Turtleocracy is designed to address problems with other org structures.

An org structure can be considered as three things in one: (1) a network through which information flows, via reporting responsibilities; (2) a set of roles by which people's personal interests and capabilities are reconciled with the needs of the org; and (3) a set of choice-making contexts in which certain information and certain people's perspectives are combined to decide what the org will do, and other information is lost.

In most orgs, important information gets lost at the network, role, and context levels. This includes information about people's personal values, and their doubts about the organizations' work. These two types of information are especially important for the economy we want to create: one that's (a) focused on meaning and values over business goals, and (b) that takes more doubts and larger-scope issues into consideration as the organization operates. (See Towards “Game B” for more on the economy we want to create.)

Turtleocracy is one answer to this.

The Design Space of Organizations

For orgs with more than six people, the design space is highly constrained w/r/t to network, roles, and contexts:

Network. Reporting and monitoring responsibilities can easily soak up most people's time, and what gets reported and monitored must be chosen very carefully. It necessarily involves a great deal of information compression as it flows through the network, with rich multivariate embedded experiences, summarized in numbers and reports.
Choice-making contexts. Contexts must either include those directly exposed to the relevant information, or those to whom this information has been reported. For high-strategy, high-consequence choices, this problem of who to include and what information to base off of is intense.
Roles. At the same time, choice-making should align with role, and roles should correspond to people's interests and capabilities, which change and evolve over time. When roles or choice-making gets misaligned with interests and capabilities, this leads both to meaningless work and to bad choice-making.

A common response to these constraints is to give up on some of them. In some orgs, the role-matching aspect is abandoned, and people become soldiers to be deployed where needed, regardless of their personal interests. In other orgs—often referred to as { flat / egalitarian / cooperative / collective / decentralized / do-ocracies / etc }—the network and choice-making aspects are abandoned, as is the possibility of making high-level, strategic decisions. Instead, the org takes a "portfolio approach" of self-assembled projects of teams, each of which is self-directed and free to be misdirected, and which are not tightly networked or coordinated. The traditional org is somewhere in the middle, attempting to meet all of these design constraints somewhat.

Lost Information: Values and Doubts

However these tradeoffs are made, important information tends to get lost at the network, role, and context levels. This includes information about people's personal values, and their doubts about the organizations' work.

We believe that these two types of information are especially important for the economy we want to create: one that's (a) focused on meaning and values over business goals, and (b) that takes more doubts and larger-scope issues into consideration as the organization operates. Neither the traditional nor the flat approaches really take this information into account at context, role, and network. (See Towards “Game B” for more on the economy we want to create.)

Turtleocracy is one answer to these design challenges. It acknowledges the highly-constrained nature of organization design, but makes it possible for orgs to (a) work with information about values and doubts, and (b) to align roles/choices with values, enabling meaningful work. Turtleocracy is only one way to do this, biased towards knowledge and research-y types of work. Other new org structures will be needed in other work setups, such as in manufacturing, delivery, in-person services, etc, to align work with values and doubts.

Choice-making Contexts

Let's start with how doubts and values can get missed in choice-making, even if the network and role layers worked somehow to bring the relevant doubts and values into the room. Later, we'll look at how the network and role layers would usually fail to do this.

The most relevant thing here is the context of group decisions, and group dynamics which often interfere with decisions being made based on the best basis.

Group Dynamics versus Contemplative Choice. Because of group dynamics, discussion group norms, and power struggles, it becomes impossible to make moral, consequential, and aesthetic choices in the best way—through deep reflection, consultation, and experimentation and the consideration of what's right. For this reason, turtleocracies are biased towards a single person making weighty decisions related to their curiosity and values. (See Four Social Worlds 🕵️‍♂️🌳💍📈 for more on how norms and values might interfere in choice.)
The Tyranny of People with "Takes". . Most group processes and organizations are overrun by people who are confident, who have takes, who can frame the situation, who see the way forward clearly. This crowds out experimentalism, open-mindedness, and true curiosity. Democracies, do-ocracies, and bureaucracies are all vulnerable to people with takes. In Turtleocracies, these people are rabbits or birds, and they are put to work for turtles. (For a taste of what it's like to be free of the tyranny of takes, play Turtles Rule Game.)
Sincere Investigations and the Role of Doubts. The conditions of sincere curiosity are rare. One way for people to stop Being Super Turtle-y is for them to lose the sincerity with which they approach work because of doubts about the whole project and their lives, or because of pressure to show progress. Thus, turtleocracies must regularly Doubt Club, keep a Registry of Doubts, and act on them.