Skip to main content

What We've Learned From

We draw on historical examples of successful coordination. These aren't templates to copy. They're evidence that intentional coordination design produces outsized results, and sources of pattern recognition for what works.

Bell Labs and Xerox PARC

Physical architecture that forced collisions between disciplines. Long time horizons. Talent density. Problem-richness.

Bell Labs produced the transistor, information theory, Unix, C, and the laser. Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface, Ethernet, laser printing, and object-oriented programming. These weren't accidents. They were the result of:

  • Density of talent. The best people wanted to work with other best people.
  • Architectural design. Buildings that forced interaction between different groups.
  • Long horizons. Research that wouldn't pay off for decades was funded anyway.
  • Problem richness. Hard problems that required multiple disciplines to solve.

These institutions show what productive coordination looks like at scale.

The Junto

Benjamin Franklin's twelve-person mutual improvement society, founded in 1727.

From this small, committed group emerged: the first lending library in America, the first volunteer fire company, the University of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, and the Pennsylvania Hospital.

The Junto worked because it was:

  • Very small. Twelve members maximum.
  • Committed. Members attended regularly and prepared.
  • Structured. Specific questions to discuss each meeting.
  • Multi-domain. Printers, merchants, surveyors, clerks—not all from one field.
  • Action-oriented. The point was to do things, not just talk.

Small groups with shared commitment and diverse expertise produce disproportionate results.

Homebrew Computer Club

Hobbyists sharing what they built. Open information exchange. Regular accountability through showing up.

The personal computer industry emerged from this network. Apple, countless early PC companies, and the culture that became Silicon Valley trace back to these meetings in a garage in Menlo Park.

What made it work:

  • Show and tell. Every meeting, people demonstrated what they'd built.
  • Open information. Schematics were shared, not hoarded.
  • Regular cadence. Meetings every two weeks created accountability.
  • Shared obsession. Everyone cared deeply about the same thing.

The club was thick with weak ties. Members knew each other well enough to collaborate, loosely enough to bring in outside ideas.

Esalen

The power of residential immersion and shared physical context.

Esalen Institute, founded in 1962, became the centre of the human potential movement. It showed that intensive, residential experiences create connections and transformations that shorter formats cannot.

Lessons:

  • Immersion matters. Living together for days creates different dynamics than meeting for hours.
  • Physical beauty helps. The Big Sur setting wasn't incidental to the experience.
  • Unstructured time. Some of the most important connections happen outside formal programming.

Also a warning: Esalen lost focus over the decades, becoming diffuse and less impactful. Intensity requires curation.

These examples share common threads: small committed groups, regular interaction, diverse expertise, bias toward action, and physical presence. The details vary—a Philadelphia tavern, a corporate research lab, a garage, a clifftop retreat—but the patterns recur.

We're trying to make these patterns more accessible. Not everyone can work at Bell Labs or stumble into a Homebrew meeting. But the underlying coordination dynamics can be replicated if you know what to look for.