---
title: "Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners"
link: http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html
published: 2015-03-01
category:
  - Article
tags:
  - culture
---
The full blog post is titled [On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft](http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html)  by [[Simon Wardley]].

The concept of Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners is something that I share with many people in thinking about their organizations. I learned it from Simon Wardley in the linked article, and have been sharing it ever since.

I find it a really useful way to think about the role of people within an organization, and what a person is best suited for. I am a Pioneer-to-Settler kind of guy.

Simon has written about the concept much earlier than the linked 2015 post (circa 2005 - 2006), including this article where he sources it back to [[Robert X. Cringely]]'s book, where it is called _Commandos, Infantry, and Police_:

http://blog.gardeviance.org/2014/11/bimodal-it-is-long-hand-for-snafu.html

And one more with all the mapping and diagrams laid out:

http://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/06/pioneers-settlers-and-town-planners.html

[[Jeff Atwood]] aka Coding Horror / Stack Overflow / Discourse wrote about that way back in 2004:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/

> As I was driving home, I found myself thinking about a favorite section of the book Accidental Empires, by longtime computer journalist Robert X. Cringely. Originally published in 1993, it's getting a little long in the tooth, but it still contains a lot of great insights about the personalities that drove innovation in silicon valley – from a guy who personally knew many of the players.
>
>In the chapter "On The Beach", Cringely talks about the three distinct groups of people that define the lifetime of a company: Commandos, Infantry, and Police: