EP 153 Forrest Landry on Small Group Method



Jim talks with Forrest Landry about his Small Group Method and the obstacles to scaling it up…Forrest Landry

Jim talks with Forrest Landry about his Small Group Method and the obstacles to scaling it up. They discuss why studying group processes is important, the difficulty of doing new things with old structures, 3 classes of decision-making structures (consensus, meritocracy, & democracy), advantages & disadvantages of each, how to use each model as a check against the other two, treating internal & external work as separate, votes of no confidence, democracy as a red button to suspend consensus, the uncanny valley between small- and large-scale governance process, a good governance architecture that emerges past 200 people, how to involve an entire community in choice-making, layered governance architecture as a complex organism, why new cryptocurrencies, voting reforms, & other incremental improvements misunderstand the problem, underestimating the value of the earth, moving beyond creating & exploiting niches, outlining the characteristics of a solution, proto-Bs as theory-practice-theory loops, and much more.

Forrest Landry is a philosopher, writer, researcher, scientist, engineer, craftsman, and teacher focused on metaphysics, the manner in which software applications, tools, and techniques influence the design and management of very large scale complex systems, and the thriving of all forms of life on this planet. Forrest is also the founder and CEO of Magic Flight, a third-generation master woodworker who found that he had a unique set of skills in large-scale software systems design. Which led him to work in the production of several federal classified and unclassified systems, including various FBI investigative projects, TSC, IDW, DARPA, the Library of Congress Congressional Records System, and many others.