I believe techniques from math and science are able to help us produce stronger organizations (if the educational and political barriers can be worked through).

If this is true, we should probably be able to come up with at least one concrete example today. Here is a very modest example.

A good system for alerting or mobilizing people is a call tree. The person instigating the alert calls $d$ people to communicate the message to them. Each of these people in turn has a list of $d$ people they are responsible for calling, and on it goes.

However, call trees are very fragile. If a person doesn’t pick up, everyone “below them” on the tree will never be contacted.

Here is a kind of “call tree” that doesn’t have this drawback, and in fact, is super robust. Many people can fail to pick up, or fail to call their people, and the message will still reach almost everyone it could have.

It will work as follows: again every person will call $d$ people. For example, imagine that $d$ is 4, so each person will call 4 other people.

Who exactly they call will be selected at random ahead of time by a central coordinator. We assume that everyone in the group knows the $d$ (e.g., 4) people that they are supposed to call in case of an alert.

This system is extremely robust against people flaking. If $d = 4$, then even if up to 40% of people fail to do their calls, at least 95% of people will get a call.

So if you have 1000 people in the organization, and up to 400 don’t make their calls, at least 950 people will still get a phone call.

This model is also tunable to the tolerance of org members for making phone calls. For example, if some people are committed to making more calls than 4, the system can be robust against an even higher number of failures.

For example, if only 30% of the people in the org make their calls, assuming each of those people calls 8 others, at least 93% of people will get a call.

Nice!

If you are interested in learning more, this “call tree” is what’s known as an expander graph, which is a kind of network that is extremely robust against disconnection.