This brings to mind something I said a while ago about Holocracy. Holocracy doesn't get rid of your managers. Rather it just prevents you from knowing who your manager is. Instead of having clearly defined priorities (e.g. I need to handle requests from person A before I handle requests from person B), you have to do a subtle political calculation, evaluating the relative social capital of person A and person B before choosing who to listen to or follow. And if you guess wrong, then you end up marginalized and fired, often without knowing precisely why.
Whenever someone wistfully posts about how great it would be if their > 100 (heck, even > 10) employee company had a flat structure like Valve, I can't help but cringe a little. If you don't have an explicit organizational structure, how is it not inevitable (if not present from the outset) that you end up with an implicit organizational structure, one that's even more based on socializing, old boy networks, etc.<p>IMO whenever someone speaks longingly for such a thing, they imagine a meritocracy in which they are somehow more valued/important/influential than they are at their current job. I don't think anyone would advocate a structure in which they themselves would be less valued than they are currently, that's for sure.<p>It's hard not to see calls for flat orgs as being much more than an unconscious expression of professional narcissism- "I know better than my stupid manager, if only I could do things exactly how I wanted to, on my own schedule, everyone would be better off!". I've got to think that that statement might be true in some cases, but for every valid case there are 100 or 1000 people who are thinking the exact same thing simply because they overvalue the things that they care about, undervalue the things that other people care about, and in general don't know what they don't know. Even dumber would be those who assume that they would end up at or near the top of the magical, Utopian meritocracy that would emerge from such an arrangement.
The Wikipedia article on this (famous 1972) article: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...</a><p>Short version: if you try to avoid the problems of existing organizations by not having an explicit power structure, you instead end up with an implicit power structure. That is not a problem at small scales when the organization is for discussion rather than for getting things done. But it has many subtle problems.<p>At the bottom, there's a nice list of things to experiment with as organizations search for useful explicit power structures: delegation, responsibility, distribution of authority, rotation of power, allocation of work, diffusion of information, and equal access to resources.<p>Since this article is about women's movement issues from 40+ years ago, it can seem irrelevant. But given how non-traditional organizational models are of the moment (e.g., open source projects, holocracy, Occupy, BLM, twitter organizing), I think it's useful material for anybody who's shaping an organization.
I'm in the middle of reading "Reinventing Organisations" and it's absolutely wonderful. It examines a handful of organisations that are doing it differently (including Holocracy) and takes notes about how their techniques compare and what they might have in common.<p>It's basically the blueprints towards building the next most efficient organisation. I highly recommend it. <a href="http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/</a>
Here's a rebuttal to the original piece, The Tyranny of Tyranny: <a href="https://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-levine" rel="nofollow">https://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-levine</a>
If you want to see staff withdraw, check out, or blow up at random, remove the consistency they use to self-assess their performance. A lot of tech companies are too young to understand that a meritocracy is more about leadership than trivia.<p>Flat organizations (as distinct from BDFLs) reward bullies and manipulators, consistently with the "star system" in the article, while punishing pro-social people who align based on principles and reasoned consent to rules.
Two years ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611</a> | 121 comments<p>I remember it coming up :)<p>I used to volunteer in an anarchist-led bookshop. "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" was one of the texts I was referred to upon starting in order to help me understand that one ought to spend a bit of time thinking about hierarchies (or the lack thereof) and their consequences.<p>This is my take on the topic given some reflection. Like money, hierarchies are not intrinsically bad. Like money, hierarchies are a tool for getting shit done. Money can be abused. Why? Because greed. Because the will to power. We know what money is good for, it is an abstraction that facilitates exchange and trade. What are hierarchies good for? Coordinated action via a chain of command. Hierarchies can be abused. Same reasons. Because greed. Because the will to power.<p>I've been thinking recently about a certain type of hierarchy where the stratification is highly ordered. Think military hierarchies. Each layer reports only to the one above. There is a strict chain of command. Orders must be followed without question. Because this special type of hierarchy emerges again and again (think about how we structure a very complex text even) I thought it must have a name. I couldn't find one so I'm suggesting <i>isomerarchy</i>. All from ancient Greek: we all know that iso means same, like isomorphic, isobar, and so on; meros is less familiar and means part or division, the study of parts and parthood is mereology[1]; finally, archon[2] means ruler from which we get monarch (literally rule by the one). Hence, isomerarchy. Funnily enough, both isomer[3] and merarch[4] are both existing concepts which rely on exactly this etymology.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereology" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereology</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomer" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomer</a><p>[4] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merarches" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merarches</a>
Basically, if you give yourself freedom to act on your impulses then your impulses will own you. Managers are supposed to be the rational decision makers. That cannot be true of every manager. In my opinion, if each person acted rationally we would not need any managers and we would only have to deal with one tyranny: rationality.
This article is interesting, but too often misinterpreted.<p>People most cite it as an argument for why you need hierarchies in your organization. However, I don't think the article gets to claim such thing. Instead, it claims that one should not let structure be implicit, because then it degenerates in tyranny.<p>People are too used to think that structure == hierarchy that we assume that the corollary is that hierarchy is needed to avoid tyranny. David Graeber in his "Utopia of Rules" [1] makes a good counterargument: if your goal is to avoid tyranny it's little difference to have it implicit or explicit. In the later case, you are just giving some moral justification for it -- you legitimize it, in the most literal sense of the word. What you need is, if you want to avoid tyranny, a resilient and explicit flat structure, with mechanisms in place to identify and reject emergent tyrannies.<p>I understand, though, why we are becoming disillusioned about the word "flat" in the business world. Most businesses that try to go "flat" still have a vertical ownership structure. What "flat" actually means in that context is: "you have to figure out how to make money for me, but I'm not going to tell you how!" This creates a lot of anxiety, because at the same time that workers are told to feel empowered and take responsibility, everybody spends so much energy in figuring out what are the invisible walls of the cell, and what their patrons actually want from them. I think it takes a lot of alienation to really thrive in such environment.<p>That does not mean that flat is impossible in the business world, in my view, you just need an explicit flat structure that begins with your ownership model. A company that I know of that has such structure is Igalia [2] (discl: I don't work with them but have acquaintances there)<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules</a>
[2] <a href="http://igalia.com/" rel="nofollow">http://igalia.com/</a>
> Since the movement at large is just as Unstructured as most of its constituent groups, it is similarly susceptible to indirect influence. But the phenomenon manifests itself differently. On a local level most groups can operate autonomously; but the only groups that can organize a national activity are nationally organized groups. Thus, it is often the Structured feminist organizations that provide national direction for feminist activities, and this direction is determined by the priorities of those organizations.<p>A very interesting aspect of structureless entities is that it is very hard to form counter-narratives to them. If you look back at successful revolutions, then their rhetoric revolves around specific events that show everyone why something is unreasonable. For the American revolution, it was the Boston Massacre - a specific instance in time that the revolutionaries could use as evidence of injustice. The dismissal of Jacques Necker, a finance minister in Louis XVI's cabinet, led to the storming of the Bastille and in turn the French revolution. Change often revolves around a commonly shared notion of injustice.<p>Without an explicit power structure, it is hard to create the common ground necessary to ferment change. How can you find a specific experience that everyone can relate to when everyone's experience of the group is inherently different? How can you find that one thing within the structure that frames the overall problem, when there is no commonly agreed one to pin down? People will spend more time arguing about what the structure might be than finding practical solutions to problems.<p>This effect seems to be so powerful and unseen that it is becoming a fashionable method for preserving the status quo. It's popping up everywhere from businesses to nation states. My favourite example is the work of Putin's advisor Vladislav Surkov, a man who was once the publisher of avant-garde poetry and a patron of deconstructionist art. He has worked very hard to deconstruct war for Putin and create a structureless society. At its heart his doctrine is a heightened form of that same structurelessness this article discusses. Except its done at the national scale.<p>Inside Surkov's Russia, the Kremlin maintains control by ensuring that there is no explicit power structure - just shifting cliques in perpetual conflict with other cliques;<p>"""<p>[..] The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.<p>One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions.<p>The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.<p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hid...</a><p>"""
Should switch the link to the author's own website: <a href="http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm</a><p>Especially since she specifically mentions that this piece has been widely republished without her permission.
Literally every problem mentioned is equally endemic to highly structured organizations. "Office Politics" did not enter common use from all of our experience with anarchist company offices.