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Comment by wutf | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

When looking for a job, be careful when leadership says their organization is flat. You will probably find people at the top (C level) who hate being told what to do and hate management. That will poison the structure and coordination of the company. People need some sort of structure so they know where to turn to for help, responsibilities are assigned and there is accountability.

I'm not advocating having rigid, strong management and structure at a company, just that if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge. And that is far, far worse.

> I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

OTOH, every place I've seen, corporate and government, with a visible and formal hierarchy has also been a mess featuring hidden power structures, informal and outside of office meetings where decisions were made, and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

(One big feature of California's "public meeting" laws is to try to limit and expose this in the highest levels of certain representative government decision-making bodies, but its pretty much a universal feature of human societies.)

> if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge.

That will also happen, pretty invariably, if you have an official structure.

Sure, but if you're not part of the informal power structure, having some influence through an official structure is better than having no influence at all.

In my (somewhat limited) experience, you need a balance to get good work done: too much official structure slows things down and limits good people, but too much informal structure leads to the kind of place described in "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."

It seems like what people forget is that whether you have structure or not, it takes effort to make it work well. You can't just throw someone a job title in leadership and assume they'll do a good job.

Leadership by example, training, adhering to values all matter. It just so happens that use a tried and true system of actual structure gives you a wealth of knowledge and experience to pull from.

Could a flat org work? Maybe? So far, it seems like every company that tries and gets to scale has serious problems. Maybe it makes sense stick to innovating on your core business, and sticking to business best practices in your processes. (A recent post by the former Cofounder/CEO of Brightroll digs into this: https://medium.com/@todsacerdoti/0-to-640m-non-obvious-lesso...)

Has there been any attempt to make a periodically oscilatting structure? One that has a structure and then gives it up and regrows one, and so on..

Sortition is one mechanism that's been used. Among the most fascinating articles I've read in the past 4-5 years was Aeon's article on randomness as a choice option (going beyond just leadership):

Michael Schulson, "How to Choose" https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...

I find the idea of a democratic structure oddly appealing. Don't like your boss? Vote them out! Love someone and wish they'd be in charge, because they're basically in charge anyway? Vote them in! If anonymous voting happened at every level, it's possible that the incompetent people hiding away in the company will quickly get revealed and demoted (which might make them leave altogether).

That said, the democratic approach has a lot of other issues in the form of cohorts and cliques. A manager might secure just enough votes to stay in power by having quiet conversations with some employees, using power to give them breaks, etc. I'd love to see a frank discussion or proposal about how to dissuade that.

Ever lived in a condo with an HOA (Home Owner's Association)? You get the opposite problem. One person, household, or small set of owners wants to be in power so they can make changes that benefit them, and everyone else wants nothing to do with the HOA so they can't be blamed when something goes wrong and because they're too busy with their lives. So a vote is held, most people don't show up, and even if they do, they don't want to do the jobs themselves so they vote for the people who want it, and the result is usually terrible.

This. And really, it's the same problem in elected government too. Often times the people who desire power the most are the last ones that should have it. People who might actually make great leaders (or at least would not be tyrants) often don't want to get involved with politics.

In the work setting I've never seen management determined by vote, but you see the phenomenon just the same. Most people who want to climb the management ladder are normal, sane people, but the power-hungry are the ones who try the hardest to get to the top. In an organization that doesn't properly evaluate people you end up with the brutes in charge, which makes life miserable for everyone else.

> Often times the people who desire power the most are the last ones that should have it.

The funny thing is that the first democracy which called itself a democracy was perfectly aware of this problem - and the tyranny of informal leaders - and had a simple and effective solution to both problems: filling chairs by lottery.

I think you missed the point of the Wikipedia article. Structurelessness (and that is still what you're describing) leads to a tyranny where there are unspoken leaders who basically bully the rest of the organization. You described exactly that and then asked how to avoid it. Short answer: You probably can't. It's a human problem, not an organizational or process one.

Clear lines of ownership and responsibility do wonders for just letting coders code, and let everyone else decide what they code.

Exactly, it's "leaderless" in the same sense that a class of high schoolers is "leaderless."

No, I got that. The article also has the person who demonstrated it advocating for democratic control of leadership, and I was commenting on how that might run into its own troubles.

The biggest problem is that the business owners want management to represent their interests; if they were elected by the workers, they would more naturally represent the interests of the workers. It might work out in a worker's co-op where the workers and owners are the same people.

I'm trying to understand how a "flat org" like this is different from a co-op. Seems like the "flatland" companies give you autonomy without ownership, which seems bad to me. It's only flat so far as the actual owner allows it to be, and you end up with a bunch of people with autonomy with no stake in the outcomes.

Co-ops still have boards and often employees that report to the board (or another employee). There's a structure there, but they also tend to be smaller so the structure has less impact.

I was treasurer of my housing co-op and we had one full-time employee who reported to me and the board. That employee (the coordinator) hired contractors for maintenance, bookkeeping, as well as things like the laundry machines.

Even large co-ops (like clothing stores) have the members vote a board in that sets up the structure.

I don't want my job to include voting people off the island and MORE office politics and meetings. Please no.

Too late. As soon as you have more than three human beings in the same group, there's politics and meetings. You can either participate, or allow others to dictate to you.

I know. I said I don't want -more- of that.

Every single member of the team having to keep up with every single other person is unnecessary and impossible past a certain number of people. Certain things don't scale well.

Plato's dictum.

The only thing that works against cliques in democracy as you described is to have sufficient number of people at each level. The large parliaments are there specifically to block too strong unilateral cliques forming. A democracy full of tiny squabbles is a working democracy - a democracy in unilateral ageeement on all matters really is not a democracy anymore.

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

The full article. Her point seems to really boil down to this:

   We cannot decide whether to have a structured or
  structureless group, only whether or not to have a
  formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be
  used any longer except to refer to the idea it
  represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups
  which have not been deliberately structured in a
  particular manner. Structured will refer to those which
  have. A Structured group always has formal structure,
  and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It
  is this informal structure, particularly in
  Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.

And she continues on, the next section is particularly, interesting, describing how these elites she refer to create a network of communication which others aren't party to.

I really recommend reading the whole thing. It's a pretty interesting article and, I think, gets at the problems (solvable in some or many cases) in any large organization, structureless or not.

EDIT: And do read the article. It's much more than just the snippet I included. That's just her thesis, the rest explains it better and the consequences of insisting on informal organization.

The problem is that the skills required to win votes generally don't have a lot to do with the skills required to be competent in any field other than electioneering. So elections don't end up quickly revealing and demoting the incompetent people so much as they do raising up people who are competent at electioneering, regardless of their competence or lack thereof in other matters.

An example from history. Elections are actually how volunteer units in the early days of the American Civil War selected their officers. Every soldier got one vote, the whole regiment got together and cast their ballots, and the guy who got the most votes got to be the commanding officer. Very democratic!

With just one problem: in almost all cases, soldiers voted overwhelmingly for officers who promised not to make them do all the tedious army stuff they hated, like drilling in formation and practicing their marksmanship... which it turns out are actually very important things for a unit to do, if it wants to actually perform in combat. So these units had a bad habit of dissolving into mobs of terrified amateurs (and therefore getting slaughtered) the moment they entered battle.

Eventually it was decided that it was more important that army units be able to function in combat than that they be democratic organizations, and the elected "soldier's friend" officers were kicked out and replaced with hardasses. The soldiers hated them, and swore under their breath every time they were called out to drill yet again. But they learned how to fight.

That's incredibly interesting - do you have a source for it?

There's some good pointers to the election processes of a few different regiments (North and South) here: http://civilwartalk.com/threads/question-about-election-of-o...

Isn't that what reviews are for? If you have substantive reasons not to like your boss then giving them a lousy review is easy.

A manager who is getting lousy reviews from engineers is going to face difficulties with the higher ups.

A little fascism goes along way.

The opposite of anarchy isn't fascism. Read the author's full paper, it's got a lot of insight into the workings of organizations in general.

Are you talking about the wikipedia article or http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I have been in those same activist groups. Right now I work for an "engineering run" organization. Maybe my emphasis should have been on _a little_.

Every organization collapses towards high-school. Those that don't are the most successful. Just as the majority of Olympic athletes are freak'n amazing, the contest is rarely not who excels but who doesn't falter.

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