No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
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Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#2Easy, you simply make the decisions within the confines of the shadow hierarchy that exists within all flat organizations.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#3Easy, you simply make the decisions within the confines of the shadow hierarchy that exists within all flat organizations.
And in a company someone has the power to fire or promote you so there is explicit power in play. You can try to distribute it but people are social and clever so they’ll work around any blockers.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#4Easy, you simply make the decisions within the confines of the shadow hierarchy that exists within all flat organizations.
I agree with your point but in the end the article was more about efficient decision making in engineering teams and less about flat organizations. Up-voted both the article and your comment :)
Reminds me about the stuff I've read about Valve. In theory, and maybe if you have strong healthy de facto leadership it could work. In practice it seems more like an excuse to dodge responsibility, leading to pretty toxic places to work - but maybe there's another side to it.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#5Easy, you simply make the decisions within the confines of the shadow hierarchy that exists within all flat organizations.
There are shadow power structures, but I don't think you are correct that they are necessarily hierarchical.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#6The article very much needs a link to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#7Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#8Find out who can approve an invoice for payment.
He's the boss.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#9I would like to refer to the following - The Tyranny of Structurelessness, originally meant to address the concerns regarding 'flat' organizations.
"This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others...
...Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware."
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#10To bastardize Greenspun, any sufficiently large flat org contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of top-down org.