The Pyramid Problem

The potential of the human species to tackle our largest problems is being constrained by the way we structure our organizations, institutions, and coalitions.

We're facing a civilizational challenge that goes largely undiscussed: the pyramid problem. Many aspects of the metacrisis can be traced back to the failure of hierarchical structures to enable collective sense-making and action. The problem becomes worse as the scale and relational complexity of the coordination increases.

From communities and corporates to countries and coalitions, we must answer the question: How do we effectively organize ourselves without relying solely on hierarchy?

From Pyramids to Polycentricity

If architecting non-hierarchical coordination at scale is the goal, we can learn much from the patterns of emergent coordination observed in natural ecosystems.

Ecomimetic design is a nascent term seeking to help unify and integrate the innovative work being done in various fields including: organizational design, collective sense-making, economic mechanism design, investment structures, tokenomics, distributed governance, steward ownership, commons design, human flourishing, and many more.

Ecomimetic design is related to, but different from biomimicry. Biomimicry invites a wide range of designers (from hardware, to architecture, to systems design) to borrow inspiration from biological entities and processes. Ecomimetic design focuses on ___ and acknowledges that we cannot borrow directly from the natural world because many of the problems we're solving in human ecosystems do not occur in natural ecosystems ... (Left off here)