What may happen if a decentralized organization met conflict with a centralized organization

Arachnophobia: fear of spiders. Though many people suffer from this fear it is very rarely questioned, spiders are just generally seen as a scary creature. Spiders are also the main metaphor used for a centralized organization. A centralized organization is one with a central command structure, a clear leader and rules which are enforced. These organizations are seen often. We see examples in the government and most highly regarded for profit organizations. Conversely a decentralized organization is one where there is no clear leader, there is no headquarters and rules and norms are not enforced. Due to their nature these organizations are not easy to spot but examples can be found in organizations such as terrorist groups.

It is easy to see that these two types of organizations contrast each other and thus the question arises: what would the outcome be if these two organizations were to engage in conflict. Partially due to my lack of military training and partially due to the nature of the two organizations the outcome would be hard to judge and if any guess was made it would have to include many scenarios. We can use for example the United States government (a centralized organization) and a terrorist organization (a decentralized organization).

The United States government has a clear leader. There is a chain of command from the man who is actually fighting on the front lines all the way back to the president of the United States. There are also specific locations where decisions are made about the conflict. The pentagon is an entire building dedicated to the United States and dealing with foreign conflict. There is also a situation room in the white house where the president is briefed on information with conflict.

The terrorist organization has no clear leader. There is no headquarters for a terrorist organization and there is no way to try and enforce rules among the other terrorists fighting. Even if someone were to give an example of Osama Bin Laden as a leader of a terrorist organization he is not crucial to the success of the organization. Why then is it that we are going after him? Sometimes if we are used to looking at the world one way, it is hard to make any sense of looking at the world a different way. We, in the United States are used to looking at centralized organizations, so if we are fooled by a decentralized organization and we see someone who looks like a leader we believe that that person is crucial to the organization and that if we kill them the organization will fall.

This approach is wrong. In fact, this may be the worst thing we could do. The more we attack a decentralized organization the more decentralized it becomes and the stronger it becomes. It is harder to detect the location of members of a decentralized organization after an attack, and we won’t know which direction to look for an attack from them. Decentralized organizations are flexible and immune to attack because even if you manage to kill members or groups of members there are still more and new ones constantly emerge.

The best way to handle a decentralized organization would be to plan attacks very carefully. The more you can take out at once. Don’t drop bombs at random and kill whoever you can. Wait, research, record and find when the most members will be in the same location at once. I would think the best bet would be if the decentralized organization had no idea you were even watching. They would have no reason to suspect anything was wrong. But this approach takes patience and skill.

Patience and skill, much like the metaphor for a decentralized organization: a starfish. If you cut an arm off, most of the time these animals grow a new one. If you cut the starfish in half the animal won’t die, and pretty soon you’ll have two starfish to deal with. The starfish doesn’t have a head and the major organs are replicated throughout the entire being. Much like the decentralized organization, the starfish has no essential part to it. Currently we don’t hear much of a fear of star fish but maybe sometime soon. Thalassophobia: fear of sea creatures.