The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
jofreeman.com
jofreeman.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292289
> This is really a good essay and surely deserves a high profile, but it's disappointing that it, and some bits of angst about Valve's internal situation, seem to be the only discussions of organisational structure that get widely shared these days. Back from about the '70s to the early '90s it seems that there was quite a lot of management-theory/theory-of-the-firm research into different organisational structures and how they affected innovation, ability to change and other desirable or undesirable characteristics of organisations. And it didn't just stay hidden in academia, as the results got a fair amount of coverage in newsmagazines and the like in the early '90s. (Which is how I heard about it: I'm no expert.) As you might expect, the findings on relatively "structureless" orgs seem to have been pretty compatible with Freeman's observations. But there was also research on many other unusual forms of structure and hierarchy, for example the "matrix management" which famously got implemented at Dow Chemical in the 1970s https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations .
> But for some reason interest and attention seems to have completely faded out, at least at the popular level, by about 2000 or so. So the Valve situation gets reported on as if it's some kind of unprecedented novelty, and not an example of a sort of situation whose outcomes had been hashed out pretty thoroughly a decade or more earlier.
Matrix managment, holacracy, consensus, etc etc.
Is this a field where people discover things that last? For instance, fundamental limits to human communication, fundamental quantities that are conserved no matter what the configuration of management is.
Computer science has Brooks' observations on team size and communication, but that was only ever a guess, it's not really a law.
Generally people seem to adopt decision and management mechanisms that purport to address the pain they were having in their previous organization, while being proven enough to be plausible ("$FAMOUS_COMPANY does it") and not quantifiable enough to be a definite failure yet. Probably someone is writing a new airport book on "Founder Mode" right now!
So... what is known about human management? I'm not a fool, people are ever-changing and complex and what they want from their organizations changes all the time, but are there any eternal truths?
That is, a control system (management structure) needs to match the system it controls in complexity. [2]
This book lists many of the major variables you need to control to run a project [3] such as "hiring/managing employees", "communications with stakeholders", ... A project has a beginning and end, unlike the activities of an ongoing business, but the list in PMBOK is pretty exhaustive. A small project/organization doesn't required a dedicated part for each one of them but as you get larger you need HR, PR, the dedicated project manager and such.
[1] A reductivist statement, yes, but Ashby's law takes the reductivism out of reductionism.
[2] The index case is the Wright Brothers' flier. People thought aviation was a matter of lift and thrust but it's actually a matter of controlling roll, yaw and pitch so you don't tumble and had Galileo understood that he could have built a glider.
I think you know effectively the answer is no. Once you get past physiological needs, there aren't really any eternal truths for people. They need food, water air and to maintain a body temp.
After that, there are mostly generally observed things that hold for large groups of people. But there are always exceptions.
Is there any food that everybody loves? Any sport, any activity? It's hard to believe there would be a single thing that everyone wants in a system as complex as management in a company. Nothing that can be an eternal truth.
A bit tongue in cheek, but the closest is probably, keep your manager happy with you or get fired. But even that has exceptions.
I think a right-wing movement is more comfortable with the idea of social hierarchy, whether it is a formally structured group where "he who pays the piper pays the tune" [1] or the kind of group that the article describes where there are people who run the group without formal authority. There have been "left-wing" groups that have a strong hierarchy, such as Lenin's Bolsheviks, but groups like that have limited appeal to most people by the 1960s [2] [3]. There are also the various membership-based groups such as the Sierra Club and NOW which have limited effectiveness because they aren't accountable to members [4]
So conflicts like the above vex leftists because they'd like to put their egalitarian values to work.
My "3 year" case study was the time I was a leader in the Tompkins County Green Party. After the 2000 Ralph Nader campaign we had a lot of energy and decided we wanted to build an organization to contest local elections. We had luck early on taking advantage of fusion voting [5] to decisively settle a power struggle within the local Democratic party so people perceived we had power.
There were about 50 people who turned up to meetings, but 3 or 4 people had the time and energy to do the work, I don't think we formed a clique, we would have accepted just about anyone who was basically aligned with us and willing to put in the work. I ran a web site and plastered the town with posters and mostly did as I pleased except for the few times somebody said "you went too far with that poster", that is, most of the members were basically deferential to the people who did the work.
As time went on though the issue of being a spoiler [6] came up over and over again. We got a famous green thinker who was shortlisted for the 2004 Presidential race by the national party [7] to run for mayor, but people in our own party were afraid "if we run Glover, the cop is going to win". Each time we the prospect of running a candidate happened the group would split in half and by the 2004 race we couldn't really go forward because locally, statewide, and nationally we couldn't make up our mind if we even wanted to run a candidate. My strongly held opinion was "Fuck 'em" when it came to the Democrats and that a political party that didn't run candidates had no reason to exist; but I couldn't force that opinion on people that I felt a representative of and the other leaders felt the same way so we folded the organization up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network
[2] https://genius.com/The-beatles-revolution-lyrics
[3] A Leninist would say you're a poseur if you aren't part of an organization with the resolve and discipline to smash the capitalist class and the state the supports it.
[4] A case study in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
[5] https://ballotpedia.org/Fusion_voting
[6] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/reflections-on-the-2000-u...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone
is of interest. In my mind the most interesting application of that was the contemporaneous Falun Gong movement in China.
Falun Gong practitioners would show up at a park and practice a set of simple physical and spiritual practices; the organization was deliberately structureless because organizations of all kinds in China are required to admit a cadre of Communist Party members to surveil and control the organization. No organization = no control network. (The very act of gathering a group of people at a point, however, is a basic practice of military science)
The one bit of authority in the organization is a book which is said to be infallible, which defends them from having the book rewritten by the authorities. (We know pretty well how the Communists and Republican governments oppressed folk religion movements such as the Huxian cult, but Taoism in its established form has always been some selection of folk practices which are approved by the authorities as long as China has had governments)
An unfortunate consequence of this is that Falun Gong cannot change any doctrine, such as their belief that "being gay is bad for your gong." They lost the support of mainstream western organizations and descended into pandering to right-wing nuts to get what support they could.
I wrote something reasonably short here:
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/to-grow-you-must...
I wrote something much longer here, but this material is mostly from other CTOs who I surveyed:
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos...
If you are in New York City, we have 2 different speakers who will speak to 2 different aspects of this problem, at our event on February 27th.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=etoy+vs...
First you need to know how conformist the culture was in the 1990s, when my wife and I would visit Manhattan we looked like two hippie throwbacks to the 1960s and got told we were the weirdest looking people in the city. I couldn't have stood to live there because you would look up and see a Tommy Hilfiger billboard and look down and see a lot of people wearing Tommy and if you couldn't take it, you couldn't take it. You couldn't get as good of a cup of coffee as you could get at an indy espresso bar in a small town in a flyover state because there was a Starbucks on every block to convince stock market analysts that it was like that coast to coast.
In Dec 1999 there were the WTO riots which have broken the WTO ever since (e.g. the old "corn law" fight over free trade in agriculture reached the impasse it at now) and it had an effect that washed over everyone. For a few weeks there was a wave of honesty, for instance I saw an article in the tech press that somebody went to a Microsoft press conference and he was bored out his mind.
So when Etoy had their domain stolen by Etoys many people from radical artists to people who didn't want to have their private property taken away rallied. We had a system where people would visit our web site and we'd use iframes to DDOS their web site. It ran for a few days with no effect, then I contributed a code snippet that made the attack many times more effective and brought the site down for a short time during the last shopping day of the year. Immediately they called the FBI who pulled the server out of the rack.
We put a lot of effort into public relations and talking to the media, never mind flooding stock market discussion groups with propaganda. We knew we were being infiltrated by the FBI so we used the tactic of creating new mailing lists with (we believed) a clean list of participants periodically. (A general answer to "Eternal September" problems)
The stock dropped precipitously when we were working on it, and a few weeks later they settled with etoy, an event we knew about before it was announced at their earnings call. It wasn't a good earnings call and the stock price spiraled downward and eventually the company folded (might have been more than three weeks but the critical part was about that long)
The management and IT folks at Etoys would minimize the contribution of activists, wrote a blog about how they defeated our DDOS (but we scared them enough to call the FBI, caused a panic on the most critical day of the year, and could boast that the registration numbers that they triumphantly announced were inflated dramatically by fake users we injected) and would say that the company failed because the earnings were not good.
I would say, however, that Etoys could have been a viable business in the long term if investors believed in management, selling toys online in 1999 was an idea with legs. Activism contributed to investors not believing in management, so they were forced to throw in the towel.
Even spontaneous groups must filter for Competence. This is fundamental.
From domain-specific skills to planning and managing the sustainability of the project, a spontaneous group must be more than superficial associates and barnacles.
For a humorously timeless example, see the revolutionary movement in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/The_People%27s_Front_of_...
Where there is a written power structure you can usually appeal to it and eventually get something done. Where there exists no written power structure at all, you're out of luck unless you can quickly figure out what the power structure is.
A written power structure is a low resolution map. It's not perfect, but it gives you some idea of where to start making sense of things. A flat organization is never actually flat, but it also has no guideposts at all to show you even the rough outlines of the real hierarchies.
Imo, that is argument for written structure. Written structure is easier to talk about openly talk about, reason about and fix. Unwritten structure is inferior consequence of its lack.
It's an example that Zizek has often given. The startup boss is more insidious than the old school boss because he's "just your pal". The traditional boss you can rebel against, in the startup you can't because duh, you have no boss, so what are you complaining about? It's a way to disguise power.
Another thing is that it's also a way to dodge responsibility, as you see in tech. When a Japanese company fucks something up, you'll often see CEOs take salary cuts and sincerely apologize in front of the public. No need in startup land, nobody was responsible.
So yes, the startups or orgs have to very explicitly lay down processes, otherwise the red flag is probably warranted.
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/the-accidental-d...
I think a functional engineering decision process is more akin to a veto process. Someone, say Olivia in your example, would be tasked with selecting the language for the job and submitting the technical rationale for it and the relevant authorities (e.g. CTO or product owner) would sign off on the decision. They will normally have the power to approve or reject but not to impose certain solution. In a traditional hardware engineering, this is how it's done, where an engineer submits a design and it needs to be approved by relevant subject matter experts in various domains, such as material, thermal, structure, safety etc.
Good organizations allow interactions without too many gates. Which is what the good kind of flat refers to.
As well as, "the tyranny of pretending that rules are much more absolute than their authors." :-)
I think the opposite of the tyranny of structurelessness looks more like our legal + regulatory system where sometimes you need a team of experts to tell you where you can build a building, or the military where everything is so regimented so that you need to fill out forms to buy toilet paper.
The premise is that in the 1500s, no one thought Europe was going to be the next great power. The dominant civilizations at the time were the Chinese and the Ottomans.
Why did Europe win? Because no one could unify Europe. It was basically a collection of states.
Whereas China and the Ottoman Empire were centralized. The problem with centralization is that if the guy at the top says to do something, everyone must fall in line, even if it's a bad idea.
China used to have the most dominant navel fleet in the world. Then in the early 1500s, their government decided to stop building ships. Which ultimately led to them falling behind in the world order.
In Europe however, even if one country received a decree to stop building ships, it wouldn't stop the others from doing so. This created a hotbed of innovation and competition that allowed them to develop rapidly. And establish dominance.
The trade offs between centralization and decentralization are fascinating.
The more decentralized your decision making the more efficient the system runs. However, this has drawbacks as it becomes hard or impossible to focus on big problems. On the flipside centralized systems are highly vulnerable to corruption. No system is perfect, and the most sensible systems use a combination of both.
Mao's command economy had the country stuck in poverty. Deng's market economy reforms turned them into a superpower.
You often see politicians and ideologues who insist that the market is the only solution to any problem, and these people are wrong and their solutions can lead to tragedy.
As far as the market goes, I think part of the problem is that most industries are not true free markets, AKA: high competition, low barriers to entry.
Industries that are close to true free markets: restaurants, barbers, spas, handcrafted goods, almost any manner of small business.
These are some of the most ancient industries and have never collapsed or become overrun by corporations.
The issue with something like deregulating banks is that banking is not a true free market. There is no high competition (it's concentrated by a few corporations). So deregulating it can be disastrous because it's basically allowing a corporate monopoly to run wild.
If they deregulated it AND made a massive concerted effort to bring a ton of new, smaller, independent banks to the market, perhaps it could become a self-sustaining free market that truly benefits the people, with little need for government intervention.
That sounds like the classic "if all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails".
It's true that decentralised decision making can make good use of local information. But you're ignoring the kind of problems that are created by decentralisation itself, so they can't be fixed by more of it.
A system that is being optimized with only local information is prone to getting stuck in local minima, situations which can be very far from the true optimum.
To escape from the local minima you need to gather global information compiled from the whole system, and use it to alter the decisions that individual actors would make from just their locally achievable information.
That's the role of regulation, and why regulated markets work better than chaotic ones. Regulation can make individuals coordinate to achieve larger goals than what's possible without it. And to enforce effective regulation you need some kind of authority, which is centralised.
Of course that raises the question of how that authority is created and what goals does it set; for that, we get politics, with various groups trying to influence what the authority will decree and whose interests it will pursue harder.
I'm not sure we do. Most parts of the world have transitioned from state owned power markets to ones that are mostly private sector driven. Even distribution infrastructure is usually quasi-privatized or owned by a collection of generator firms.
Things like pipeline networks and power cabling often seem like good candidates for command economies at first, but in practice governments struggle to spend adequately on capital infrastructure. They tend to take over the infrastructure after it's been built by private actors, then slowly run it into the ground over a period of many decades, then privatize it to try and get it off the books, then blame the private sector when it starts to break down despite their attempts to repair the damage. The left then use the parlous state of the network to argue that things were better when they were state run, ignoring that the reason they're now bad is exactly because maintenance and upgrades weren't taken seriously enough during the state run period - and often, that the private sector struggles to drain the tech-debt backlog because of government price controls.
The above is basically the experience that the UK has had over the last 150 years with water, rail and now they're adding power to the list. A big part of why the NHS is in a state of collapse, or likewise for the German railways, is because governments systematically prefer to spend money on pay rises for large workforces (=new loyal voters) than on capital infrastructure (=no new voters). Private sector network operators don't have that same problem unless they face a heavily unionized workforce, which is again often a legacy of public ownership and left wing union protection laws.
So I think it's a lot more complicated than you make out. A system that transitions between state and private ownership doesn't magically take on the properties it'd have had if that'd been the case all along.
From a submission about a left-wing subculture to declaring victory for the “decentralization” of capitalism. What else to expect.
The original Adam Smith capitalism basically called for a nation of small businesses - ultra decentralized. Modern American industries are very far from that. Some might argue they're more like state-sponsored organizations. Which definitely wouldn't be Adam Smith's capitalism.
I was talking about the only capitalism that has existed.
Seems a bit like an apple vs. fruit basket situation.
But if it's the wrong leadership, the results are far more catastrophic.
Centralization is high risk/high reward.
In particular, this condition
> Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.
is a good match for many free software projects.
That's one of four conditions she thinks are necessary. The other three are interesting too.
Interesting idea. But the illustrations are lacking for now. I have seen events put up - and the thing is less that there was no structure (there are a core of people who know what they are doing, and the others who need their leadership) and more that (1) there is no time to haggle about the structure and (2) what you do notice is the people who are willing to put hard work on anything that needs it and the people who are there socially.
In the case of software projects, there is the thing of people putting in programming work on whatever they feel like - but meanwhile there is a structure of people defining the project, prioritizing bugs, etc. And there is very often a project owner or BDFL. We can rationalize it by saying that it's a technical structure or leadership but it's still there.
What I don't see much of is projects where being willing to show up and do the work is "enough". There are many project where people self assign themselves to this or that group - but that's not the same.
>The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific.
I do think of some of the "awareness" activism I see where it never seems to lead anywhere. Folks are just busy with their awareness activities and everything is deemed good because they're generating awareness. Like minded people do their awareness thing, they like to do it, and there ya go... awareness is sort of its own means to an end and I'm not sure the given individuals or groups are structured in a way that they'll ever be capable of more.
I'd even argue that some of these structureless groups are incapable of much critical discussion as their group exists purely because of their awareness raising efforts, it is what they are, change might take some leadership.
> Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization.
She mentions some concrete ideas:
- Leaders do not select their teams, instead, teams select their spokesperson. A spokesperson does not have authority over the team but can make decisions on their behalf in conversation with other spokespeople.
- Rotating the role of spokesperson among the eligible of the team. Possibly even having multiple spokespeople on the same team for different types of decisions.
- Set up processes to ensure someone does not sit on important information others do not have access to. All data should be public in the group.
- etc.
This is far from instituting an explicit hierarchy!
This is so far from popular understanding of anarchism.
They ran into the problem where one group of volunteers that aligned to cook together were vegan and insisted on making only vegan food (it also sounded like the dishes were very strange to the locals). This made sense for the cooks, but the locals didn't want the food. But nobody could convince this group to do anything differently.
Their system resulted in a sort of rotating hierarchy that meant every few days they couldn't provide for the locals.
Functional anarchy seems like it takes a lot of work.
That said, it is easy to think that some other decision making mechanism (besides the rotating decision makers these guys were practicing) would always lead to better outcomes. A common consensus mechanism is decision by majority voting. Which often works, but often just picks the suboptimal solution, because it the average of the actual close to optimal solutions different subgroups are advocating for.
Every decision making mechanisms has some failures (and advantages). It's good to know what they are.
Unfortunately there's an underlying "i do what I want" in a lot of political philosophies where it just doesn't work that way, even for getting what they want..
Not necessarily picking on your comment in particular, but it does remind me of several (what I considered at the time) broken software development methodologies that I've encountered.
Someone tells me their philosophy of development, I point out what I feel is a problematic edge case, they respond with something like the above: "well you still have to use your brain".
It seems to me that everyone's real philosophy is just being sufficiently smart and the "formal" definition is really just brought out for story time.
It's called a compromise, and it's fairly critical to a functioning group of humans of literally any size.
I feel like this is more a commentary on the "needy" folks.
No one goes into a soup kitchen and expects to get their favorite meal, but I guess these folks were expecting the vegans to give up their beliefs and cook them hamburgers.
There's a strange cruelty to your comment where you're thinking of homeless people who went through a natural disaster ... so you can call them 'privileged'.
The issue is deeply cultural & until it's being worked on, solidarity is key: serving people in the ways they choose to receive care.
Imagine if the local library were destroyed, and a group came forward to organize book donations, but due to the religious beliefs of the people running the book drive, they only were willing to collect evangelical literature, and refused everything else. Would the locals in that scenario be wrong to avoid them?
Don't want to go too far down the religious hole considering where some folks have taken religion, but the whole story of Jesus washing people's feet wasn't just about his own humility / setting an example. I think it was also about treating others with some respect.
Some people draw that line elsewhere. I could picture someone else saying "it's ridiculous to demand meat, at least to someone who knows of the environmental and financial consequences, when perfectly good food exists that does not have the same consequences." That's putting the line elsewhere, but it's just the same line.
It's not about cooking for one's principles, it's about respecting them while offering to cook for someone else.
FDA approval of food is far more respected in our culture than Vegan approval of food is at the current time, and food means a lot more to a dining experience than just filling up a nutritional fuel tank.
They expected food that looks like a food and does not come across as disgusting to them. They did not expected hamburgers, they expected simple cheap foods that wont stress them out further.
They have choosen to go more hungry for that day.
Things breaking down over veganism sounds like the typical anarchist self-own.
But if they really were short of food: I'll side with smug vegans over choosing beggars.
The ideological hate for any form of hierarchy and structure is not anarchism, it's chaos.
If one wants a default, well-tested structure, hierarchy seems to be a good candidate[1]. Another idea is to optimize for viability, meaning the ability to adapt to and survive changes in the environment, described by the Viable System Model[2].
I wonder if there are studies on the different ways of structuring and their goals and tradeoffs.
[1] Choose Boring Culture — https://charity.wtf/2023/05/01/choose-boring-technology-cult...
[2] Tools for Viable Organizing — https://vsru.org/articles/tools-for-viable-organizing.html
It does not describe how the individuals who hold particular positions within the heirachy may change over time, which is a central part of the ideas Joreen gets to in the latter part of the essay.
Or in click-bait terms: you can have heirarchy without heirarchy :)
IMO, a regular representative democracy is "good enough." It may be biased towards the elite, but it's still by far the most successful form of governance when it comes to creating large systemic change. The perceived ineffectiveness of it comes from people's unwillingness to put actual work, which applies to any other form of organization as well.
The idea that you can avoid hierarchy is, I think, confusing “social hierarchies with permanent places” - yes, bad, avoid that - with the _concept_ of hierarchy at all.
Although I have to admit that these sound all like ideas that sound great "in theory" but don’t work in reality. At least I’m not aware of good examples.
It may sound hyperbolic to say that "anarchism is the default way humans work together". At the same every production I have worked in may have a boss, but at the same time usually the folks actually doing the work are getting along with very little direct hierarchy- people who know what to do go do it, folks who don't get tasked with doing things.
Most folks have watched stuff really get into the weeds when every action needs to be dictated from above.
That seems to align somewhat with those ideas.
I have seen this and result is that no one wants to be the spokesperson except really really aggressive people able to bully others into compliance. Because the "spokeperson" gets to experience all the negative consequences of the decisions without having the authority to do anything about it. They are effectively secretaries. Most people, including good leaders, nope out.
Books I can think of are
"Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Organizations
"Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivering_Happiness
Speaking from personal experience, I've seen it myself at one previous employer. The clear hierarchy and delegation of ownership and responsibilities made it easier for everyone to get things done and enhanced everyone's sense of psychological safety. People explicitly knowing exactly what authority they do and do not have means they can make confident decisions without feeling the need to play wasteful and exhausting games of "mother may I" with the latent power structure for fear of accidentally stepping on influential toes.
It's also made me sad that finding teams that operate like that is really hard, and they often don't changes in management :( I had an absolutely amazing several years working on a team like that at Target of all places, until the broader Target culture caught up to us...
Here is a talk given by the author of "Turn the Ship Around!", David Marquet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJL8zX3EVk
Semco, like Valve is a 'horizontal organisation' with a BDFL. The difference being that Semco is a massive organisation and employer operating across a range of industries.
Here's a quick read on the company - https://hatrabbits.com/en/ricardo-semler-does-things-differe...
In the software world, check out Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming which touches on these ideas (more about how to look at and examine systems, not prescriptive). The book was more of a starting point (or intended as such) so it's hardly comprehensive, but he looks at various organizational approaches within software teams and where they work and fail.
https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t...
Teal hasn't really seemed to develop much except through outlets like Corporate Rebels, but IMO Holacracy has shown some real continued promise. The Zappos adoption had middling success over time (and while they're no longer practicing, their market-based model owes a lot to it), but overall Holacracy and the similar structure-heavy self-management stuff it has inspired is continuing to press on. It's not growing, but it's fairly steady. They released a new version of Holacracy a few years ago set up for "modular adoption" instead of all-at-once adoption, and I think it's a significant improvement.
This framework based on cybernetic science provides good heuristics to both understand and design complex social structures.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Organization-Creating-sustain...
You can find Key Theorists section there with book recommendations.
Early Media Effects Theory & the Suggestion Doctrine https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/nb-early-media-effects/re...
Full pdf https://github.com/mediastudiespress/singles/releases/downlo...
Chapter 1 is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popu...
Another interesting fellow is Daniel Mezick, whose writing is definitly available in English.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jofreeman.com%2F...
There are about 11 other non-jofreeman.com comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... including some about the Wired article "A 1970s Essay Predicted Silicon Valley's High-Minded Tyranny" at https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-tyranny-of-struct... .
Hierarchical, flat, or structureless (as pointed out by this article); with a rigid procedure, without a rigid procedure. Doesn't matter how the group is organized, it's going to be bad in some way.
The American democracy he sought to co-create was one that could reign in humanity's worst impulses while enabling our better ones.
If you don't take on this assumption I think it will go smoother than if you're relying on structure or lack of structure to save you from actually taking on each issue (where each issue will, each time, have their own sets of tricky, subtle and thorny trade-offs).....
Well some commenters here are about a hair-width away from declaring losing faith in humanity. Anyway.
Knowing that initial structurelessness is good and eventually becomes bad can help us preempt failures
https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-f...
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/the-accidental-d...
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285097 - June 2023 (73 comments)
Jo Freeman's the Tyranny of Structurelessness (Recommended by Mark Andreesen) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829486 - June 2022 (1 comment)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728477 - Oct 2020 (19 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1973) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17585104 - July 2018 (20 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535834 - Oct 2017 (2 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651406 - May 2016 (54 comments)
“Meritocracy” and the Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495241 - Oct 2014 (1 comment)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762486 - May 2014 (15 comments)
RE: The “Tyranny of Structurelessness” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555013 - April 2014 (7 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 - March 2014 (120 comments)