Ted Nyman from GitHub recently gave a talk at Mozilla about GitHub's "manager free" work environment. Here is a video with slides: https://air.mozilla.org/scaling-happiness/
Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)
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Re: Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)
#12In my experience, the biggest hurdles to a truly self-organizing organization (at every level) are people and trust. If you don't have really excellent, self-motivated people, you are going to have a lot of trouble with self-organization simply because some people need to be told what to do. People also have to be 100% bought in to the concept and don't try to create themselves management and authority roles. It real…
Not only trust, but honesty. It's a lot harder (I would wager almost impossible!) to operate in a flat organization without everyone being willing to both be honest and receive honest criticism.
The company I work for is about 30 folks strong and there are, for all intents and purposes, only two levels of hierarchy. It could probably sustain being completely flat, but I'd fear that it'd fall apart relatively swiftly due to people being unwilling to both bring others to task and be brought to task themselves.
Plus, there's something to be said for decision by committee severely obfuscating progress if consensus can't be easily reached.
Re: Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)
#13"It's been a year since we've filed for bankruptcy and we're still there." - I work in a company that strives to follow such a model, and it honestly struggles to achieve the kind of efficiency most companies take for granted. I dearly hope it doesn't lead to that end, but from what I can see it's a distinct possibility.
Re: Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)
#14"It's been a year since we've filed for bankruptcy and we're still there." - I work in a company that strives to follow such a model, and it honestly struggles to achieve the kind of efficiency most companies take for granted. I dearly hope it doesn't lead to that end, but from what I can see it's a distinct possibility.
I suspect that the highest performance levels come from a group that self organizes around the vision of a leader.
Re: Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)
#15I was excited to read about how an "org-less" org could work. Then: "We've grown from three to thirteen employees in about a year, to shrink back to four in about two years." And: "About a year ago, we've filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11 of Bankruptcy Code."
It's hard for me to have much faith in the author's argument.
Re: Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)
#16I was excited to read about how an "org-less" org could work. Then: "We've grown from three to thirteen employees in about a year, to shrink back to four in about two years." And: "About a year ago, we've filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11 of Bankruptcy Code." It's hard for me to have much faith in the author's argument.
I read it as the description of a first experiment. Note they still can improve and come back in the economic race. However, this is interesting to see some people have courage to try those things, whatever the risk of failure it represents.
Re: Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)
#17"It's been a year since we've filed for bankruptcy and we're still there." - I work in a company that strives to follow such a model, and it honestly struggles to achieve the kind of efficiency most companies take for granted. I dearly hope it doesn't lead to that end, but from what I can see it's a distinct possibility.
I suspect that the highest performance levels come from a group that self organizes around the vision of a leader.
That's the most common pattern indeed. Note they tried to find a vision by themselves without an "official" leader. They were unfortunatly unable to find one apparently.
However, I believe a kind of implicit vision has emerged which is simply to make sustainable such a place. Put another way, people who are attracked by this implicit vision (such as the author of the article) are still with them, and the others have probably left because this was not a vision they were inspired by.
Re: Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that the highest performance levels come from a group that self organizes around the vision of a leader.
That's the most common pattern indeed. Note they tried to find a vision by themselves without an "official" leader. They were unfortunatly unable to find one apparently. However, I believe a kind of implicit vision has emerged which is simply to make sustainable such a place. Put another way, people who are attracked by this implicit vision (such as the author of the article) are still with them, and the others have…
One can outsource leadership in a variety of ways. A highly cohesive and capable group can do consulting projects and self-organize around the project, for example.