Posts connected by the team-dynamics tag.
3 posts
You cannot drive a Mars rover with a joystick, because the round trip for a radio signal runs six to forty-four minutes. Distance and delay are one constraint measured in two different units, and once the round trip is slower than the thing you are controlling, central control stops being inefficient and becomes impossible. The physics version of the argument for autonomy at the edge.
A George Washington film handed me a phrase that stuck: 'independent fire.' I cannot vouch that Washington ever said it, but the tactic it points at is real history. The colonists could not win by copying British linear volleys on open fields; they had to use cover and let soldiers pick their own targets. Independent fire is the perfect model for how high-agency engineering teams should be allowed to operate.
Watching World Cup 2026, some squads talk like a single organism and others like strangers in matching shirts. Soccer is a one-dimensional model of a team (one field, one ball, one clock); engineering is played across many planes at once and across time. The lesson: stardom is local, the most valuable star is the versatile generalist who moves between planes and passes the ball six months into the future, and resilient teams rotate that capability instead of betting on one hero.