A node/connector perspective
Most of our coordination failures don’t come from conflict. They come from our containers.
Companies, foundations, DAOs.
We build them. Then step inside. We say they’re about guidance, but an org chart isn’t a map. It’s a mold.
People don’t use orgs. They serve them.
Attention and effort drift toward fixtures: boards, treasuries, governance. The work bends toward meetings. Toward process. Success becomes more and more defined as positions held.
When the shape stops working, we don’t question the container. We reshape it. A flatter hierarchy, or a top-down projection of the same structure—circles instead of branches.
A node-connector graph flips the unit of design: from boxes to relationships. You design for a single person, their goals and their connections.
You let the shape emerge.
Networks are already everywhere, hiding under containers.
Reading a Dalton Trumbo biography, I realized the film studios weren’t the rigid hierarchies I’d imagined. They look solid from the outside. But really, only their facades are distinct. Behind them is a different story.
Trumbo was one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters when studios started blacklisting suspected communists in 1947. The studios made an example of him. His name vanished from the credits.
But the work didn’t stop.
The King Brothers—small, pragmatic producers—kept him writing under borrowed names. Scripts moved quietly, hand to hand.
For a decade, Trumbo worked day and night, because that’s what writers do when the world tells them to stop. Under the blacklist, he actually got more work, and employed more and more writers.
The pretense finally collapsed when two directors, Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger, decided for themselves. They credited him openly. The blacklist lost its grip, if it ever had one.
You can see how film production actually lives on a mesh of relationships. The crews form and dissolve like tidepools: the same grips who’ve pulled cable together in the rain, the same camera ops who can read each other’s eyebrows across a set. Directors pull in their writers, their actors, to suit their styles.
The hierarchy is temporary scaffolding. The relationships are the real structure.
Venture Capital also runs on a node-graph.
Beneath any VC brand, you find a sequence of numbered funds. Each fund has its own lifecycle—raise, deploy, return, close. Each has its own general partners, each with their own web of founder relationships.
Every experienced founder knows this. It’s not the firm that matters. It’s the partner. The person. Their connections.
Accelerators look like programs with curriculum, a mentor pool, office hours and a Demo Day, but under the hood, it's really that each founder's unique situation activate a specific set of relationships. The accelerator opens a network to cherry pick.
A partner checks in. Listens. Notices where things are stuck.
"I know someone who's been through this. She’ll get it. I'll intro you."
Usually it’s not a mentor or a trainer. It’s another founder, still in motion.
Two people who should know each other finally do. And the problem softens, or disappears entirely.
The real value isn’t instruction. It’s introduction.
Container thinking: "Our program tells you what to do."
Connector thinking: "Let’s talk every week and open doors."
Once you see this, you also notice networks that trap themselves in containers.
Bankless Academy was a few seasons in.
The ambition was large—teach crypto clearly, responsibly—but the output was thin. Two finished courses. Each one twenty slides long. Every new season reopened the same question: why is this taking so long?
The DAO's treasury had increased pressure, now threatening budget cuts openly.
On the weekly call, the budget was always on screen.
In DAOs with seasonal budgets, the last proposal writers effectively own the project. That season it was the illustrators and a developer. So the call focused on them.
The coordinator pushed the plan forward, assigned tasks, kept momentum. The writing budget had dried up, but they still needed a dictionary of cryptocurrency terms. He took it upon himself, and crowdsourced definitions from everyone on the call.
Meanwhile, in the sidebar, a different conversation was happening.
A few instructional designers were asking the questions that make or break a course:
- Where are learners actually getting confused?
- What do they think they understand, but don’t?
- What not to explain yet?
Those messages scrolled by while the main call stayed on budget. The illustrators were negotiating scope. The hour was almost up. Someone asked for another week. The coordinator nodded.
After the call, I messaged one of the people from the sidebar.
He turned out to be the person who designed Intel’s training material for retail staff. He knew how to explain complex CPU architecture to a teenager at Best Buy.
He just wanted to help, he didn't care about getting paid.
He came to the next call. And the next.
Each time, the same rhythm. Budget first. Assignments. Not enough time. He stayed in the sidebar. After the third call, he didn’t come back.
No one pushed him out. No one decided he wasn’t useful.
The structure just created scarcity where none was required.
Container-thinking says: "Here’s the plan. Assign people."
Connector-thinking says: "Here’s the goal. Work in public. Share with each other."
When containers break down, reform becomes an endurance contest.
People with talent leave first. Why grind it out when they have better options?
The people who stay are increasingly the ones who prize the position itself. The work grows careful, then brittle. Momentum slows.
This isn’t malice.
It’s gravity.
Persistent structures accumulate weight. Decisions bend toward it.
In security, Defense-in-Depth means layers that make the attacker’s job too costly to bother with.
If they can get over the moats, walls, spikes, they then discover you can drop cow poop on them.
It works—until the castle is taken.
A node-graph behaves differently.
Maybe you've been in a group chat when one or two people stink up the room. A multi-day rant or two people beefing.
Everyone goes quiet.
You see a few people typing… but never sending.
Then someone else sends a dm to a friend about something else. Another group chat starts around that.
People drift across.
From the container view, it looks like a split.
From the network view, it’s just rebalancing flows. Each node is able to reroute as needed.
The relationships stay intact.
Ephemerality is defense-in-depth for networks.
Permanent structures create leverage points: treasuries, roadmaps, permissions, charters. They attract attention. They imply control. They invite protection.
A castle concentrates value, so someone will always try to control the gate.
A node-graph behaves differently. Force your way into any point and the relationships just route around you.
Once we let go of controlling the shape, we escape from assuming we need insides and outsides.
We get a different design question. Not: "What structure would serve this goal?" But:
"How do we give people agency over the connections they need?"
Containers always collapse into politics. Connectors create space for emergence.
A connector is anything that makes the right connection cheap, and in the hands of the individual: an introduction, a thread, a forkable workspace, a lightweight way to reroute when things jam.
We need better connectors.