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Teams decide
After an acquisition, the new business gets the shared technological foundation within a few months, and then it is done. From there, each business is run by a dedicated team of core members and acquired team members with a complete mandate to do whatever helps Bending Spoons as a whole, which generally starts with running that business well. Executives follow along through Slack channels, threads, and dashboards. Only a small set of decisions, such as pricing, needs approval, and those come up about once a year. For 99% of decisions, the teams are trusted.
The cost of central control
Centralized decisions are slower, and they get made with less context, which a bloated ego tends to think it can cover. The biggest flaw is that they deprive people of ownership. It is hard to feel excited about work, or responsible for it, when someone else has to stamp every important decision.
Rules and the shared toolkit
Rules are another route to centralization, because strict standards for how people operate and report make it easier for a central team to decide. Teams are told not to report in a way that makes leadership happy. They talk in Slack channels, and the same information serves everyone. The principles, good ideas, and lessons learned that come with the toolkit are guidance and aren't prescriptive. The toolkit itself works like an internal open source community: a team that finds a bug or a missing feature builds the fix, and every other business benefits.
Why do central decisions lose context?
The economist Friedrich Hayek argued in his 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society that the most useful knowledge is scattered among the people closest to a problem and cannot be fully passed up to a central authority. Much of it is local, fleeting, and hard to write down. Decisions made by those who hold it tend to fit the situation better. Hayek's essay was written about whole economies, and managers have applied it to companies since.
Why does making decisions feel like ownership?
Self-determination theory, developed by the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan beginning in the 1980s, holds that people are most motivated when they feel autonomy, competence, and connection to others. Autonomy means having real say over what you do and how. When approval is required for every important choice, the sense of autonomy fades, and effort tends to follow.
How does internal open source work?
The publisher Tim O'Reilly coined the term inner source in 2000 for applying open source methods inside a single company. Any team can propose a change to shared code, usually as a pull request, and the code's maintainers review it before it joins the main version. The fix then reaches every team that uses the tool without each one rebuilding it. The approach copies the way projects such as Linux accept contributions from outsiders.
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