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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

Most flat org I've seen are not flat. The people naturally organised in tribes that are only known by themself, and that are in no organigram.

Each tribe have an implicit leader that bears no title yet influences all decisions just by regular social interractions.

Tribes communicate, negociate even, through the implicit leaders even if not directly.

Some kind of overuling bdfl also oversees all tribes, like a king, in case of conflict or emergency. Often the CEO.

It's not "flat org", it's just good ol' human society.

Rules are less clear, social skills are more required and if you get there in the early days you get a big advantages over the newcomers.

But if you get a nice tribe, things rock.

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Also, authority by expertise vs authority by hierarchy make a big difference.

As in, people have the security guy vet their security decisions — not because he has power over them but because they trust his expertise.

Suddenly everything becomes easy and self organized.

> Suddenly everything becomes easy and self organized.

Unfortunately not. A technocracy works great works great when choices are straight-forward, but one of the great responsibilities of leadership is taking decisions when things are anything but.

A good leader is not one who always knows the right answer, but one who knows how to figure out a good enough answer more often than not. And who does so under confusing circumstances, competing interests, and intense time pressure.

I am not sure finding acceptable answers in confusing and complex situations needs to be the role of a leader.

For instance in some orgs being a system architect has no hierarchical implications. People who are recognised to be good at designing systems get the title, take decisions when no clear consensus is reached, and can still be overruled when other experts veto their decisions (it then becomes a matter of which expert has precedence. E.g. legal wins over anything else)

And far more often than we like to admit, making a decision is more important than making the best decision.

And when wrong decisions are being made too often, formal structure helps to hold leaders accountable for their decisions.

When "everything becomes easy and self organized", it's generally because there is an implicit leader that makes it so. You may not see the leader, as he or she may have no title or recognition. But it's the person that people go to when they have problems, it's the person people turn their head to during disagreements in meetings, it's the person that will go from party to party to discuss "off-the-record" and do the real negotiations, it's the person that show example, encourage efforts and discourage disruption.

You just think it's self organized because a good leader makes you feel you are part of a whole, not that you are working under someone.

I've yet to see a group a human, working together over time, that doesn't see one leader emerge from the group. We can't help it.

I've went to NGO stating they were a flat org, hippie events where they promote the team spirit, eco-villages with community driven systems. They all have unacknowledged leaders.

Is it always a single person?

Leadership can be exercised by non-leaders, sure. But the kind of leader the GP is talking about is an authority figure which tends to be centralized in a given domain.

Referent power — people listen to you because they want to be like you. Even for leaders in a position of authority this is often the most powerful way to lead and influence.

https://www.toolshero.com/leadership/five-forms-of-power-fre...

I don't believe there's any such thing as authority by expertise for any meaningfully sized group of people. It works right up until there's a conflict between the security expert and the UI expert, or any other expert. Then whoever "wins" ends up being whoever has the most unspoken political power or the more forceful personality. And maybe the best choice ends up getting made for the product, and maybe it doesn't. And maybe it was one of those cases where the expert was just plain wrong but all of the other non-experts weren't empowered to push back, because there's no organization and it's supposedly a Platonic ideal of a meritocracy.

Every specialist faces a lifelong moral hazard/cognitive bias in which they overvalue the thing that's important to them (because it's literally their job to value that thing above all other considerations, and their value to their employer is based on a perception that the thing they know about is really really important), and they undervalue everything else. The job of an organization is to provide an explicit framework to allow everyone to have their say, and enable an actionable consensus to be formed. And every single person involved might think that that consensus is fatally flawed because it doesn't go quite far enough with respect to whatever the thing they care most about is. But really that's just the organization minimizing everyone's individual biases, so whatever gets produced is more likely to be closer to what's ideal for the majority of users.

The flat meritocracy ideal also ignores the fact that there are very few objectively correct answers to anything in software design. Get three different specialists in the same area and you might get three different answers over what needs to be done, and three different weightings of all the different pros and cons in every decision that affects other parts of the product. Most likely, none of them are wrong, but more importantly none of them are likely to be the One True Correct Answer, but it's human nature for each one of them to feel like that's what they're offering so of course they're going to argue for it. Most likely there is no One True Correct Answer to begin with, only sets of compromises that are more or less desirable. A true flat meritocracy would only work if there were correct answers that don't involve compromising anything else, and the specialists knew them all the time.

> Then whoever "wins" ends up being whoever has the most unspoken political power or the more forceful personality.

I suspect the forceful personality can be a learned behavior as well. I.e. your ideas get accepted when you really push for them, so then you do that more often. Then your peers expect this from you, so your lack of aggression might be seen as an implicit disapproval somehow (e.g. "X is usually excited by their good ideas, so this one must suck"). Pretty soon you are just being a dick all the time.

I hypothesize that in-person/video/audio meetings exacerbate this. In my experience you have to be forceful to interrupt whoever is talking to introduce your idea. Some people will talk in any gap and just keep going so it's a struggle to wait for natural breaks. However I always felt too rude to give feedback like "you generally talk too much" since that's essentially an attack on their personality, so it never seems to get better. In formats with more concurrency, (email, chat, collaborative documents, code review, etc.), this issue doesn't seem as bad (although async formats tend to have the opposite problem of chronic absenteeism, which I also found difficult to give feedback on).

All of human history in one comment.

Yep

He refers himself as “the leader of Doist’s back-end team” so there is indeed some sort of structure.

Read the comments before the article, and I was kind of hoping that maybe the 'Doists' were a faction within the company. Maybe those that organized around a "bias for action" or something. They frequently go to war with the Architecture Astronauts.

Darn!

They prefer the term Archonauts.

Lets examine this against the top, root comment, and their comparison to white water rafting.

We can debate our course while we cruise slowly on smooth water. But in choppy waters, we need a Captain to decide whether we go left or right around that big rock.

I dont see this as such a bad thing for Flat Orgs. Nobody is in charge, but someone has to make the decisions.

If we need to switch out who's in the role? Its a lot easier when there's no official title, no extra prestige, no pay raise, nothing but the burden of leadership actually felt as a burden.

But what'll make that burden worthwhile? I care that my comra-... coworkers and I get this chance to enrich ourselves and our clients. Maybe we're sheltering in place from an economic maestrom outside, maybe we're here to make a home, maybe this is one step on a larger journey. Regardless, we have much to offer one another along the way.

One problem is the lack of accountability. Someone is making decisions, but that someone is not taking responsibility of outcomes of those decisions.

> If we need to switch out who's in the role? Its a lot easier when there's no official title, no extra prestige, no pay raise, nothing but the burden of leadership actually felt as a burden.

No, it's harder. If nobody is actually named the leader, there can be no official point in time when the role changes hands. The organization will most often break apart at that point.

That's what the essay is about.

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