My experience with this dynamic is that leaders and power structures emerge in “leaderless” organizations despite the best efforts of participants. This leads to a lack of accountability for the excercise of de facto authority because it supposedly does not exist, and rapidly creates toxic and exploitative environments with zero recourse for grievance.
I’ve seen flat organization work well at one organization, essentially a consulting firm where we worked on short-lived projects. Teams had to assemble and disassemble within a span of two or three years.<p>It really worked well, in retrospect. Our clients (from one branch of the military or another) came to us with actual clearly-defined problems, and gave us space to engineer real solutions.<p>I left because I didn’t want to spend my time developing tech for the military, and I joined an industrial R&D lab. What a mess I walked into. Layers and layers of hierarchy, all decided by political in-fighting rather than merit, and every team is pushing mocked-up half-solutions to imaginary problems.
One reason this has been discovered as of late in tech circles is Bitcoin.<p>Professor Arvind Narayanan at Princeton cited this in May 2015, as the Bitcoin community was having debates about decentralization and what it meant for governance.<p>See the fifth footnote in this blog post entitled "Bitcoin faces a crossroads, needs an effective decision-making process
":<p><a href="https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/05/11/bitcoin-faces-a-crossroads-needs-an-effective-decision-making-process/" rel="nofollow">https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/05/11/bitcoin-faces-a-cro...</a><p>Also, this tweet:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1005151684807610368" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1005151684807610368</a>