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Comment by ismail | Hacker News Reader

Great post. “Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion”

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model

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> If you take a look at any biological system that must exist, sustain itself, there is always a control and monitoring system.

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...

Thanks for the link will take a look. Not familiar with the beating heart example but I do recall the example of the flock of birds. So will analyse that.

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.

CAS do form hierarchies, however.

> If I recall correctly the birds are a network, where each one would monitor the ones closest to them and react based on that?

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids

The is some space between always a command and control mechanism and not always a central monitor. There are cells that communicate / coordinate via hormones. So you get coordinated behaviour via stimulus / reponse.

Pigeons flocks have hierarchy.[0]

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...

> Instead you should turn to history and anthropology

This is equally flawed since this is a field swamped with risks of survival bias in anything you study.

> Sadly, there are very few (if any) examples of long lived leaderless / flat human organizations.

I think this point still stands though.

Exactly. There is survival bias precisely because flat organizations have never survived long enough to become the dominant form.

it's not survivor bias if you're studying long-term survival

Exactly. We're just a blip. To say we've figured out how to survive ling term is unbounded ego.

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'll never forget the hilarity I felt when I heard about the gigantic political fights happening at a big convention of anarchists in Minneapolis in the 80s. I was a college student working on a history degree and remember thinking, "Wait, why are people who want a society with no laws or rules holding a convention? And what is the fight about? Rules? Goals? Leadership?"

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.

Anarchism as a political philosophy does not "want a society with no laws or rules".

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 Held

> the cells in the heart muscles beat together without a central monitor

A 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.

Yeah, I used to make the same mistake.

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.

> Stafford beer has developed a model for this, the viable system model.

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.

"Beer took a cybernetic approach to designing organizational structures"

What are the other approaches?

Sports analogies.

"An insight is that there will always be a hierarchy, or more appropriately recursive levels of control and moniotoring needed."

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.

> Exactly. Trying to build a company without structure is like trying to build software without structure.

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.

> The question is do you acknowledge that or not, do you design for that or do you let it spring up adhoc?

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`.

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