02:07:00].
- This fosters high coherence and clarifies the “basis of choice” for the group [02:29:00] [02:34:00].
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Meritocracy for External Actions:
- For external actions, such as laying out a cornfield or interacting with zoning authorities, the group shifts to a meritocratic mode [02:27:00].
- Consensus is used to select a leader (or a structured team) for a specific, scope-limited task, based on who has the skills, willingness, and availability [02:40:00]. The scope of the meritocracy’s authority and the person(s) appointed are both determined by consensus [02:53:00] [02:57:00].
- This ensures a single, coherent point of contact for external communications, preventing contradictory messages that could arise from multiple independent contacts [04:10:00].
- To ensure accountability, the consensus process can also define reporting requirements for meritocracies, allowing the group to monitor performance and act responsibly [04:41:00].
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Democracy as the “Red Button”:
- The primary role of democracy in this system is limited and specific: to act as a “red button” that triggers a “vote of no confidence” [02:56:00].
- If the group feels there’s a misrepresentation, a mistake in scope, or general issues with a meritocratic function, a vote (requiring a true majority, e.g., half plus one of the whole membership) can collapse that specific meritocratic structure back to consensus [02:57:00] [03:00:00] [03:32:00]. This means starting from scratch for that role/function [03:51:00].
- This mechanism is powerful and costly (halting external functions to return to internal debate), thus discouraging frivolous use [03:03:00]. Critically, even those who might have “lost” a traditional vote of no confidence gain substantial input in the subsequent consensus process [03:08:00].
- Democracy as a “Timeout”: Democracy also has the power to suspend the consensus process for a temporary, specified period (e.g., two weeks) if internal discussions become too heated or unproductive [03:44:00]. This acts as a relief valve, allowing the group to cool off and avoid being stuck [03:57:00] [04:06:00].
- The specific parameters for these democratic powers (e.g., maximum suspension duration) can be established and revisited by consensus, forming a “constitution” for the group [03:55:00].
The dynamic of transitioning between these modes—consensus bootstrapping meritocratic capacity, and democracy collapsing meritocracy back to consensus or suspending consensus itself—creates a robust and balanced system [01:37:00].
Scaling Beyond Small Groups
While the small group practice is effective for up to around 16 people (or perhaps 30 on a good day) [01:54:00] [02:00:00], Landry’s thinking indicates that it cannot directly scale up to much larger collectives (e.g., 150 people for a proto-B community) [01:56:16]. This is due to an “uncanny valley” that exists between small and large governance processes [01:02:08].
Landry highlights the importance of understanding evolutionary drivers:
- Point mutations: Additive effects [01:00:06].
- Survival selection: Multiplicative effects [01:00:10].
- Mate selection (recombinatoric process): Exponential effects [01:00:14].
The exponential power of recombinatoric effects means that simply accreting smaller groups to create larger ones is unstable [01:01:04] [01:01:09]. Existing institutional forms (businesses, schools, governments, religious organizations) fill the “no man’s land” between the optimal small group size and the scale where new solutions become viable [01:02:53].
A new, stable governance architecture for large-scale decision-making starts to emerge only for groups of at least 200 people [01:03:21]. This requires going back to first principles of evolution and human psychology, rather than incremental improvements to existing models (e.g., new voting methodologies, financial instruments, or narrative control) [01:05:35].
The goal is to foster collective wisdom or capacity at the large group level, enabling “holographic communication” to balance sustainability (changelessness) and evolution (change) [01:07:01]. This means a system that is not representative, avoids the principal-agent problem, and involves the whole community in decision-making without overloading individuals [01:09:41]. It necessitates a “culture-first” approach, where human dynamics and health lead to values, vision, and then strategy [01:14:00]. This requires a meta-systemic understanding of how ecology, culture, infrastructure, and finance interact [01:16:16].
Ultimately, designing such large-scale governance is a profoundly difficult engineering and philosophical problem, requiring a level of wisdom to handle technology’s impact on cultures and ecosystems that humanity, as the “dumbest species capable of developing the tech that we currently have,” has yet to fully attain [01:19:52] [01:37:02]. The solution demands the ability to facilitate “conscious sustainable evolution” to ensure the long-term well-being of the species and planet [01:22:25].