# The Goat Rodeo Index – a persistent Governance Antipattern | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [88]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Text), 2010-10-22 (from the career record), http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/the-goat-rodeo-complexdifficult-situation-scale-2064. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Scale for judging coordination failure among the many actors around a camp.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Goat Rodeo Index (2010): A ten-level scale for how hard a governance mess is: many actors, competing incentives, some irrational,...
  - Why Nothing Works: identifying and quantifying the Goat Rodeo governance antipattern (2010): One-page paper: warlord entrepreneurs fill the gap when accountability fails, and the goat rodeo,... (suggested by machine)
  - Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur (2015): Contributor: wrote chapter 1, Of Warlords and Rodeos: Why Nothing Works, for a collection on warlords as... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015).
- Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Goat Rodeo
- Topics: Goat Rodeo / warlord entrepreneurs — governance failure (100%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Goat Rodeo (13 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 3 undated); Goat Rodeo Index (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 3 undated); Why Nothing Works (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 1 undated); VUCA (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); wicked problems (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Coase (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Goat Rodeo; Goat Rodeo Index; Why Nothing Works
- Importance: core-text score 0.85 (1.00 is the top), number 10 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [25] [The Goat Rodeo Index (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/25.md): same career work: The Goat Rodeo Index
  - [725] [Vinay Gupta l Plausible utopias | Meaning 2012 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/725.md): same career work: The Goat Rodeo Index
- On the same works, just after: [25] [The Goat Rodeo Index (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/25.md); [725] [Vinay Gupta l Plausible utopias | Meaning 2012 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/725.md); [155] [Mother of Hydrogen (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/155.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: The Goat Rodeo Index – a persistent Governance Antipattern | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution, document, 2010-10-22, http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/the-goat-rodeo-complexdifficult-situation-scale-2064; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [88], https://guptaoption.com/texts/88.md.

## Passages
[passage 1](http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/the-goat-rodeo-complexdifficult-situation-scale-2064) There is a terrain where angels fear to tread. Over and over again it is discovered, and a small professional guild forms around it in the unfortunate field has arrived at the conclusion. The US military has called it VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) Social planners discovered it as wicked problems Later, the military called a specific facet of the terrain complex contingencies Sometimes those are known as complex operations The Cynefin framework calls the space chaotic Mathematics has some parallel ground in chaos theory, complexity and specifically complex adaptive systems Economics brushes past on multiple sides – Nash works on lock-ins, Coase on organization size and cost landscapes, and Benkler on network economics all touch it – as do all market traders Colloquially, terms like SNAFU and clusterfuck (surprisingly precise!) are liberally applied But of all these terms, the newest to my ears is also my favorite: a goat rodeo. Originally referring to the use of goats as lasso targets for children, the term has come to mean a profoundly messy, complicated situation which has few-to-no good outcomes. A fair example of the original use can be seen here. The Goat Rodeo, the Great Goat Rodeo, the Travelling Goat Rodeo etc. all capture this hard-to-define quality of utter fuckedness which is the essential instinctive reaction to the 100% genuine article situation in which four factors combine to produce the kind of insoluble nasty, the black tar at the bottom of the test tube of life, the problem. The situation has multiple actors The actors have incentives to compete with each other Some of the actors are not rational, typically by virtue of failing to grasp the situation Finding a solution may piss off larger actors from outside the current situation, disincentivizing success These situations are goat rodeos. There are other situations which the term may well perfectly apply to, but these situations, for sure, are goat rodeos. For all the fancy language used in the complexity consulting trade, we all know the feeling – 14 people around the table, with no clear idea of where they are going, going through the motions of mapping a complex problem with no belief that their respective organizational chains-of-command will every approve any common-sense solution to the problem at hand, and slowly the coffee pot drains, and people consider their pensions. For all the theory, for all the hope for elegant solutions, you know it when you see it and the political need is to be able to name and identify the goat rodeo when it arises, and begin to build an alternative rather than expecting it to be resolved in its current political form. The true goat rodeo is intractable. When you see it, run. If you can’t run, call me. Here, then, is the Goat Rodeo Index, a handy way of expressing the complexity and horror of a situation. I – A divorce. (damage is confined to one family unit) II – A commune. (a tribal level goat rodeo) III

[passage 2](http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/the-goat-rodeo-complexdifficult-situation-scale-2064) current political form. The true goat rodeo is intractable. When you see it, run. If you can’t run, call me. Here, then, is the Goat Rodeo Index, a handy way of expressing the complexity and horror of a situation. I – A divorce. (damage is confined to one family unit) II – A commune. (a tribal level goat rodeo) III – A dying industry; the extinction of one species. IV – The economic collapse of a small nation, or the death of a river. V – NATO. US healthcare policy. (regional, one sector) VI – The United Nations. The auto industry. Airlines. (global, but mostly-harmless) VII – The 2008 global liquidity crisis. Software. (global, fast moving, single sector) VIII – A severe global food crisis, or a lite pandemic. Religion. (multi-sector, with occasional flurries of mass mortality) IX – Kyoto, Copenhagen and the continuing failure to reach a global agreement about how to handle anthropogenic climate change including economic, scientific and political factors. (Planet-wide, cross-sector, high-stakes negotiations between a plurality of competing parties and sectors. But slow moving) X – Future problems with regulation of programmable matter, nano/biotechnology, AI, artificial life, self-replicating robots, elective germ-line modification, alien contact etc. (global, high stakes, technically sophisticated, riven by intra-sector and inter-sector competition, plus totally misaligned fundamental evolutionary cognitive biases – the whole megillah ) I have a new twitter account, @GoatRodeoX, which I use as link-and-chat overspill from my main twitter account. Please feel free to use the Goat Rodeo scale (“This is a 4th Degree Goat Rodeo problem”) when thinking about the scope and difficulty of problem areas. Note how many of the things we are struggling with are GR7 to GR9 problems. We’re chest-deep and rising in Goat Rodeos in the complex systems which keep our societies alive. If you’d like to read more about Goat Rodeos and State Failure, read “Why Nothing Works” which is one of the pieces of my writing that turned out exactly the way I wanted it to. Sobering. On how many sides are we hemmed in by the problems caused by our inability to agree?

---
End of [88] The Goat Rodeo Index – a persistent Governance Antipattern | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [25](https://guptaoption.com/texts/25.md) The Goat Rodeo Index (2011); the most closely related, [25](https://guptaoption.com/texts/25.md) The Goat Rodeo Index (2011); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.