No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?

I currently work within a profit-share-based flat-org. We have a rule to never exceed 12 people in company size. Sure there might be several of us that are "core" members and others that come and go throughout the years. So in a sense this seniority has translated to hierarchy to some degree.

We're all mostly web developers so the mind-share is important since our technologies move fast. Decision making doesn't cost us a lot of time because there aren't many big decisions to make. Our only producer and founder see client faces the most, but not exclusively. We do good work and rely solely on previous clients and referrals banging our doors down for more work – so we fortunately don't have to worry on that front or "crown someone" with biz dev because it's on autopilot for the most part (definitely over-simplifying the work it takes to get a client in the door but you get the picture).

One would assume that our profits would cap out eventually because we aren't scaling the labor-force, but we just keep getting better paying projects and have a few internal projects that provide some passive revenue – so we've been able to nearly double our revenue year-over-year for the last few years and is now stably seven figures.

Our big decisions come down to whether or not to hire a specialized dev for an upcoming scope or maybe what conference we attend that year. These decisions don't happen often but they happen openly and almost everyone is satisfied with the result almost all of the time. "Almost" is used unapologetically because we all know there's never been a perfect organization and that keeps everyone involved perfectly happy. We can't always be skipping around in the cotton candy fields and enjoying the sugar rain like the unicorns we truly are on the inside – so when we have to go to work we recognize that our pattern is better than the vast majority of agency-models here in NYC and are still delighted by our cumulative work experience day to day.

Flat-org is sometimes tossed around as if it projects itself as a silver bullet to organizational overhead. But anyone that cares to think clearly for a moment can recognize that any org structure has a place and time and that there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution to managing people.

Sounds a lot like consent (not consensus) as practiced in Sociocracy or Holacracy.

https://patterns.sociocracy30.org/consent-decision-making.ht...

Even if you think direct democracies are the best, how do they scale? As a group (or society) grows, there are simply too many decisions to make for everyone to participate in every decision.

It sounds like fun when you describe it that way!

It's more complicated than a hierarchy. Informal power isn't transitive, so you can have arbitrary directed graphs with loops.

It'd be an interesting experiment to build a tech startup with an overt hierarchy, where decisions were made by the person in the room with the most stripes on their shoulders. The conventional wisdom is that it would suck and you couldn't hire smart people, but sometimes the big wins are to be found in such places.

I disagree. I oppose concentrations of power. Will there be a certain power disparity and hegemony of certain particiants in their little groups? Sure, but as long as they are prevented or discouraged by various mechanisms from joining together into still larger groups, then everyone still has a fighting chance of opposing them or switching groups. The trouble arises when you have concentrations of power. Just look at the Web! It disrupted AOL. And Wikipedia disrupted Britannica.