I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company.

I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company – Automattic

We believe good ideas can come from anywhere. Communication is our oxygen, and we communicate frequently.

Diversity in Ideation – Automattic Design

Sustainability agents have a few simple operating guidelines, or network protocols, or rules if you like: diversify, connect, interact, and adapt.

Diversity is not about tolerating difference or treating others equally and without prejudice. The diversification principle compels you to maintain your individual differences, particularly from other agents who are similar to you. This prevents you from clustering into narcissistic flash mobs. You must also seek out and interact with a wide variety of agents who are completely dissimilar to you. Finally, you must interact with other systems beyond your own, keeping your system open and therefore sustainable.

Connectedness balances the excesses of individualism in the diversity principle. The first step in connectedness is forming pairs (like kinship pairs) with multiple other agents who also pair with others. The next step is creating or expanding networks of these connections. The final step is making sure these networks are interacting with the networks of other agents, both within your system and in others.

Interaction is the principle that provides the energy and spirit of communication to power the system. This principle facilitates the flow of living knowledge. For this, you must be transferring knowledge (and energy and resources) with as many other agents as possible, rather than trying to store it individually. If the world ever experiments with an actual free market rather than an oligopoly, this would be the perfect system to facilitate sustainable interactions. Knowledge, value, and energy in truly sustainable networks of interaction are prevented from remaining static and unchanging by the final protocol.

Adaptation is the most important protocol of an agent in a sustainable system. You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them. This knowledge and energy will flow through the entire system in feedback loops, and you must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked. An agent that is truly adaptive and changing is open to sudden eruptions of transformation, in which the agent may temporarily take on the role of strange attractor and facilitate chain reactions of creative events within the system.

Yunkaporta, Tyson. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (p. 85 -87). HarperCollins.