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tags: Andamio
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## The Problem

**Organizations should solve problems. Often, when organizations scale, they orient away from problem solving. What if organizations were incentivized to grow only as much as necessary to solve big problems?**

Early in the lifecycle of an organization, problem solving is common. New organizations often start when there is a problem to be solved. Founders do whatever it takes to deliver a viable solution. Everyone pitches in.

Eventually, a successful organization might have an opportunity to grow. Sometimes, the survival of the organization takes precedence over solving problems. Bureaucracy might take root. The goal of work might shift from problem-solving to ensuring that the organization continues to exist.

To grow, the organization must onboard new contributors. There is no guarantee that new contributors will be as invested as the founders of the enterprise, so incentive structures are defined, hierarchies are constructed, and problem-solving is gradually replaced with rules and procedures.

Training new contributors requires time and investment. Organizations commit such extensive resources to employee training that they end up afraid to "lose" this investment. More rules are made, often at the expense of meaningful employee engagement.

People, having already navigated an education system that orients toward competition and compliance, find that organizations emphasize the same.

## Our Hypothesis:
**Solving big, global problems requires collaboration. People want to contribute to organizations that solve meaningful problems and engage in relevant projects. We must re-orient our organizations toward people and problem-solving.**

Here we find a quandary. Small organizations are agile and capable of focusing on problem solving. In large organizations, bureaucracy often impedes problem solving. And yet, in order to solve global problems, we need people to collaborate at a global scale. We must harness the power of large-scale organizations without losing sight of problem solving.

When organizations are focused on survival, they compete. Two companies might produce similar widgets, but in order to survive, they must out-maneuver their competitor: cutting costs, spending on advertisements, doing whatever it takes to keep going, even at the expense of our natural environment and our collective attention.

When organizations stop innovating, they build moats around themselves as protection from competition. Two companies engaged in similar inquiry must keep secrets to survive: locking down intellectual property, and stifling open innovation.

Moat-building and widget-competition are reasonable approaches when our biggest problems seem to hard to solve. Solving the climate crisis? That's too big. Better to make enough money to build a bunker and hoard supplies than to work on the problem itself. Surveillance capitalism? Well, the machine is running and no one can stop it. Better to take a high paying developer job in algorithmic advertising.

We must change these narratives. Andamio is built for people who are writing new stories, together.

## Goals:
- Andamio supports organizations to transition from risk-averse human resource practices to robust collaboration.
- Andamio is built to help organizations share information, talent, and expertise in service of real problem solving.
- Andamio is built to keep experiments running, so that organizations of any size can innovate.
- Andamio is built to distribute decision-making power across organizations of any size.

## Concepts:
- **Adversarial Collaboration:** What if organizations could share an HR function? What if training for one organization could support another - even among competitors? People want to solve problems and engage in relevant work. Organizations would be incentivized to keep doing relevant work in order to retain talent. They would only scale in the service of solving problems.
- **Distributed Decision-Making:** People should have decision making power in their work. Solutions to real problems can emerge from anywhere in an organization, not just from the top of a hierarchy.