Tim J. Davey

Coordination is adaptation

I research and build tools which enable teams to understand complexity and organise themselves through it.

Right now

"Survival of the fittest" often gets misunderstood. It doesn't mean the strongest or the healthiest, it's how well a species fits into its niche. But even then, it doesn't capture the most important part of evolution. Darwin wrote that the best place to watch selection at work is a country whose climate is changing.

Adaptation is the only skill that truly matters. We've barely felt the coming change of AI and the climate, so at Concentric we're building the infrastructure you'll need to coordinate and transform through it.

Consulting

I'm currently working as what I call a Forward Deployed Founder. My aim is to upgrade your whole organisation to be AI ready, not just some individuals within it.

I'm unreasonably obsessed with this problem. And my motivation isn't the next invoice, it's the next insight for Concentric. That means I only win if I'm in the trenches with you, creating fixes that work long after I'm gone.

Reach out below even if you're curious and want some free pointers before you commit.

Get in touch

Organisations

Most people know me for the things I've helped build.

London Interdisciplinary School

Founded 2018 · lis.ac.uk

A degree built around problems rather than disciplines.

"The most radical new university to open in decades", the Times. We designed it around two key principles. First, the world is becoming more interconnected and complex (the internet, global shipping and trade). Second, specialisation in the workforce is becoming automated by AI, fast. Both of which mean we need more people who can stitch ideas together across boundaries to get stuff done.

As you'd expect at first nobody got it. "Who needs more generalists?" Then just one year after launching covid hit, demonstrating how brittle and interwoven our global system is and moving complexity science into the mainstream.

Then a year after that, OpenAI released their first LLM, where the rapid advancement of agents also proved our thesis that being system thinkers and having high agency is fundamental to the future of what it means to be human.

onefinestay

Founded 2009 · The largest distributed hotel in the world

A tight knit organisation, in both senses.

The team was amazing and have gone on to create many more successful companies. But it was also tightly coordinated across a huge number of moving parts. To service that many homes we had to become one of the largest domestic cleaning businesses in London, one of the largest plumbing businesses, and so on. Then holding a consistent level of quality for guests, when the product itself was about staying in someone's unique home somewhere across five continents, was a very real world lesson in legibility.

We ended up selling the company for a healthy nine figure sum.

snaptalent

Founded 2007 · A recruitment ad network, and a very early YC batch

I was only 19 and it was long before any exits. What blows my mind is how wonderful that early hacker group of people were, and how basically everyone has gone on to do amazing things.

Research

The problem

About 7% of all humans who have ever lived are alive today, and we're about to add countless AGI. Yet we can't finish HS2 or the California Bullet Train. Ambitious projects seem to either grind to a halt under the weight of their own complexity, or, to avoid that, all the little hacks that make the system work in practice get squashed to make it understandable (legible).

This is a problem for every government. The NHS in theory should have standard processes to give them the efficiencies of scale you expect from a health service that employs around 6% of the country's workforce. But the day to day of a GP practice in a small seaside town full of retirees looks nothing like an oversubscribed inner city one. The same goes for schools.

It's worth comparing how the Roman empire must have run to the information flow in organisations today. A small letter from Egypt could have taken months to reach Rome. Whereas today, we're supposed to answer our colleague's Slack ping at 9pm on a Sunday.

As the cost of communication falls, accountability has an opportunity, and therefore a tendency, to centralise. But the more that happens, the more accountability wants to simplify projects. And the more that happens, the more the local nuance which actually makes a thing work gets smoothed away.

Solution

The focus of my research is to build concrete tools to enable organisations to embrace the power complexity brings rather than fear what it takes away. Answering, how do we understand systems holistically enough to steer them, while encouraging all the hacks that make them practical.

I published a new measure of complexity, based on information theory. If you can't measure a system's complexity, you can't manage or diagnose it.

Alongside it I created a sister measure for self-organisation, to identify when a complex system is merely chaotic rather than full of sophistication.

Understanding how to navigate complexity and harness self-organisation is the way you create groups which adapt.