# What is the role of organizational boundaries? To a large extent, these are just expansions on [[coaseNatureFirm1937]], however, it’s worth digging into specifics in the context of considering whether to create a new organization to accomplish a task and how we fund organizations. People tend to be much freer with their time towards other people within an organization. When someone reaches out to you over an organizational slack, the reaction is very different than when someone reaches out to you over a community slack. I’ve found a shocking difference in my own commitedness to literally the same project when my collaborator and I were nominally part of the same organization (even though we were working on completely different projects most of the time). On the funding side: A benefit of organizational boundaries is that they enable the organization to shuffle around effort and money without needing to justify it. [[It takes a shocking amount of effort to justify things]]. Imagine if startups had to raise money to do each different part of what they wanted to do. You can view even projects with a single nominal goal through many different lenses. Any project also has many subgoals and it’s fractal. [[Project-based funding reduces organizational agency]] ### When you shouldn’t create organizational boundaries At the same time, organizational boundaries are not all upside. Everybody in the organization is, to some extent, competing with each over the same resources. And because communication is easier inside organizations, intra-organizational politics is easier than extra-organizational politics. ### Related * [[R+D orgs lie on a spectrum between externalized and internalized execution and benefits]] * [[When is externalized research better than internalized research and vice versa?]] * [[DARPA does not do any research in house]] * [[Institutional affiliation matters for coordination]]