Air-traffic control for your company

On 30 June 1956 two planes left Los Angeles three minutes apart and collided over the Grand Canyon. 128 people died. Yet neither aircraft did anything wrong.

They were flying under a doctrine called see and avoid, which put the whole job of not hitting anything on two pilots using their eyeballs alone. Above 20,000 feet it was all based on trust. Which worked, because the sky had been empty for as long as anyone could remember.

Thankfully the response was not better pilots, more training, or a rule that pilots should look harder. It was to admit that the picture had outgrown a person. By 1958 Congress had created the FAA and bought the country a radar-and-controller layer.

The genius of what they built is what it does not do. The controller sees two hundred aircraft and sends you only nine words: traffic, two o'clock, three miles, climbing, report in sight. Only what you need to know, in your vocabulary, timed so you can act on it.

She does not tell you everything. Total awareness needs to live at the centre, but transmitting everything costs lives. That asymmetry is the only reason the modern sky works, and it has become so ordinary that twelve million people a day trust it without question.

Every org still runs on see and avoid. Post it in the channel and hope the right person is looking up. That almost worked while we moved at human speed and the sky was thin. But it just won't scale to agents.

Who is building this

Concentric is built by Tim Davey.

He has helped scale several companies and every one of them had the same problem. Growth adds people, and now agents. It does not add product: the good companies hold their focus and keep offering one clear thing. So a team that keeps getting bigger has to work around a surface that stays the same size. Everyone is running experiments, learning something, adding a nuance. All of it has to reach the rest of the team fast, and none of it can collide.

onefinestay was the clearest case. It turned thousands of private homes into one distributed hotel across five continents, and was acquired by Accor in 2016. Then the London Interdisciplinary School, a university organised around problems rather than disciplines, which The Times called the most radical new university to open in decades.