Principles of a Decentralized System

We’ll be looking over the next few weeks at the book, The Starfish and the Spider.‚  To begin our discussion of this book, I want to list the eight principles of a decentralized system they describe in the book.‚  The are essential to our look at open systems and then how they can apply to both profit and non-profit sectors.

  1. When attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized.
  2. It¢â‚¬â„¢s easy to mistake starfish for spiders.
  3. An open system does not have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system.
  4. Open systems can easy mutate.
  5. The decentralized organization sneaks up on you.
  6. As industries become decentralized, overall profits decrease.
  7. Put people into an open system and they¢â‚¬â„¢ll automatically want to contribute.
  8. When attacked, centralized organizations tend to become even more centralized.

David has been a systems thinker most of his life. He has started three businesses as well as designed and developed systems and processes in existing organizations. He has a Doctorate in Leadership and has also done additional post-graduate work in communications.

He has also pastored 3 churches and loves to think about, write about and podcast about scripture, theology, and leadership.

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2 comments
  • Hi David

    Enjoy your posts which I read quite regularly. However one thing frustrates me – they often show ‘garbage’ codes in various places which makes for harder reading. See example below:

    02. It’s easy to mistake starfish for spiders.

    Is there anything that can be done about this?

    Shalom

  • Gordon,

    I have noticed this recently occuring on older posts. There are at least a couple of reasons this happens:

    1. People copy and paste from a word processing program straight into the html editor
    2. Different WYSIWYG editors handle things differently and newer xhtml standards mean characters are read a little differently.

    I do not do the first one so my initial guess is that the WYSIWYG editors in older versions of wordpress are different and the xhtml is reading some of the characters slightly different than before.

    The newer posts do not have this issue, just the older posts…

    I’m sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t really have time to go back and clean all of them up.

    Blessings

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