Context:I (Mod J) work in a warehouse for my day job. Employees aren’t allowed to leave the premises during work hours, but there is a good-sized breakroom with fridges, assorted tables, a coffee machine, and general breakroom stuff.
How it happened: I’d love to claim I had the intention of starting something like this from the beginning, but I didn’t. I had a friend who also worked at the same warehouse, and when she got a different job, she gave me her old uniform shirts. That left me with way more work shirts than I had space for. I folded up the extra shirts, put them in a box with “free” written on it, and put it on the table next to the time clock.
By the time I clocked out the next day, most of the shirts were gone, but someone had added a boxed cake mix and two cans of soup. And I realized something I probably should have thought of sooner: A box in the break room had more possibilities than just getting rid of my extra work shirts.
The box: I replaced the shirt box with a bigger box and a more visible sign.
Food has so far been the fastest to disappear out of the box, but mugs and clothing have also been popular. Even though due to varying break schedules, it’s mostly anonymous, it’s been a great project to share things among coworkers - and all it takes to start oneis a box and a marker.
Recently Sarah Constantin wrote a taxonomy of norms for groups, breaking them into Civic, Guest, Kaizen, Coalitional, and Tribal norms, which I think is fairly good if I think struggling with the common case where people want to be fair but also not rule-based.
Kaizen norms are an interesting identified cluster; in Kaizen, there is an ideal, everyone is working towards it, and the structure of the group is based around rewarding people for progress toward it and discouraging movement away from it. Distraction is discouraged; claims of unfairness are valid not if they correctly point out inconsistent application of rules, but if they point out inconsistency in rewarding the ideal. Examples they give include competitive/meritocratic school and work environments, sports teams, and some religious groups. I would add most academic spaces- certainly it is what they want to be.
I know a lot of people who are very attracted to Kaizen-type norms and keep trying to work on spaces implementing them for ideals they care about. And I think Kaizen norms arguably are the best norms because they can encourage you towards being more like you want to be, provide reinforcement to the parts of you you want reinforcing, and be actually built in a consequentialist, goal-oriented way rather than having norms decoupled from objectives… so long as you are in perfect alignment with everyone else on what the ideal should be and what behaviours achieve it.
When you have a slight disagreement, it’s a considerable friction. When you have a disagreement of any substance, the group is intolerable to you. And from the inside view, this often just looks like “the group is dumb” so people go off and try to find a *better* space for the virtues they care about, maybe grouping up with other disgruntled people. And maybe they try again, and it still doesn’t work, or it’s perpetually in progress but never realised. And they never quite realise that it’s because they struggle to find a mere two people who actually have compatible enough ideals and strategies that they could productively operate on Kaizen norms together, let alone more.
People, I think, don’t realise how incompatible they are with everyone else on these things. They’re perpetually looking at spaces they have frictions with and thinking that they’re unusually bad rather than thinking that the target area they want is actually really really narrow. And thus we get schism after schism, and fork after fork. Programmers, trying to build Kaizen-norm spaces whose ideals are based around building software together, are pretty bad for this.
As a result, I think Kaizen norms are a great thing to try to build communities around- a space where everyone reinforces each other in getting better in some way or towards achieving some goal. But always as a place to visit, rather than a place to live, because you’re going to have friction that you will only be able to tolerate in small doses. And to visit with an expectation of compatibility issues and friction to deal with, and an awareness that you’re never going to agree perfectly with everyone else on what things constitute successfully accomplishing your ideals even if you can agree on an ideal to try to accomplish.
But in contrast, kaizen spaces clearly do exist - so what’s the difference?
Most of the clear cut examples - sports, academics, certain religious communities - have a standard of success that is clear cut and more or less immutable. You have to buy into the method of evaluation before you join the group, really.
But this seems more like a matter of degree than a clear cut difference. You could just fork a new sport or ruleset, and people do, but mostly not. So is it just that these orgs are built around succeeding at standards with much more weight behind them?
Video game communities very often fall into this pattern, and the rules there are pretty close to immutable - ruleset arguments are mostly about which game to play rather than how to play a given game.
Companies are less like this and while they are substantially more prone to schism than sports, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as bad as it is in software projects and lw stuff.
And part of it might be missing organizational skills. But I think part of it is that software communities and lw communities are not nearly as aligned on being kaizen communities as game competitive ones are.
If you’re trying to win at a sport, it’s not hard to agree that goodness at that activity is the core metric.
But like Taymon calls out in the comments, many lw adjacent discords and communities are at least nominally trying to adhere to something closer to guest norms.
I think part of the conflict you’re perceiving is between people trying to build kaizen communities, but disagreeing about what the valued measure is, against the backdrop of a civic community and a series of naturally schisming guest communities.
I think the correct answer to how these real world Kaizen spaces work is basically “heavy authoritarianism” but it isn’t very actionable. By joining the functional Kaizen spaces you delegate all judgement on what strategies work to your pastor/coach/boss and get under a lot of structural pressure to just stop second guessing them. If you can’t do that then you do burn out, but most people learn to do it temporarily. This only sort of avoids being massively unhealthy by having a separation between your life and the space, and I think if you lack that things do go downhill.
The other especially bad thing locally is that yes, the metrics are way less clear and people disagree on them more, and much more than they estimate.
Edit: Some other points of distinction:
Trying to build Kaizen norms around real-world goals might be a serious problem for people’s willingness to delegate defining of how a strategy is accomplished to an authority.
We lack established traditions or social scripts for authority that make for vaguely trustable authorities- not that authorities elsewhere have proven consistently trustable either.
Maybe it’s actually an unusual trait to have such an incredibly narrow target for the kind of Kaizen spaces that work for you- the observation “people have very narrow requirements” is made based on observations of the people relatively close to me, and it could well be an idiosyncrasy of our kind that stops it cooperating.
Schisming an actual established org is harder- I don’t think this is the only explanation though because if it was I’d expect to see everyone completely atomised, and instead we’re only almost completely atomised. There has been an utter collapse in membership in so called intermediate-level organisations between the size of “family” and “state” which actually ask anything of their members in the last century, as I understand it, which could well be “people have very narrow demands and kept leaving because schisming wasn’t practical”, but as you say, sports teams still exist so this isn’t the only thing going on.
Recently Sarah Constantin wrote a taxonomy of norms for groups, breaking them into Civic, Guest, Kaizen, Coalitional, and Tribal norms, which I think is fairly good if I think struggling with the common case where people want to be fair but also not rule-based.
Kaizen norms are an interesting identified cluster; in Kaizen, there is an ideal, everyone is working towards it, and the structure of the group is based around rewarding people for progress toward it and discouraging movement away from it. Distraction is discouraged; claims of unfairness are valid not if they correctly point out inconsistent application of rules, but if they point out inconsistency in rewarding the ideal. Examples they give include competitive/meritocratic school and work environments, sports teams, and some religious groups. I would add most academic spaces- certainly it is what they want to be.
I know a lot of people who are very attracted to Kaizen-type norms and keep trying to work on spaces implementing them for ideals they care about. And I think Kaizen norms arguably are the best norms because they can encourage you towards being more like you want to be, provide reinforcement to the parts of you you want reinforcing, and be actually built in a consequentialist, goal-oriented way rather than having norms decoupled from objectives… so long as you are in perfect alignment with everyone else on what the ideal should be and what behaviours achieve it.
When you have a slight disagreement, it’s a considerable friction. When you have a disagreement of any substance, the group is intolerable to you. And from the inside view, this often just looks like “the group is dumb” so people go off and try to find a *better* space for the virtues they care about, maybe grouping up with other disgruntled people. And maybe they try again, and it still doesn’t work, or it’s perpetually in progress but never realised. And they never quite realise that it’s because they struggle to find a mere two people who actually have compatible enough ideals and strategies that they could productively operate on Kaizen norms together, let alone more.
People, I think, don’t realise how incompatible they are with everyone else on these things. They’re perpetually looking at spaces they have frictions with and thinking that they’re unusually bad rather than thinking that the target area they want is actually really really narrow. And thus we get schism after schism, and fork after fork. Programmers, trying to build Kaizen-norm spaces whose ideals are based around building software together, are pretty bad for this.
As a result, I think Kaizen norms are a great thing to try to build communities around- a space where everyone reinforces each other in getting better in some way or towards achieving some goal. But always as a place to visit, rather than a place to live, because you’re going to have friction that you will only be able to tolerate in small doses. And to visit with an expectation of compatibility issues and friction to deal with, and an awareness that you’re never going to agree perfectly with everyone else on what things constitute successfully accomplishing your ideals even if you can agree on an ideal to try to accomplish.
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