It's one of those essays that is just plain important to read for life, because you will see the forces it describes everywhere around you, for the rest of your time on earth.
As ismail points out, people always conflate "flatness" with "structurelessness" or essentially some version of the wild west or a slumber party. This conflation is unfortunately too common and misses the point and reasons for more horizontal organization.
> Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group.
> This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.
Wow, what a money line. It's like a Rosetta Stone for a whole family of naive political ideas.
From ancap and the more extreme forms of libertarian thinking on the right, thru "flat organization" in the startup world, to explicitly leaderless leftist groups like Occupy Wall Street.
What they have in common is the fantasy that large human organizations can work without defined leadership.
I would rather say that it is extremely naive to believe that the systems we have inherited are optimal in any way.
What we (all four--me, the comment I'm replying to, the Tyranny of Structureless essay, and the article about Valve) -- what we're saying is that "no system" is not an improvement.
That's not to say any are perfect or fully optimized. There is room for innovation. As problems are solved, remining problems start getting more attention. And environments change over time. But established approaches are more optimal in at least some respects than failed experiments of the past.
New schemes are certainly a good idea if they actually improve on the current models and are based on reality and not fantasy or malfeasant popularism.
You just earned enemies and downvotes from the entire political spectrum. I'm onboard, let the martyrdom commence.
Likewise, a leaderless group can work very well for a while until someone joins the group who will put their own interests before that of the group. Then the group has much less capable defenses than a traditional hierarchy since by definition there is no leader to expel the new person. The chance a group meets such a person is clearly dependent on both the size of the group and the lifetime of the group.
In physical terms you might say that such groups are in an unstable equilibrium: any pertubation away from perfect harmony leads to a total collapse because there is no more benefit to cooperating if there are non-cooperators present.
I think the terminology we use may be letting us down.
Rather than talk about flat or horizontal organization, think it would be more useful to think in terms of encouraging freedom, autonomy and reducing bureaucracy while achieving {x} purpose.
How can one design for this?
To summarize, diffuse authority, have authority be ultimately responsible to the group (aka the employees as a whole), and avoid informal networks and concentration of resources by rotating responsibilities and equal access to equipment.
An employee-owned co-op with some or all of these systems in place could achieve the freedom and autonomy you seek. It has to be proved in practice, however. Many co-ops have more traditional authority structures still. Some bureaucracy is inevitable when designing a decision-making process for a large group.
yes, but these are measures designed to prevent an accumulation of power and information so that leaders remain interchangeable (like rotation); this does work against building individual competence. These are hard to maintain as a movement/organization gets bigger - for example the green party in Germany abandoned rotation and direct democracy at some stage.
I think that creating an organization that works well (any form of organization) is really a form of art - there seems to be some secret sauce not described in any books that makes it all tick. (for example even a dysfunctional system like this one somehow works for Valve, they seem to be doing fine from the business side of things)
If we were to make distributed systems more like humans, every 1000 systems would have a greedy psychopath amongst them. Unlike a chaos monkey type system, such bad actors could reprogram and take over the whole system. The chaos monkey is useful in software because they're ultimately controlled and can be shut down. Greedy psychopaths in meat space can pursue high value relationships and weave narratives to shut down systemic protections (I.e. WMDs, too big to fail). Why not perform some group screening to filter out excess greed, assuming it's a trait visible at the genetic level?
Disclaimer: these are my wandering thoughts likely more appropriate for sci fi that any society in my lifetime.
I have always looked on and decided I would create a “flat structure” in my co. To avoid “politics”.
I have since changed My view. An insight is that there will always be a hierarchy, or more appropriately recursive levels of control and moniotoring needed. The question is do you acknowledge that or not, do you design for that or do you let it spring up adhoc?
If you take a look at any biological system that must exist, sustain itself, there is always a control and monitoring system.
This model exists for example in the body i.e our regulatory system.
Stafford beer has developed a model for this, the viable system model.
This may be a sweeping statement. We do know of collections of cells, for example, the cells in the heart muscles beat together without a central monitor. Swarms like flocks of birds, schools of fish etc. do not seem to have a hierarchical order.
Steven Strogatz has a book called "Sync" related to spontaneous synchronisation. He also has given a Ted talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync/transcript...
If I recall correctly the birds are a network, where each one would monitor the ones closest to them and react based on that?
Which is monitoring and control. Just at a very micro level.
Also note the more appropriate term used above was “recursive” rather than hierarchy.
The behaviour of a flock of birds is referred to as a complex adaptive system, with emergent properties. It can be modelled quite accurately as a vsm.
Put simply one needs control, monitoring, feedback and information flow to exist. This is needed at every level (hence recursive).
Therefore rather than contradict my comment, your post is just a further expansion.
A complex adaptive system, can itself be modelled as a vsm.
This is how Craig Reynolds' Boids model works. [0]
However, I recall from word of mouth that if you factor in a reaction time that the model breaks down; though I can't see any references to this phenomena online.
Also, to state the obvious, nonhuman social structures aren't always applicable to human social structures. Very often, the have very limited applicability to human organizations, for the simple reason that they're biologically based.
Instead you should turn to history and anthropology, not biology for advice. Sadly, there are very few (if any) examples of long lived leaderless / flat human organizations. Inevitably, a small cadre form an elite core (either through influence (Politics! Gasp!) or force / intimidation (politics by other means! Double gasp!) You can see this with various anarchist organizations, intentional communities such as communes, protest movements, even the tragedy of the commons.
[0] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2010/04/when-pigeons-flock-wh...
This is equally flawed since this is a field swamped with risks of survival bias in anything you study.
I think this point still stands though.
I wonder if a small number of our species will come to terms with the fact that we're basically a virus cursed with short term thinking and come up with some means of actual long term survival before we're wiped out. I'm optimistic.
I still can't do anything but laugh when someone tells me they're an anarchist. No you're not, what you mean is you don't like the current structure, whatever it happens to be. You have an idea of what you think it should be, even if you can't clearly express what that is exactly or how to get there.
It wants a society where power (social, political, economic, etc) is not distributed based on a hierarchy.
Some misinterpret this as meaning that anarchists oppose the structuring of power in general (a.k.a. chaos), but in fact power can be organized through all kinds of non-hierarchical forms.
Anarchism as a broad philosophy is not prescriptive as to how power /should/ be organized, only how it should not. There are many complementary and competing ideas about how a society or group can best structure itself to minimize hierarchical power, and anarchists argue about these a lot.
They also actively experiment with them, and often the experiments fail. But sometimes they succeed, and those discoveries help all of us expand our possible modes of social organization. So basically I think even if you don't subscribe to anarchist philosophy, you should not be so dismissive of it.
Anarchist Club
Meeting Tuesday
Elections To Be HeldA control/monitoring system isn't required to be centralised, or even different from what is controlled/monitored. E.g. with groups of fish every fish just keeps his distance to other fish, resulting in the well known global as-if-centrally-coordinated behaviour of fish groups.
So I think the statement just means that there is some kind of control loop. It doesn't say how it looks.
If you don't plan for it you're going to nurture paranoia in employees.
> If you take a look at any biological system [..]
No, no, no. You can justify any systems by trying to extract analogy from `nature`.
It's worth noting that Stafford Beer dedicated a lot of his life to fixing very broken hierarchies which at their core tended to two extremes: management managing everything, crushing front-line autonomy; and management having no interest in anything outside metrics.
Beer took a cybernetic approach to designing organizational structures which is not at all unlike the design of electronic regulatory systems.
There are several of his talks online which are an accessible but easily-misunderstood introduction to the material he covered more fully in his books.
What are the other approaches?
The way I now think about it is the for organizations, the purpose of the hierarchy is not to directly control work, but to create supportive contexts with enough formal structure so that emergent organization gets the work done flexibly and humanely.
This isn't an unknown model; it's basically how western democracies relate to families. Nobody tells families what to do. We mostly trust they work it out on their own. But when things go wrong, we have a variety of interventions (from public service announcements to police to disaster response) to get things back in the good zone. To varying degrees, it's also how states relate to cities, counties, companies, non-profits, and a bunch of other entities.
For work, I think of that unit as the team. If I'm putting together a software team, I will make sure the team has all the needed skills for the work (e.g., front end, back end, ops, design, user research, product management, data science). But I don't want to design a micromanagement structure for how work flows between roles; I want to help the team self-organize in a respectful and collaborative way. If they are happy and getting shit done, my role as manager should be supportive. It's only if they get in trouble that I'll need to shift to controlling interventions.
Exactly. Trying to build a company without structure is like trying to build software without structure. If it's non-trivial software, and you insist that there should be no organization, the project will fail 100% of the time. And so, unconsciously or consciously, you or others on the project will in fact begin to structure the code.
I think the intended lesson has always been not to have a fixed, rigid structure, but one that can adapt easily to pressures to better suit the challenges it faces at any given time.
Thanks for this. One of the issues I found with the Agile implementation in my current company is that there's no longer an architectural/technical leadership within the team: the manager acts as scrum master, but it doesn't guide on how things should be done. As a result, as the quoted paragraph mentions, there's progress when the team is well suited for a given set of tasks. But most of the time progress is slow, because the team doesn't want to tackle the boring ones, or challenging tasks that would require the extra mile of effort.
That extends to the leadership of the company. It seems structureless, or "democratic" organizations can only work if the will/resolve/capacity of the lowest common denominator is good enough, and there's a large pool of commonly-minded individuals.
Once you go beyond a single Scrum team most organizations do need dedicated architects who provide guidance and maintain conceptual integrity across multiple teams. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/system-and-solution-arc...
It’s a chicken or the egg problem kind of problem. For all its talk about its love “freedom,” America is a deeply authoritarian and putative society.
The institutions that define much of our default “social scripts” (e.g. school, and later, work) are run like little dictatorships and their hierarchy and despotic bent come to define and permeate broader culture. Surrendering your “fundamental rights” (like freedom of speech and assembly), the moment you cross the threshold of your workplace leads to cognitive dissonance and a diminished belief in the truth of their “inalienable” status, both at work and in society at large.
The democratic participation of working class people in labor unions used to act as a check against this orientation, but as businesses interests have succeeded at undermining and destroying unions, businesses have filled the resulting power vacuum with even more authoritarianism, both in the workplace and in the outside politics they fund and support.
To change things, you’d have to do something like what Valve is attempting, but from the bottom up and at a more baseline level of culture and social arrangement.
Unions largely have done that to themselves, as they organized into the same structures they purport to combat and act accordingly, with a capitalistic bend.
And this narrative of course absolves business interests of things like how they used the red scare to attack union leadership, buying themselves judicial and favorable NLRB rulings, not to mention how curbed they are in their power relative to unions in Europe by the Taft-Hartley act:
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/taft-hartley-unions-right-to-...
Agile Coach here. Yes, this is toxic to quality and technical excellence.
The typical hybrid Scrum/corporate org chart I find puts product ownership (the “business”) in control and leaves each team’s tech lead (responsible for getting the team to the sprint goal) as the last line of defense of quality and technical excellence. What ends up happening, tech leads with no technical air cover give up craftsmanship in exchange for making the product owner happy and therefore keeping their job. A number of companies are going to wake up in a few years with an agile hangover of legacy garbage rivaling the mountain of shit they used agile to replace.
Should make a lot of consultants a lot of money.
When the Agile movement started out, it was very much about empowering teams to do good work. But the form that won, Scrum, was the one least disruptive to existing corporate hierarchies. (At least until somebody invented SAFe, a comically unagile Agile process.) I have very rarely seen "we're doing Agile" shops where technical concerns weren't entirely overruled by business concerns, when the goal of many early Agile proponents was to bring them back in balance. (And here I use "business concerns" advisedly, in that they're often much more about the political concerns of managers, not the actual needs of customers or the business.)
Your point about "legacy garbage rivaling the mountain of shit they used agile to replace" is spot on. If an org does a big rewrite without fixing the problems that got them the mess, they just get another mess. Switching from manager-dominated waterfall to manager-dominated mini-waterfall with some Agile labels slapped on doesn't fix the broken feedback loops and distorted values that created the legacy garbage. It would be as if George Washington had declared himself king after the Revolutionary War, or when a left-wing dictator overthrows a right-wing dictator. Deeper change is necessary.
thanks for the article link.
Specifically, the section titled "The Nature of Elitism"; and the definition of "elite", elite groups, friendship and communication channels.
It's interesting to think about as it relates to one's own experiences with group dynamics in the workplace and maybe even more so - volunteer activities where explicit structures may not be defined.