The Starfish and the Spider

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

By Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
Unlike John Robb and others who have taken basic military lessons and turned them into other strategies and tactics, this book reminds me more of the mid-Seventies when so many people in business became devoted to the military teachings of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

Brafman and Beckstrom are entrepreneurs who see modern business changes from the perspective of military and government actions.

To me, the price of the book is justified in the first chapter as they move from the Peer-to-Peer problems of MGM and introduce anthropologist Tom Nevins.

In a very readable fashion, they take us back to 1519 when Cortes arrived in Tenochititlan (Mexico City) and got greedy. After his small force cut the head off the Spider organization of the Aztecs, they turned north and headed into what has since become the Southwest of the United States.

If you are reading this as World War II and Afghanistan, good!

The Spanish-Aztec conflict was much more like nation-state warfare. Leaders on both sides (Cortes and Montezuma) and people following orders. Cut off the head of the spider and there is chaos until a new leader can be found and an organization rebuilt. Take down the big leader and the capital city and the rest of society and the economic system falls apart.

Cortes had a small force, but a professionally trained and well armed, and armored, military unit. Horses, metal weapons, fighting spirit, maneuver tactics, chains of command, military specialization – for the sake of argument, something like the U.S. military of today…not a ragtag bunch of gunslingers, or pirates, or drug runners, but soldiers following orders. People who could take down the Incas and Aztecs.

For the first century and a half, the Spanish Conquistadors seemed unstoppable in Central and South America against societies hundreds or thousands of years old. Then in the 1680s, the Spanish headed north – there was not much up there, but the Spanish had to head north to see what other riches might be conquered.

And Spanish lost to a primitive people (who really had no riches, no real natural resources other than too much solar energy) who had not even bothered to build towns.
The Spanish tried to convert these Apaches to Catholicism and for the most part failed. Then the Apaches – who had little to protect other than their culture and society – started to wrest control of New Mexico from the Spanish.

For the next two hundred years, the Spanish fought a losing battle against these people who – in Spanish eyes – had nothing worth fighting for.

So Brafman and Beckstrom see lessons in looking at the leadership models of the two opponents. The Spanish are – like the U.S./UK and many nation-states – Spiders and the Apaches – like the insurgents in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other insurgent organizations – are Starfish.

Now, if Brafman and Beckstrom are correct in saying “the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations” then there is cause to worry. A lot of worry.

First of all, this fits into the idea that guerrillas win by not losing (Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the various insurgent groups in Iraq today) and the idea that the strong become weaker when they fight the weak, and that strong nations (or organizations) lose their legitimacy when the people see their government leadership as failing (Iran today and the U.S. during the Bush Administration).

They say the Apaches preserved because they were decentralized and leaderless. “A centralized organization is easy to understand….You have a clear leader in charge.”

They paraphrase Nevin that this is a coercive organization because up-and-coming leaders can be fired for not following the system (think of the Pentagon). Rules need to be followed or the system collapses (think of Hurricane Katrina).

“The Apaches continued to hold off the Spanish for another two centuries. It wasn’t that the Apaches had some secret weapon that was unknown to the Incas and the Aztecs. Nor had the Spanish army lost its might. No, the Apache defeat of the Spanish was all about the way the Apaches were organized as a society. The Spanish couldn’t defeat them for the same reason that the record labels weren’t able to squash the P2P trend.”

(And, of course, the P2P trend is also manifested in Twitter and all the other social networking areas of the Internet….people sharing online.)

They quote Nevins on differences between the Apaches and other tribes. “If you look, for example, at the Sioux – the Dances with Wolves people – they had some degree of political centralization. They resisted spectacularly for short periods of time, but they were really not successful for more than ten years.”

So 200 years for the Apache and only 10 years for the Sioux.

“In a decentralized organization, there’s no clear leader, no hierarchy, and no headquarters.”

In the West, people like to think of other organizations being like those we are used to seeing. Leaders, like Presidents Barak Obama or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad….and we try consciously or subconsciously to plug others in to this concept, like Osama bin Laden.

The international news media is filled with reports about the U.S. or coalition forces claims of killing the No.2 or No. 3 insurgent leader in Iraq, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, etc. What Brafman and Beckstrom might call “Spider Mentality” when people think in the terms of a coercive organization.

Take a serious look at (and give serious thought to) the concept of the Nant’an – the spiritual and cultural leader. (Which strikes me like as the role of the druid in ancient Celtic society.)

Tribe members followed the Nant’an because they wanted to, not because they were in a coercive system. (Also think of the German advertising for a penis for dinner)

The authors mention one Nant’an known to nearly all of us.

“One of the most famous Nant’ans in history was Geronimo, who defended his people against the American forces for decades. Geronimo never commanded an army. Rather, he himself started fighting, and everyone around him joined in. The idea was, ‘If Geronimo is taking arms, maybe it’s a good idea. Geronimo’s been right in the past, so it makes sense to fight alongside him.’ You wanted to follow Geronimo? You followed him. You didn’t want to follow him? Then you didn’t. The power lay with each individual – you were free to do what you wanted. The phrase ‘you should’ doesn’t even exist in the Apache language. Coercion is a foreign concept.”

Remind you of the Internet?

Or John Robb writing about how global guerrillas can “swarm” targets?

“On first impression, it may sound like the Apaches were loosey-goosey and disorganized. In reality, they were an advanced and sophisticated society –it’s just a decentralized organization is a completely different creature….the traits of a decentralized society – flexibility, shared power, ambiguity – made the Apaches immune to attacks that would have destroyed a centralized society.”

The authors write: “Let’s see what happens when a coercive system takes on an open system. The Spanish (a centralized body) had been used to seeing everything through the lens of a centralized, or coercive, system. When they encountered the apaches, they went with the tactics that had worked in the past (the take-the-gold-and kill-the-leader strategy) and started eliminating Nant’ans. But as soon as they killed one off, a new Nant’an would emerge. The strategy failed because no one person was essential to the overall well-being of Apache society. Not only did the Apaches survive the Spanish attacks, but amazingly (their word, I do not find this amazing at all) the attacks served to make them even stronger.”

Throughout the Spider and the Starfish, the authors show example after example of the differences between well-organized groups and volunteer leaderless groups gaining in power and often running inside their O-O-D-A Loops.

Set aside the business models and as you are reading, from time to time plug in Osama bin Laden or Afghanistan or the UN or Somali pirates, or Hezbollah, or the Supreme Leader, or King George and George Washington, or the Internet etc.

No surprise that the U.S./UK forces (and most of the news media) are set up to fight the last war, think in centralized terms like a coercive organization and are now facing the decentralized Internet and leaderless (or replaceable leaders in) resistance groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (to name just a few trouble spots).

If one person on the web can get some man to donate his penis for dinner, the Internet must be a rather good decentralized place to find volunteers for leaderless organizations of like-minded people.

And all the talk about finding and killing bin Laden (as if this might be a show-stopper) and all the press releases about the No. 2 leader being struck by a drone only really fits into the Western idea that someone is really in control of these insurgent forces.

If you go along with this spin, then let’s return to U.S. airpower in Afghanistan and the civilian casualties which create more enemies, and the destruction of infrastructure in Iraq and the firing of the Iraqi Army etc., and one wonders how highly centralized organizations are going to survive in the near future when the “Twitter Revolution” in Iran becomes commonplace.

Read on in the Spider and the Starfish about the President of the Internet.