Flat organizations are the most hierarchical

I've seen this often claimed, and buy it in the long run based on experiences I've heard from employees that work at these kind of companies, but I also feel like there's missing context and subconscious assumptions by writers who claim this.

There is an alternative to both informal and formal power structures. It's "everybody does what they think best". Who approves new product launches? Nobody does, you just push code to the live site. Who handles time-off requests? What, you thought you'd get time off? Who handles resource allocation? Everybody basically has control of their own time and nothing else. If you're lucky you might actually be able to get rough consensus, but basically totally anarchy reigns.

Most people would say, correctly, that this is a disaster in the making. Think of the product chaos as each new feature breaks the last one! The burnout! The privacy violations in the making! The employees that are sleeping with one another! The laws that are being broken! And all of these happen, and they actually are real problems that can potentially sink the company. But hypergrowth (temporarily) solves all known problems - if people are really desperate for your product, they'll put up with anything that is borderline functional, and if you hire smart people who are passionate about the problem you're solving, most of your employees will be capable of putting out something borderline functional on their own volition.

It's probably no accident that the companies that have experimented with flat hierarchies - Google in 2001, GitHub ~2010, Zappos in 2013 - are ones that were undergoing hypergrowth at the time. Many of them rolled it back after the eventual problems became apparent, but it may actually have been appropriate for circumstances at the time.

I think this (a bit long) 1970 read should be mandatory for anyone who wants to abolish hierarchies and make an organization that works "differently":

THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS : https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

tl;dr: in the 70s feminist groups started organizing but they did not want to reproduce typical hierarchical structures. So many opted for "structurlessness" which led to implicit structures that the author claim were at least as oppressive as explicit ones.

It is possible to have an enjoyable flat organization and oppressive hierarchies are avoidable. But if you want to have a different kind of hierarchy, understand the organizational needs of your group, the balance of inherent powers within it, and create a hierarchy designed by taking all this into account, because otherwise these things will organize spontaneously anyway.

“A heterarchy may be parallel to a hierarchy, subsumed to a hierarchy, or it may contain hierarchies; the two kinds of structure are not mutually exclusive. In fact, each level in a hierarchical system is composed of a potentially heterarchical group which contains its constituent elements.”[1]

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy