I just had the time to watch Larry Garfield's DrupalCon Amsterdam core conversation on managing complexity today. I did not have the chance to attend his session live due to other obligations, but it is nonetheless a topic I am very interested in.

The key point of the talk in my understanding is the Drupal community needs to decouple and be component based (evolving around more independent components), so responsibility and authority is distributed and local. Larry specifically calls out that Drupal 8 initiative leads and component maintainers are "glorified secretaries" with responsibility but no explicitly granted authority.

I am not a native speaker and although I had an idea, I wanted to clear up what authority would mean. According to Google the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. (I'll use hard power as a synonym). Larry alludes to parts of this definition in the talk with examples. While the talk is well worth the hour to get insights form one of the Drupal 8 initiative leads on some of the struggles we had in the Drupal 8 cycle so far, I think there are fundamental issues with the premise. The biggest fallacy is the gross generalisation and picking one facet out of a very multi-faceted situation, so the proposed solutions don't stand deeper scrutiny.