Interview with Professor Thomas Malone

May 31, 2001
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I was born in New Mexico. I grew up on a farm near a small town in New Mexico. My dad was a farmer.

Sometime in junior high or high school, I remember thinking that the best thing you could do in life would be to be a great thinker …

I went to Stanford in ’75… When I first went to psychology graduate school, I thought the problems that psychologists have as their domain are some of the most interesting problems in the world. …

When I finished graduate school I went to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In fact, my last year of graduate school I worked as a research intern at Xerox PARC and then stayed on as a full-time staff member afterwards. …

When I was a graduate student, I remember at one point going with a friend to an antinuclear demonstration at the--I believe it was called--Abalone Nuclear Plant, down near Monterey, California. I wasn't a heavy-duty antinuclear activist, or anything like that, but I did go, this one time, to a planning meeting for a demonstration.

And I remember very clearly sitting in this big room where the demonstrators were sitting around planning what they wanted to do. You know, when they were going to do what to disrupt things. There were 30 or 40, maybe 50, people sitting in a big circle in this room, trying to make consensus decisions about what to do. And I was really struck by the difficulty of making consensus decisions in such a big group. It’s not impossible, but it's really hard. Everybody has to have their say. Anybody who has any objection has to say it, and everybody has to listen to the objection. In many cases nothing happens, and if anything does happen, it takes a long, long time to come to a decision.

While watching all this, it struck me that it should be possible to say something in situations like this about what you might call the physics of organizing. It should be possible, for example, to have principles like: the difficulty of consensus decision-making increases with the square of the number of people involved, or something like that. It seemed to me then—and still today—that it should be possible to formulate some much more precise rules or principles about organizing than had been done so far.

I ended up taking the MIT job to work on organizations and computers. And I think by this time, the basic form of my life mission was clear. It was to use computer technology to help create better organizations.

In a certain sense, everyone in the world is working together and their actions are coordinated by the global marketplace. It's far truer today than it ever was before in history. There's one kind of intriguing version of the extreme form of this, which is Teilhard de Chardin’s global mind, global brain.

My work refers to the problem how to use information technology to design organizations in general and businesses in particular in ways that are better. I think a fifteen-year-old can understand that.

The answer that I've reached so far—I think the part of the answer that I'm most confident of—is that new information technology makes it economically possible, and in many cases economically desirable, to organize work in more decentralized ways, to distribute decision-making authority much more broadly among the people involved in accomplishing goals. That's a deep fundamental shift in the way many of us think about work and business and management.

It's not that decentralized ways have never been used before; they have for sure. All of us, for instance, take for granted the idea of using free markets as a way of coordinating much economic activity. All of us also take for granted the idea of using voting and democracies as a way of making certain kinds of political decisions. And we all understand, at least in principle, the possibility of delegating power more widely. But I think, in practice, almost none of us understand the potential of extreme forms of decentralization in each of those directions.

VIII. Coordination Is Managing Dependencies Among Activities

Thomas Malone: Yes. What I mean by coordination theory is that body of theory and principles that help explain the phenomena of coordination in whatever systems they arise. Now what do I mean by coordination? We define coordination as the management of dependencies among activities. … Our hypothesis is that all the dependencies, all the relationships in the world, can be analyzed as either combinations of or more specialized types of these three elementary types. The three are: flow, sharing, and fit.

The question I'm pondering right now is: are there any forms of radical decentralization that aren't in some sense equivalent to a marketplace, even if a non-monetary marketplace? The question is, is there some other way of delegating that seems plausible that isn't equivalent to a market?

I think management thinkers and business intellectuals in general are blind to how powerful the effect of luck, chance, or fate is. We over-attribute outcomes, both good and bad, to the personal qualities of the individuals in charge. And we fail to appreciate the degree to which those exact same individuals in different circumstances would have had very different outcomes. …

Well, it's the question of what do we mean by good. If we want to use IT to make organizations that are better, what do we mean by better? The more deeply you think about that question, the more you come to questions that are really philosophical or spiritual questions. At a superficial level, better organizations are ones where you make more money or where you spend less time working. But then why do we want to make money in the first place or why do we want to spend less time working? What else do we want that we can get with the money or the time? What else do we want that we can't even buy with money?

Thomas Malone’s question concerns how to use information technology to design better ways of organizing. Three themes stand out. The first one is the notion of a "physics of organizing," which allows one to be much more precise in defining the space of possibility and articulating the laws of coordination among actors and activities. Coordination, according to Malone, is the management of dependencies among activities. His hypothesis is that there are three elementary types of dependency that map the possible space in which activities can link: flow (one activity produces a resource used by another), sharing (a single resource is used in multiple activities), and fit (multiple activities produce a single resource).

The second theme concerns his proposition that anything that can be coordinated in a hierarchical way can also be coordinated in a non-hierarchical or emerging way. As communication and coordination technologies become better and better, it becomes possible to coordinate the work of more and more people, and larger and larger projects, more and more effectively. "If you take that to the extreme," says Malone, "you have everybody in the world working together." That picture is intriguing, particularly because it describes much of what is already happening in the world economy. Rethinking all key issues of economics and management from this point of departure—"the whole world working together"—is a fascinating idea.

The third theme is the proposition that none of us understands the full potential of extreme decentralization, in either market- or non-market-based forms of decentralization such as hierarchical delegation, democracy, or dialogue-based coordination. Whereas Wanda Orlikowski said she was "disappointed" with the actual changes that technology had brought about in the cases she had studied (see Orlikowski interview), Thomas Malone focuses more on the enormous space of possibility that arises from modern communication technology and distributed patterns of collaboration across the global economy.