Fork You!

This essay is based on underlying theory and practice that I’ve been co-learning and developing with Patricia Parkinson through OpenCivics Labs. I’m profoundly grateful for everything I’ve learned from Patricia and the opportunities we’ve had to develop this body of work into a living praxis for networked organizations.

There’s a familiar ritual that plays out in organizations everywhere, from startups to social movements to bioregional networks. A group of intelligent, committed people gather around a table (or a Zoom call, or a Miro board) to make a decision about strategic direction. Two viable approaches emerge. Both have merit. Both have passionate advocates. Both could conceivably work.

And then the ritual begins: the debate, the position-taking, the gradual hardening of camps and hearts, the inevitable search for consensus that never quite arrives, the eventual compromise that satisfies no one, or the executive decision that leaves half the room resentful. Whichever path is chosen, the other dissolves into the realm of what-might-have-been, taking with it not just an alternative strategy but often the people who championed it, their energy, and their commitment.

We’ve been conditioned to see this as inevitable—the natural price of making decisions. But what if the whole ritual is predicated on a false premise? What if the problem isn’t that we can’t agree on the best path forward, but that we’re assuming there must be only one path?

This is the case for functional pluralism—the idea that organizations should embrace strategic differentiation rather than fighting it, that divergence isn’t a bug but a feature, and that the ability to fork might be one of the most important organizational capacities of our fraught and liminal time.

The Tyranny of Singularity

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: centralization creates fundamentally competitive dynamics. When there’s only one organizational center, one strategic direction, one allocation of resources, we’re forced into a zero-sum game. Your preferred approach and mine become rivals. We’re not just choosing between strategies; we’re choosing which group of people gets to feel ownership over the organization’s direction and which group has to swallow their concerns and fall in line.

This structural problem is reinforced by our most basic decision-making tools. Consider the typical vote: yes or no, option A or option B, thumbs up or thumbs down. These binary mechanisms compress the actual complexity of preference into winner-take-all outcomes. If 51% of people prefer Strategy A and 49% prefer Strategy B, we implement A and abandon B entirely—even though nearly half the organization sees value in B, even though the preferences might not be that strong, even though in a resource-rich scenario we might pursue both.

The binary isn’t just in how we vote. It’s in how we think about decision-making itself. We ask: “What should we do?” when often the better question is: “What should we explore, and with what weight?” We create governance structures designed to produce unified decisions even when the underlying reality is pluralistic. We measure success in terms of “organizational alignment”—getting everyone rowing in the same direction.

Beyond theory, this dynamic has profound practical consequences. Power struggles emerge not because people are power-hungry (though some are) but because genuine strategic disagreements become existential even when they don’t have to be. If there’s only one organizational direction and you believe deeply that the current path is wrong, your only options are: convince everyone else you’re right, leave, or surrender your judgment and comply. None of these are particularly generative.

The result is organizations that are perpetually fighting their own internal complexity. A conservation nonprofit argues for months about whether to focus on policy advocacy or direct land restoration. A tech collective debates whether to build for immediate community needs or invest in longer-term infrastructure. A bioregional network wrestles with whether to prioritize economic localization or cultural regeneration. These aren’t idle debates between egos. This type of organizational conflict represents genuine uncertainty about what strategies will be most effective. But our organizational structures often force us to choose one path and foreclose others, usually with very limited information about what will actually work.

Consider what this means in terms of learning velocity. If an organization commits to a single strategy, it might take years to gather enough evidence to know whether that approach was effective. During that time, alternative strategies remain unexplored, gathering dust in the archives of meeting notes and strategy docs. When the chosen approach eventually reveals its limitations, as most strategies do because the world is complex, the organization has to undergo another lengthy process of reassessment and re-orientation. The sunk cost fallacy kicks in. People who championed the original strategy feel defensive. The organization becomes rigid precisely when it needs to be adaptive.

This is the tyranny of the singular path: it forces premature convergence on strategy, creates artificial competition between viable approaches, and drastically slows organizational learning.

What Is Functional Pluralism?

Functional pluralism is a deceptively simple idea: let organizational form follow functional diversity. When multiple viable strategies exist, allow multiple implementations to proceed in parallel. When groups have genuinely different theories of change, let them pursue those theories without forcing one to dominate. When people align around different values or approaches, support that differentiation rather than trying to smooth it over or force a single path.

The key word here is “functional.” Functional pluralism is not mere tolerance of difference or diversity as representation. Functional pluralism means that different approaches are actively pursued, resourced, and evaluated. It’s pluralism in action, not just in principle.

This might sound like a recipe for fragmentation, chaos and wasted effort. But consider how nature actually works. Forests don’t have strategic planning committees that decide which type of tree should be planted. Different species emerge and coexist because they occupy different niches, exploit different resources, and thrive under different conditions. The result isn’t chaos; it’s resilience. When one species faces a challenge, others compensate. When conditions change, the forest’s diversity becomes its adaptive capacity.

Or consider how science advances. We don’t require all researchers to pursue the same hypothesis. Multiple research groups explore different approaches to the same problem. Some turn out to be dead ends. Others yield breakthroughs. The competition isn’t zero-sum; it’s generative. Each attempt, successful or not, generates information that improves collective understanding.

Functional pluralism applies this same logic to organizations. Instead of fighting over which strategy should be THE strategy, we ask: which strategies should we explore in parallel? Instead of forcing everyone to align behind a single vision, we ask: what visions are worth pursuing, and how can they inform each other?

This requires a fundamental shift in how we think about organizational coherence. Coherence doesn’t mean homogeneity. A forest is coherent not because all trees are the same but because they exist in relationship, sharing resources through mycelial networks while occupying different niches. Organizational coherence in a functionally plural framework means maintaining relationship and shared learning across different strategic implementations, even as those implementations diverge.

Mechanisms for Pluralism

Functional pluralism isn’t just an armchair philosophy or consultant-speak for organizational designers, it’s becoming increasingly practical thanks to new mechanisms for collective decision-making that move beyond binary choices.

Traditional voting mechanisms force binary outcomes. Even when we vote on multiple options, we typically use methods (from ranked choice voting to majority rule) that produce individual winners. This works fine when there genuinely should be only one outcome—when we’re electing a single mayor, for instance. But it’s terrible when we’re trying to allocate resources across multiple valuable initiatives or signal varying levels of support for different strategies.

Enter quadratic voting and quadratic funding—mechanisms explicitly designed to surface and support plural preferences.

Quadratic voting allows people to express not just binary preferences but weighted intensity of preference. Instead of one person, one vote, participants receive a budget of “voice credits” that they can allocate across multiple options. The brilliance of the mechanism is that, unlike dot voting, votes cost quadratically. Your first vote on an option costs 1 credit, your second vote on that same option costs 4 credits, your third costs 9 credits, and so on. This creates a natural check on tyranny of the majority: you can feel very strongly about something and spend many credits to express that intensity, but you pay an increasing price for doing so, which prevents a bare majority from completely dominating outcomes.

The result is a much richer signal about collective preferences. Instead of “51% want A, 49% want B, so we do A,” you might learn that “people moderately support A, but a significant minority feels very strongly about B, and actually quite a few people see value in both.” That’s actionable information for plural outcomes.

Quadratic funding takes this insight and applies it to resource allocation. Originally developed by Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, and Glen Weyl, quadratic funding is particularly powerful for supporting public goods. Here’s how it works: individuals contribute to projects they care about, and a matching pool amplifies those contributions based on the breadth of support rather than just the total amount contributed. The matching formula rewards projects that have many smaller contributors over projects that have a few large contributors.

The effect is elegant: a project with 100 people contributing $1eachreceivesmorematchingfundsthanaprojectwith1personcontributing$100, even though the raw totals are the same. The mechanism is essentially saying: “broad-based support is more meaningful than concentrated support” and allocating resources accordingly.

Why does this matter for functional pluralism? These are structural mechanisms that create a way to fund multiple approaches simultaneously based on distributed preference rather than centralized decision-making. Instead of an organization’s board or leadership team deciding which strategic initiative to fund, the community or network can signal support for multiple initiatives, and resources flow accordingly.

Imagine a bioregional network wrestling with how to allocate a shared pool of resources. The traditional approach: a leadership council, board, or funders determine organizational priorities and invite communities to participate in centrally determined programs. The plural approach: all viable projects are proposed, community members allocate quadratic voting credits across projects they support, and the funding pool is distributed according to the resulting preference signal. Projects with strong niche support get some resources. Projects with broad moderate support get resources. Projects with both deep and broad support get significant resources. No single binary decision. No zero-sum competition. Just a nuanced, plural allocation based on actual distributed preference of a community or network.

This methodology has already been successfully prototyped on Ethereum to fund public goods, the core infrastructure and ecosystem services that everyone benefits from but can’t or shouldn’t be easily monetized. Gitcoin has run 24 cycles and hundreds of quadratic funding rounds for Ethereum ecosystem projects, climate initiatives, and local communities, allocating over 70 million dollars based on community preference signals. OpenCivics has experimented with quadratic funding for civic innovation and local organizing. RadicalXChange has deployed tools for anyone to host their own quadratic vote. Colorado used quadratic voting for state budgeting. The mechanisms are becoming proven tools, not just academic curiosities.

What makes these mechanisms truly powerful is that they make plurality operational rather than just aspirational. It’s one thing to say “we should support multiple approaches.” It’s another to have a concrete mechanism that translates distributed preferences into distributed resources without requiring someone in authority to make the final call.

These mechanisms also change the nature of the conversations that inform decision-making. Instead of “which strategy should we pursue?” the question becomes “how much support does each strategy have?” Instead of “convince everyone your approach is best,” the task becomes “build genuine support among those who care.” The competition shifts from zero-sum (winner takes all) to positive-sum (multiple things can be resourced simultaneously).

Of course, these mechanisms aren’t magic. They don’t eliminate the need for judgment, coordination, or difficult conversations. A quadratic vote might reveal that a community wants to fund five different projects, but if there are only resources for three, someone still has to make hard choices. And these mechanisms can be gamed or manipulated if not carefully designed and implemented within a culture that values genuine preference expression.

But they represent a crucial evolution in our toolkit for navigating plurality. They give us ways to move beyond binary decision-making without descending into either paralysis (we can’t decide, so we do nothing) or autocracy (someone decides for everyone). They create space for weighted, nuanced, plural outcomes.

The Power of the Fork

In software development, “forking” is when someone takes an existing codebase and creates a new, independent version. It sounds dramatic, and sometimes it is, but it’s also completely normal and often productive. Linux, one of the most successful open-source projects in history, has been forked thousands of times. Some forks remain independent. Others eventually merge back into the main project, bringing innovations developed in parallel. The possibility of forking creates a kind of evolutionary pressure: projects that don’t serve their users well get forked, and better alternatives emerge.

What if we thought about organizational strategy the same way?

When a significant strategic disagreement emerges, instead of viewing it as a crisis that must be resolved through debate, compromise, or authority, what if we viewed it as an opportunity for differentiation? Instead of one group winning and another losing, both approaches could be pursued. The “main branch” continues with its current strategy. The “fork” explores an alternative. Both remain in relationship, sharing learnings and resources where appropriate. Over time, evidence accumulates about what actually works. Sometimes one approach proves superior. Sometimes different approaches work better in different contexts. Sometimes the fork and the main branch eventually re-merge, integrating the best of both.

The key is that forking doesn’t represent rupture. It represents creative differentiation. This is perhaps the hardest mental shift to make because we’re so conditioned to see organizational splits as failures. Someone leaving to start their own thing is often viewed as a betrayal or at least a loss. But that interpretation assumes that organizational value is primarily captured through institutional control, that the only way for your work to matter is for it to happen under an officially sanctioned banner.

Functional pluralism suggests something different: that organizational value emerges from the network of relationships, shared learning, and mutual support between independent but connected nodes. When someone forks to explore a different approach, they’re not leaving—they’re differentiating while remaining in relationship. They’re expanding the possibility space that the broader network can explore.

Mechanisms like quadratic funding create ways for forks to be resourced without requiring permission from a central authority. If the main organization’s leadership doesn’t support a proposed strategic direction, but a significant portion of the network does, quadratic funding mechanisms allow that network to directly resource the fork. The fork doesn’t need to “win” the internal debate—it just needs to demonstrate sufficient distributed support to access resources from the shared pool.

This ecological mindset is crucial. Ecologies thrive on differentiation. A monoculture is fragile; a polyculture is resilient. When we embrace forking as a normal, healthy part of organizational evolution, we build in the same kind of resilience. We’re no longer betting everything on a single strategy working out. We’re maintaining optionality.

Polycentricity: Multiple Centers of Leadership

An exploration of functional pluralism would be incomplete without explicitly referencing its sister principle: polycentricity. Polycentrism challenges one of the deepest assumptions in organizational design: that there should be a single center of authority. Whether that center is a CEO, a board, a coordinating committee, or a charismatic founder, most organizations implicitly assume that decision-making power should ultimately flow through a single point.

This assumption is so deeply embedded that we often don’t even notice it. We talk about “the organization’s strategy” as if an organization is a singular entity with a singular intent, rather than a collection of people with overlapping but not identical goals.

What if multiple centers of leadership could coexist without being in fundamental conflict? What if the goal wasn’t alignment behind a single vision but rather coordination between different visions?

Polycentricity can be observed in nature and in human social systems. The concept was popularized by Elinor Ostrom as she observed how healthy commons govern themselves, multiple centers of decision making interfacing to manage shared resources. Polycentrism is how networks and commons actually function. In a forest, there’s no central tree calling the shots. In a healthy ecosystem, there are multiple keystone species, each playing different but complementary roles. In the internet or on a blockchain, there’s no central authority managing all the packets or blocks. Coordination emerges from protocols that allow independent nodes to interact.

The shift is from seeing organizations as unified actors pursuing singular strategies to seeing them as ecosystems of related initiatives, each with its own leadership and approach, coordinated through shared protocols and mutual learning rather than central authority.

Quadratic mechanisms support this shift by creating ways to resource multiple centers of leadership simultaneously. Instead of a single executive team deciding which initiatives get funded, the network can signal support for multiple leadership centers, each pursuing different aspects of the shared mission. Resources flow not from the top down but from the network out, based on distributed preference.

This doesn’t mean chaos or the absence of coordination. It means that coordination is achieved through different mechanisms: global protocols rather than global command, mutual adjustment for interoperability and network effects rather than hierarchical control, transparent information flows enabling distributed sensing and response rather than centralized decision-making.

In practice, this might look like an organization that operates more like a constellation than a pyramid. Different teams have genuine autonomy to pursue different approaches to the organization’s broader mission. They coordinate through regular knowledge-sharing, transparent documentation of learnings, and voluntary collaboration rather than mandatory integration. Resources flow not from a central pot controlled by leadership but through participatory mechanisms like quadratic funding rounds where the network itself signals what to resource.

The crucial insight is that plural resource allocation enables plural leadership. You can’t truly have multiple centers of initiative and authority if all resources still flow through a single decision-making center. The mechanisms matter. Quadratic voting and funding aren’t just nice-to-have features, they’re infrastructure that makes functional pluralism possible.

Exploring Possibility Space

Functional pluralism isn’t just philosophically appealing due to its egalitarian and inclusive nature. Practically, it dramatically accelerates organizational learning.

Think about how most organizations learn. They develop a strategy, implement it, wait to see results, evaluate, and adjust. This works reasonably well when the environment is stable and feedback loops are clear. But in complex, rapidly changing contexts, which increasingly describes everything, this sequential approach is painfully slow.

The fundamental constraint is that organizations can only learn as fast as they can implement and evaluate strategies. If you can only pursue one strategy at a time, you’re limiting your learning rate to your implementation rate.

Functional pluralism removes this constraint. Instead of sequential exploration (try A, evaluate, then try B), it enables parallel exploration (try A and B simultaneously). This means:

Faster feedback loops: Instead of waiting years to discover that Strategy A has limitations before you can try Strategy B, both are explored simultaneously. You get data from both approaches at the same time.

Maintained optionality: If Strategy A runs into unexpected obstacles, you haven’t lost years of time. Strategy B has been developing in parallel and might be ready to scale.

Cross-pollination of insights: Often the best approach isn’t A or B but a hybrid that combines insights from both. This only becomes visible when both are actually implemented, not just theoretically discussed.

Reduced groupthink: When an entire organization commits to a single strategy, confirmation bias kicks in hard. Everyone’s invested in proving it works. When multiple strategies are pursued, there’s natural internal skepticism that improves evaluation.

This is why evolution is so effective as an optimization strategy: it explores vast possibility spaces in parallel. Thousands of organisms try different survival strategies simultaneously. Most fail. Some succeed. The successes propagate. The system learns incredibly quickly not despite the failures but because of them. Each failed experiment provides information and each feedback loop accelerates adaptability and resilience.

Organizations practicing functional pluralism can tap into similar dynamics. Instead of arguing whether to prioritize depth or breadth in your next development cycle, let different teams explore both while the network allocates resources based on emerging results and preference. Instead of requiring consensus on whether to engage established institutions or build parallel systems, support groups doing both while they share learnings.

The key is maintaining enough connection between the parallel efforts that learning propagates. This is where the “network” part of networked organizations becomes crucial. The forks need to stay in conversation. Failures need to be documented and shared. Successes need to be visible and accessible. The goal is not just parallel experimentation but collective learning, and collective learning requires collective sensing of what’s working. This is another place where quadratic mechanisms prove useful: they create ongoing feedback loops that allow the network to continuously signal what’s generating value, rather than requiring periodic high-stakes decisions about what to continue funding.

From Theory to Practice

All of this might sound compelling in principle but practically challenging. How do you actually implement functional pluralism in real organizations that exist in the real world with real constraints?

Let’s start with resources. The most common objection to functional pluralism is: “We can’t afford to pursue multiple strategies—we barely have enough resources for one!” This is both true and misleading. Yes, pursuing multiple strategies requires more total resources than pursuing one strategy with maximum efficiency. But “maximum efficiency” is a dangerous goal in complex environments. It reduces resilience, increases fragility, and often proves to be a false economy when the single bet fails.

The better question is: how do we allocate resources to maximize learning while maintaining viability? Often this means pursuing a primary strategy at scale while supporting smaller experiments that explore alternatives. Think of it as an investment portfolio: the majority of resources go to relatively safe, proven approaches, while a meaningful minority goes to higher-risk, higher-potential-learning experiments.

Some practical mechanisms:

Participatory allocation through quadratic funding: Rather than central decision-makers determining all resource flows, create quarterly or annual funding rounds where network members can signal support for different initiatives. This doesn’t mean abandoning all central coordination—you might still have core operations funded through traditional means—but it creates space for emergent priorities to access resources based on distributed preference rather than centralized approval.

Implementation might look like: 20% of the organization’s budget goes into a quadratic funding pool. Anyone in the network can propose an initiative aligned with the organization’s mission. Network members allocate their voting credits. The funding pool is distributed according to the quadratic formula. Funded initiatives operate semi-autonomously for a defined period, with clear documentation of learnings.

Transparent forking protocols: Make it clear how groups can fork to explore new approaches. What reporting/sharing responsibilities do forks have to the broader network? Under what conditions might a fork re-merge? Having clear protocols reduces the drama and interpersonal tension around divergence.

A sample protocol might specify: The fork must articulate clear goals, timeline, and learning questions. If the fork receives sufficient support in a quadratic funding round to meet minimum viability threshold, it proceeds. Forks maintain connection through monthly learning shares and shared documentation. After the defined period, forks present results and may propose either continuation, re-merging, or dissolution.

Cross-pollination structures: Create regular opportunities for different approaches to share learnings. This might be monthly “research talks” where teams present what they’re discovering, shared documentation platforms where insights are recorded, or periodic gatherings where different forks reconnect and potentially re-integrate. These feedback loops are essential infrastructure for collective learning.

Explicit experimentation frameworks: Frame exploratory forks explicitly as experiments with defined learning goals and timelines. This helps distinguish between “we’re exploring whether this approach works” and “we’re committed to this approach forever.” It also makes evaluation more concrete and less personal. Combined with quadratic funding, this creates a natural rhythm: propose experiment, secure funding through demonstrated support, run experiment, share learnings, network decides whether to continue funding based on results and ongoing interest.

The Cultural Shift

Perhaps the deepest challenge in implementing functional pluralism isn’t structural but cultural. We’ve been conditioned by centuries of hierarchical organization to see divergence as problematic and unity as virtuous. Splitting is failure. Forking is disloyalty. Multiple visions represent confusion rather than richness.

Functional pluralism requires inverting these values. Divergence becomes generative. Forking becomes creativity. Multiple visions represent adaptive capacity rather than confusion. This internal psychological shift is hard! It requires a kind of epistemological humility that doesn’t come naturally, the ability to say “I might be wrong” even about your deepest convictions.

Quadratic mechanisms can help with this cultural shift because they make room for degrees of support rather than requiring binary judgment. You don’t have to pretend to enthusiastically support an approach you’re skeptical of—you can allocate few or no credits to it. But neither do you have to actively block it if others see value.

This is a subtle but important psychological shift. Binary voting often forces people into defensive positions: if you’re skeptical of something, you have to vote no and actively oppose it. Quadratic voting allows for varying levels of support to coexist without anyone having to override anyone else’s judgment.

The cultural shift also requires reconceptualizing organizational belonging. If the organization’s identity is bound up with a particular strategy or approach, then forking threatens the organization’s identity. But if the organization’s identity is bound up with a broader mission or set of values that can be pursued through multiple strategies, forking becomes an expression of organizational identity, not betrayal of it.

This is where the metaphor of the forest becomes most useful. When a tree sends up a new shoot, it doesn’t threaten the forest, it’s the forest expressing itself. When mycelial networks support different trees with different strategies for capturing sunlight, the network isn’t confused or divided, it’s exploring what works. When one section of forest develops different characteristics than another because of different microclimates, that’s not fragmentation, it’s appropriate adaptation to variation.

Organizations practicing functional pluralism need to cultivate this same sensibility: we are a network exploring how to achieve our mission, and that exploration naturally involves differentiation, experimentation, and evolution. The coherence isn’t in doing the same thing but in learning together.

When Forks Re-Merge

One of the most interesting dynamics in functional pluralism is what happens after differentiation: the potential for re-integration.

In software, successful forks often get merged back into the main project. The fork allowed for experimental features to be developed without destabilizing the main codebase. Once those features prove their worth, they get integrated. The result is a main project that has benefited from innovation it wouldn’t have pursued on its own.

The same can happen with organizational forks. A group splits off to explore a different strategy. That strategy works. The learning from that experiment then informs the broader organization’s approach. Or sometimes the “fork” becomes so successful that it effectively becomes the main branch, with the original approach now being the alternative.

Quadratic mechanisms can support re-merging by providing ongoing signals about where the network’s interest and energy is flowing. If a fork starts receiving increasing support in funding rounds while the main branch sees declining interest, that’s useful information. It suggests the fork may have discovered something important. The network is voting with its credits, revealing a shift in collective sense of what’s working.

This re-merging isn’t automatic and shouldn’t be forced. Sometimes forks remain independent indefinitely, which is fine. They’ve expanded the total capacity of the network to pursue the shared mission. But creating conditions where re-merging is possible requires:

Maintained relationships: Forks that retain personal connections, share learnings, and maintain goodwill are much more likely to re-integrate when appropriate than forks that split acrimoniously.

Clear success metrics: If both the fork and the main branch have explicit learning goals and metrics, it becomes much easier to evaluate approaches based on evidence rather than politics or ego.

Legitimate pathway for influence: If the fork discovers something important, there needs to be a way for that learning to influence the broader network. Quadratic funding provides this: forks that are generating value naturally attract more support, which gives them more resources and more voice. The network’s distributed preference becomes the mechanism for recognizing and scaling success.

Celebrate evolution: Organizations need to explicitly celebrate when a fork’s approach proves superior and influences the broader network, rather than viewing this as the original approach “losing.” The frame should be: we learned something important by enabling this experiment.

Beyond Organizations: A Pattern for Complex Coordination

While this essay has primarily focused on organizations, functional pluralism has implications for much broader patterns of coordination.

Consider social movements. How often do movements fracture over strategic disagreements that might have been opportunities for differentiation? The climate movement has historically struggled with conflicts between approaches: direct action vs. policy reform, individual behavior change vs. systemic transformation, working within institutions vs. building alternatives. These conflicts have sometimes been generative, but often they’ve been destructive, with groups spending more energy fighting each other than pursuing their distinct approaches while staying in relationship.

What if our movements to regenerate our bioregions and re-localize our economies embraced the same functional pluralism we see in nature? Different groups pursue different theories of change while maintaining connection, sharing learnings, and supporting each other’s work. When one approach hits barriers, others can continue. When conditions change, the movement has multiple options already developed. The movement becomes more like an ecosystem: diverse, resilient, adaptive.

And what if movement funding worked through quadratic mechanisms? Instead of foundations and large donors determining which approach to bioregional regeneration gets resourced, what if there were large matching pools that were distributed based on broad community support? Groups pursuing different strategies could coexist without needing to compete for the same binary funding decisions. The movement could explore multiple approaches in parallel, with resources flowing toward whatever approaches demonstrate both breadth and depth of support.

Diving deeper into bioregional coordination and governance, we face an even more complex challenge: how do you coordinate across deep difference when you can’t select for ideological alignment? A watershed includes conservatives and progressives, developers and preservationists, indigenous communities and recent settlers. Forcing consensus on strategy is often impossible and potentially counterproductive. But functional pluralism offers another path: multiple strategies pursued in parallel by different groups, with coordination mechanisms focused on shared learning and avoiding harm rather than unified action.

Quadratic funding could work beautifully in bioregional contexts precisely because it respects diversity while enabling coordination. A watershed might establish a shared pool of resources (from a mix of public funding, private philanthropy, and community contributions). Different groups propose initiatives aligned with watershed health—maybe one focused on riparian restoration, another on sustainable agriculture practices, another on water quality monitoring, another on indigenous land stewardship. The broader community allocates quadratic votes. Resources flow to multiple initiatives based on demonstrated support, not based on which group has the most political power or loudest voice.

This pattern: embrace differentiation, enable parallel exploration, maintain connection through shared learning, resource based on plural preference, is ultimately about how we navigate complexity without resorting to either fragmentation (every group for itself) or totalizing unity (one approach to rule them all). It’s a third way that acknowledges both our deep interdependence and our genuine differences in perspective, values, and approach.

The Post-Institutional Future

There’s a larger context for why functional pluralism matters right now: we’re living through what might be called the twilight of institutional gravity.

For most of modern history, institutions: corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, universities, have been the primary vehicles for coordinated action. This made sense when coordination required significant fixed infrastructure, when information flow required centralized management, and when scaling impact required hierarchical organization.

But digital networks are changing the calculus. Coordination can happen peer-to-peer. Information flows transparently across organizational boundaries. Facing complex and compounding crises, our responses can and must scale horizontally through replication and adaptation rather than centralized control. We’re entering an era where self-organization becomes increasingly viable, where groups can form around specific alignment and shared vision, pursue specific goals, and dissolve or reform as needed, all with much lower organizational overhead than previous eras required.

Technologies like quadratic voting and funding are crucial enablers of this shift. They provide coordination infrastructure that doesn’t require centralized control. A network can make collective decisions and allocate collective resources without anyone being “in charge.” The mechanisms themselves become the coordination layer.

This doesn’t mean institutions disappear. Many institutional functions remain valuable. But it means that institutional gravity weakens. The default assumption that significant work requires building a formal organization with staff and hierarchy and strategic plans becomes questionable. Sometimes the right form is a temporary network of committed individuals who coordinate through shared protocols and plural resource allocation mechanisms, pursue a specific goal, and then dissolve.

Functional pluralism is the organizational logic for this post-institutional context. When organization itself becomes fluid, when groups can form, fork, merge, and dissolve with relative ease, then the ability to embrace strategic differentiation becomes crucial. The question isn’t “what should our organization do?” but “what strategies should we explore, and how should we coordinate between them?”

And the answer increasingly is: let the network signal through plural preference mechanisms. Not rule by majority. Not rule by authority. But resource allocation and priority-setting based on distributed weighted preference, enabled by mathematical mechanisms designed to surface and support plurality.

This is simultaneously exciting and destabilizing. Exciting because it dramatically increases our collective capacity to explore possibility space, to respond to emerging challenges, to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Destabilizing because it requires us to hold much more uncertainty, to operate with less institutional stability, to find coherence through different mechanisms than we’re used to.

Constraints and Concerns

It would be intellectually dishonest to present functional pluralism as a panacea. There are real constraints and legitimate concerns.

Coordination costs: Maintaining relationship and shared learning across multiple approaches takes work. Someone needs to facilitate knowledge sharing, document learnings, manage tensions when approaches conflict. Running quadratic funding rounds requires infrastructure, administration, and ongoing maintenance. This is real overhead that shouldn’t be minimized.

Resource fragmentation: There is a meaningful tradeoff between focused investment in a single approach and distributed investment in multiple approaches. Sometimes, particularly in resource-constrained environments, concentrating resources really is necessary. Quadratic mechanisms don’t eliminate this constraint; they just provide a more nuanced way to navigate it.

Accountability diffusion: When multiple groups are pursuing different strategies, it can become unclear who’s responsible for what. This can make it harder to maintain accountability or make difficult decisions. Plural outcomes mean plural accountability structures, which is more complex to navigate.

Gaming and manipulation: Quadratic mechanisms can be gamed through strategies like splitting accounts (Sybil attacks) or coordinating voting blocks. While there are technical countermeasures (identity verification, contribution limits, social graph analysis), no mechanism is perfectly resistant to manipulation. The cultural context matters as much as the technical design.

Cognitive load: Holding multiple strategic approaches in mind simultaneously is genuinely harder than committing to one. There’s a reason why “focus” is such valued organizational advice. Participating in quadratic voting rounds requires time, attention, and judgment. You can’t just show up and thoughtlessly click.

Not everything can fork: Some resources and commitments are genuinely scarce and require prioritization. You can’t fork your organization’s legal liability or reputation. You can’t easily fork your brand or your relationships with key partners. Plural mechanisms work for plural resources, but not everything is plural.

These aren’t insurmountable, but they’re real. Functional pluralism works best when:

• There’s genuine strategic uncertainty about the best approach
• Multiple approaches can be resourced without undermining viability
• The cost of choosing wrong exceeds the cost of parallel exploration
• The network can maintain coordination mechanisms across approaches
• Time horizons are long enough that learning from experimentation is valuable
• There’s sufficient trust and cultural alignment to make plural mechanisms work

It doesn’t work well when:

• The situation requires immediate, coordinated action
• Resources are so constrained that any division is fatal
• Approaches are directly contradictory (can’t simultaneously do and not-do something)
• The context requires unified presentation to external stakeholders
• The network lacks the maturity or trust to handle plural outcomes responsibly

Like any organizational pattern, functional pluralism is a tool, not a religion. The question is always: what does this situation call for?

Conclusion: The Adaptive Organization

We’re entering a period of profound uncertainty. Climate chaos, technological disruption, institutional failure, rapid cultural change. The pace and complexity of transformation exceeds our capacity to predict or control. In such a context, the ability to explore multiple approaches, learn rapidly, and adapt continuously becomes more valuable than the ability to efficiently execute a single plan.

Functional pluralism is fundamentally about building organizational forms suited to this moment. Forms that embrace uncertainty rather than pretending to have eliminated it. Forms that distribute risk across multiple experiments rather than betting everything on a single approach. Forms that maintain optionality and evolutionary adaptive capacity even as they pursue specific goals.

Functional pluralism is an invitation to move from organizations as machines designed for efficiency, standardization, and control to organizations as ecosystems designed for diversity, resilience, and adaptation. The machine metaphor served us well in stable, predictable environments. But we don’t live in that world anymore, if we ever did.

The mechanisms matter. Quadratic voting and funding aren’t just interesting technical curiosities—they’re infrastructure for a fundamentally different way of coordinating. They make it possible to move beyond binary decision-making without sacrificing the ability to make decisions at all. They provide ways to surface and act on plural preferences that would be invisible or suppressed in traditional governance structures.

The forest doesn’t argue about which species should be planted, and it doesn’t vote yes or no on whether oaks or maples should exist. It explores what’s possible. Resources flow to what thrives. When conditions change, new forms emerge while others recede. The coherence is in the relationships, the nutrient cycling, the mutual adaptation. Not in homogeneity but in healthy interdependence.

This is a vision of an ecological civilization: organizations, and networks of organizations, that can fork without fragmenting, diverge without dividing, explore without exit. Not because they’ve transcended difference or achieved perfect unity, but because they’ve learned to make difference generative. Because they have mechanisms that allow plural preferences to produce plural outcomes.

Fork you might sound like fighting words. But in the context of functional pluralism, it’s a call to explore what’s possible together, through our very differentiation. Let’s turn our disagreements about strategy into experiments. Let’s transform the competitive dynamics of centralization into the creative dynamics of networked exploration. Let’s use our best tools, mathematical, social, technical, to make plurality not just possible but powerful and effective.

The future belongs not to those who can most efficiently execute a single plan, but to those who can most rapidly evolve, explore possibility space, and select for what works. Not to the organizations with the strongest center, but to the networks with the most generative edges. Not to those who can force consensus, but to those who can enable productive pluralism.

So fork you!

And fork me too.

But let’s stay together in collaborative learning networks of solidarity and mutuality as we inch towards protopia, one experiment and network at a time.

If you or your organization are interested in exploring these approaches to organizational design and network funding, OpenCivics Labs has been working diligently to apply this theory into practice through Localism.Fund, Regen Commons, and other networked experiments. Reach out to myself or Patricia Parkinson to explore how we could apply these ideas for your organization or network.