Teams Grow Organically | Hacker News Reader

Teams Grow Organically

frederickvanbrabant.com

66 pointsTheEdonian25 comments

> The challenge is that these communication networks are informal, fluid, and nearly impossible to map.

I bet most large tech companies could have a fairly accurate map of the network in less than a week if they really wanted it. Simply look at every email and chat reply between two people and build a graph whose nodes are people and with edges whose strength is the number of those interactions. Done.

Of course, there are a lot of scary privacy implications and I'm sure there are a few execs who wouldn't want anyone to discover that, wow dude_in_power_x sure does sent a lot of chats to cute_indirect_subordinate_they_have_no_reason_to_interact_with.

But if and organization really did want a better sociological understanding of their workforce, they could build it.

I would gladly just tell my bosses who I'm talking to, how often, and about what areas. If that helps me I see no problem, just send me a survey to fill.

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) Tools. Google that and you will find many out of the box tools that tap into email, calendars, Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, et al.

I know someone who was building a product like this that they intended to sell for the purposes of improving M&A efficiency. You feed it slack, zoom, etc. info and then get a sense for "who needs to be in the room" at various levels, see where duplicated management effort is, and so on. Not sure where it went, but this was around 10 years ago.

I was in a non-tech org of about 100 people and they had this. The data is so accessible to admins that it’s almost hard not to do it.

What was the data used for?

The company was getting a bit silo’d and they were using it to try and figure out a way to fix that.

I grew several grassroots software projects in a 5-digit size company. The last had least 10-15 direct contributors and tens of others involved. It grew so large the CTO organized a summit to get the main IT organization along with everyone else involved on the same page and it came out as the "winner".

I did all this as an individual contributor. We called them "internal open development" and had developed an entire model around it. You can basically create "parallel" hierarchies within organizations. It's not that different from the "build something people want" idea, but it actually makes those people part of it.

There were several other projects like this.

The office advocacy seems out of place. Extroverts work this weak network methodology well with face time. Introverts are more likely to get similar results from sharing planning and status documents and lists highlighting relevant problem reports. While it may be easier to do this kind of thing by putting extroverts in an office it might be more valuable to let introverts focus on shared documents and reports because of the records that get generated along the way.

> * Introverts are more likely to get similar results from sharing planning and status documents and lists highlighting relevant problem reports.*

As an remote introvert, I do this sort of thing over Slack, instead of at the watercooler, not via docs.

Anyone who has worked in disaster recover and business continuity planning knows how to map an organizations processes and people.

There is always 2 different orgs: the organization that is formally stated for legal/insurance reasons, and the REAL organization that is messy and ad-hoq.

You have to account for both.

I find the automate csv shuffling example interesting. I have never worked in a place that was this organic.

You can’t just find some idea and do things. There are road maps and promises made to manager and product.

What incentivises your manager to just agree to let you work on your own projects?

I've seen it work in a few ways; these are not mutually exclusive:

* You have someone whose job or as part of their job is to it is to discover these kinds of internal organizational efficiencies and automate them. Something that organically comes up like this gets assigned to that person.

* Managers are not incentivized to stick to a rigid schedule or metrics based on an inflexible roadmap.

* Flexibility and autonomy is built into developers' schedules so they can work on things outside of just their rank-ordered task list.

These sound like good ideas. I guess I just don’t work in such companies and I think this is the norm unfortunately.

There are strict timelines that span months if not years, often optimised to a large extent. There is little room for spontaneity and organic projects to come up.

I've worked at companies where this sort of thing is encouraged, and others where I'd be afraid to even ask about the possibility of doing such a thing. Naturally it's a spectrum.

(Although, there is also the company that claims to encourage it, and then buries you in bureaucracy...)

> What incentivises your manager to just agree to let you work on your own projects?

What incentivizes you to ask permission?

I'm simply not allowed to work on things that are not agreed upon with my manager.

Are you allowed to pee? To make yourself a sandwich? To comment on Hacker News during work hours? To look out the window at two birds fighting over a stick?

Isn't this effectively a core operating principle of DAOs? Members self-organize and declare their roles and accountabilities. Tooling has been built specifically around structuring, visualizing, governing, and incentivizing this emergent organic structure. Traditional orgs could learn a lot from what's been happening there.

I liked what flashed on the front page a week or so ago, about encouraging people to rant. With Slack specifically, it basically amounted to having a "<username-rants>" channel for every user.

Now that I read the current post, maybe that should be a Slack feature out of the box!

"If you're remote, ramble" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44775563 (976 points, 464 comments)

This would be a better article if the term "organic" was defined.

organic, as in organic growth, is the default, natural growth as contrasted with the synthetic one that is explicitly planned. For example, that means how people prefer to work with there people they like rather than those in their teams.

I don't think it's hard to infer from the context and example.

An organic team is a group of individuals that forms spontaneously within an organization based on informal communication networks and interpersonal relationships rather than formal directives or predefined structures. Such teams typically emerge in response to a specific need or opportunity and are composed of members from various departments who collaborate based on shared goals and complementary skills. Unlike traditional teams, their existence is not documented in official organizational charts, and their composition can be fluid.

Re-read my statement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com