This fundamentally changed my view on flat organizations, realizing they were vulnerable to predators with such simple tactics.
This has been noted as a failure mode of democracy — as people won’t risk their individual reputations to challenge radicals garbed in “noble” causes, until the situation is already dire.
In the 50s, John Boyd did a lot of really interesting work on the idea of "mission command" and the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop. Although he did his work for the US military, I think his ideas are broadly applicable to social movements as well, as they describe how "swarms" of autonomous actors can easily overwhelm hierarchical organizations due to their ability to make decisions faster.
Flat and structureless are not necessarily synonymous. It's certainly possible to have a highly structured yet flat organization with clear roles and non-hierarchical decision-making.
When there is no authority, predators become the authority.
Flat structures may, or may not, have a head.
What they don't have is deep hierarchy.
Mind that this has its own set of benefits and disadvantages. Fewer deparmental turf battles, but very broad spans of control and/or highly autonomous roles.
An ant or bee colony is a flat structure with a strong central control, at least reproductively: the queen. This isn't an ideal comparison, of course, as the individual workers don't take orders from the queen (or anyone else), but instead respond largely based on instinctual behaviours and pheremone signalling (in the case of ants at least, I'm not certain of bees).
Flat structures may lack any leadership, or have various rotating or ad hoc leaderships. These are more akin to the structureless organisations Freeman writes of.
An example is the UK political system, where it's clear who has "say", but the structure for dealing with quite serious misbehaviour is very outdated. Only today there was an article in the BBC about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65856484
Countries without a robust consensus-based governing process and an established process for removing someone from power - and that's most of them - are susceptible to strongman politics. Think Putin, Jinping, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Saddam, Gaddafi, Tito, Kagame, Mugabe, Hitler, Mussolini, etc...
Outside of politics, wealth and celebrity are the obvious paths to unaccountable power. Jeffrey Epstein is an example of how a predator can get away with despicable behaviour without comeuppance for decades. Rupert Murdoch has frequently been at the centre of various scandals and serious controversies, and seems to have escaped pretty much unscathed by treating it as all part of the business.
The venture capital environment in silicon valley seems to have some of the hallmarks; we can see people like Holmes or Bankman-Fried trying to exploit the system to gain power.
Academia also springs to mind. It's surprisingly easy to get into powerful positions with very little skill/knowledge besides networking. I believe there's a real issue with toxic, abusive PhD supervisors in the UK and potentially the US, which is a classic consequence of heirarchies with little accountability.
But this doesn't feel too relevent to the discussion of whether an organisation can operate effectively with a flat structure.
[1] https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/read-the-cias-simple-sab...
Power structures tend to form either where a single individual can bring things about, or where they can prevent their occurrence.
In a consensus organisation (either intentionally so or de facto), the individual or faction which can prevent business from transacting has effective control. If there are multiple such entities, what results is gridlock. This is unfortunately one potential failure mode of democratic or representational government.
Sabotage is one means of accomplishing that goal.
Having structure and roles is OK in a grassroot, horizontal movement.
> inserting a crazy and letting it go from there
A professional agitator with a covert political agenda is hardly a "crazy".