Starfish and Spiders

Superficially, starfish look like spiders. A spider is a creature with eight legs coming out of a central body. If you chop off the spider’s head, it dies. It could maybe survive without a leg or two, and probably even stand to lose a couple of its eight eyes, but it certainly couldn’t survive without its head. The spider has a centralized control system that is similar to most organizations.

A starfish, at first glance, is similar to a spider in appearance. Like the spider, the starfish appears to have a bunch of legs coming out of a central body. But the starfish is decentralized. It does not have a head. Its central body is not even in charge. In fact, the major organs are replicated throughout each and every leg. If you cut the starfish in half, the animal doesn’t die, it regenerates.

Similar to the starfish, there are a host of emerging organizations that function in a decentralized manner like the starfish. Examples include such entities as Visa, Skype, Craig’s List, Wikipedia, Alcoholics Anonymous and Apache Software, to name a few.

See also

• Starfish and Spiders
• Starfish and Spider analysis
• Circles: the first leg of a starfish network
• Catalysts: the second leg of a starfish network
• Ideology: the third leg of a starfish network
• Pre-existing networks: the fourth leg of a starfish network
• Champions: the fifth leg of a starfish network
• Get more like this

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