Science Needs Outlier Organizations

There is no best structure, but there are many bad compromises.

As we’ve noted, science is driven by outliers. This fact has huge consequences for how we organize to do science.  

For one, there is no “best” structure. There are, however, many bad compromises that prevent outliers along one axis or another. The tendency for compromises to clip outliers is damning for the institutional oligopoly that dominates the scientific landscape today; most science is done within organizational structures that are tweaks on a few basic blueprints. Even if current structures can be extreme in certain ways, they are all doomed to miss most of the opportunities to do great science. This is because the limited variation between existing science organizations implies that they are all ordinary in most of the ways it is possible to be an outlier.

Outlier-driven science means that we should expect structures that are extreme in different ways to be good at different things. We should also expect that structures which can accommodate at least some outlier individuals and ideas will outperform those that cannot. The differences between startups and corporate R&D hint at this, but we need to deliberately design outlier organizations if we want them to exist.

Several of the following posts will explore potential structures for outlier organizations, many inspired by structures from other domains that successfully harness outlier talent and ideas: Hollywood, sports, content creation, and others. The past is another place we plan to dig for ideas – not to copy (reviving the past is a fool’s errand) but to draw inspiration from. There are surely many other modern and historical domains that we’re less familiar with that are also a rich source of ideas. At a time when structuring science organizations is, at best, an art we take heart in the maxim that great artists steal.