I am like the luckiest guy in the world – after a great week in Paris with my second family of the Sakai community I was able to come to spend the weekend in Barcelona with some last minute arrangements and meet some new tech-geek friends.

After a long day of talking eating, drinking, talking and drawing architecture diagrams on napkins – we were going back to my hotel. Earlier I had told the group all about one of my favourite books – “The Innovators Dilemma”.

http://www.claytonchristensen.com/publications/

On the drive to the hotel one of my new pals told me of one of his favourite books titled “The Starfish and the Spider – The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations”.

http://www.starfishandspider.com/

Here is the short synopsis – the Spider is a hierarchical organization where each piece does its precise part in well-organized concert with the other parts of the spider. You can kill a Spider by putting a tiny pin through the Spider at that one place where it is all controlled.

The Starfish by contrast is a collective of pretty independent units. While none of the bits can stand alone – you can cut off a whole leg of a starfish and it will grow back – or if you chop a starfish in half you will end up with two starfishes. So while a starfish needs some minimal sized chunk to survive – it is pretty robust when it is injured and no single injury can kill the Starfish.

The book talks about how the Spanish invaders quickly conquered the Aztecs and Incas with 100 soldiers by figuring out the leader and killing the leadership (Spider killed by a tiny pin). However as they moved north, the encountered the Apaches. The Apaches were an open source project derived form the original NCSA httpd server. (Sorry – I slipped into the wrong story for a moment there).

The Apaches were a decentralized free society that operated in a collective manner but where participation in collective action was voluntary. So there was no real leader of the Apaches. When the invaders found someone who *looked like a leader* and killed that person – it was just the old medicine man – who was the spiritual leader- and while the tribe certainly must have missed the medicine man and hearing long stories about the ways of the ancient ones around the campfire – ultimately the loss of the medicine man did not stop the Apaches from organizing to wage war and chopping the Spaniards into small pieces.

After a while the Spaniards figured out that sneaking 100 soldiers into the middle of a big gathering of Apaches and killing one medicine man – just resulted in a lot of Spaniard pate’.
So how did the Apaches finally lose? According to the book, the United States much later turned the Starfish *into* a Spider. They took only a few of the Apaches – told them they were “special” – and gave these new special Apaches some cows. The ownership of a cow proved to be pretty cool – milk, baby cows for Veal Parmesan, Ruth Chris Filet Mignons cooked at 1800 degrees soaked in butter – all that. Feeding the whole tribe Ruth Chris steaks got one a lot of street cred that could be used later when decisions needed to be made.

The cows caused structure to appear in the society – and folks started keeping track of who was up and who was down – the Apaches were no longer equals in a loose, flexible, and dynamic collective – there was a class structure – and who you were and where you fit in the cow owner society started to matter and structure formed.

While the Starfish is generally pretty resilient in the face of obvious and seemingly damaging frontal attacks, it is fascinating how collective adaptive organizations (Starfish) can slowly be transformed into hierarchical static organizations (Spiders) by coming in the back door – intending to “help” and treating some members of the collective as “special”.