A good resource to learn more about scaling flat self-organizing organizations is the book Reinventing Organizations. It's a curious mix of dreamy hippie philosophy interspersed with very practical examples of flat orgs and how they remain flat while still getting things done.
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?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't hierarchy intrinsic to power?
What's the hierarchical ordering of Congress, SCOTUS, and the White House?
President tends to dictate congress when they are popular and congress is of the same party. While there can be some push back, it will become costly come election time. SCOTUS has strongly defined limits on what they can do, but given they are made up of picks by the President and approved by congress the shape of the SCOTUS changes depending upon whom is in power when the existing members leave.
The President is generally immune to congress until they do something that gets enough congressional support for impeachment. This has proven extremely hard to do so far. The President also gets significant say over any issue that doesn't strongly unify congress.
Thus, for an issue that is popular in congress and unpopular with the President, but not popular enough in congress to override a veto, the hierarchy does President > Congress (a > b means a is above b). SCOTUS almost never gets involved when it comes to passing laws.
When it comes to an issue that is popular enough congress is willing to override a veto and which is popular enough with voters that congress going against the President on it isn't a threat, then congress > President.
I don't think anyone is claiming there is a simple hierarchy that consistently applies regardless of scenario. Even in a classical monarchy the hierarchy can shift for extreme enough scenarios.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What about democracy? It is a clear rule (one person one vote) and yet it is not hierarchical. Most, if not all societies do not implement direct democracy, where decisions are truly made by one person one vote. Most at least employ an abstraction such as representative democracy, and the United States employs an abstraction upon an abstraction with the electoral college.
Couldn't you have both? You have the right to a direct vote, but you also have the option to bestow your vote to a representative to cast for you. Seems like a neat idea and solves many of these structureless problems. Many people know that a topic is out of their reach or interest, but they may know someone knowledgable to give their vote to to cast for them. If they feel that person doesn't represent them, they can…
That's what not voting does...
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#134Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#135Great article! But humming does bear a striking resemblance to voting by acclamation.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#136I 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 sm…
strongly seconding this essay - it remains one of the most influential things i've ever read, in terms of completely and immediately changing my views on a topic.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#137To bastardize Greenspun, any sufficiently large flat org contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of top-down org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
Regarding Greenspun I have to think about a colleague. He is a studied mathematician. So in the past 15 years he was working on a tool in Perl. Now he switched teams and is tasked to work on a Python problem. You don't hear about him for weeks besides he need to setup is development environment. Then he comes back and starts to code. It seems like he doesn't need to spend any time learning Python. You look into his code and also have no idea what's happening or why it's working.
What he basically did was implement his own programming language out of lists, dicts (hashtables), and functions, with class hierarchies, type checking, inheritance, etc. And the time he spent "setting up his system" was the time he needed to basically code his VM engine in Python instead of Perl, and then adapting his standard library files to the quirks of the underlying interpreter.
It was weird for me at first, but actually makes sense if you look at it mathematically. A math lover starts with defining zero, one and plus, right? So this is the only logical way to program for him. He doesn't even know what a VM or standard library is.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most flat org I've seen are not flat. The people naturally organised in tribes that are only known by themself, and that are in no organigram. Each tribe have an implicit leader that bears no title yet influences all decisions just by regular social interractions. Tribes communicate, negociate even, through the implicit leaders even if not directly. Some kind of overuling bdfl also oversees all tribes, like a king, i…
All of human history in one comment.
Yep
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#139"A chair who asks, “Is everyone OK with choice A?” is going to get objections. But a chair who asks, “Can anyone not live with choice A?” is more likely to only hear from folks who think that choice A is impossible to engineer given some constraints." It's funny - I've adopted a similar approach towards getting my kids to agree on something with each other. Instead of asking, "Should we do A or B or C?", and having o…
There was a good podcast with a famous FBI negotiator, Chris Voss, who recommends if you want to sway someone, frame it as, "are you opposed to doing X?" rather than "should we do X?". People are more likely to agree with the former.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you have both? You have the right to a direct vote, but you also have the option to bestow your vote to a representative to cast for you. Seems like a neat idea and solves many of these structureless problems. Many people know that a topic is out of their reach or interest, but they may know someone knowledgable to give their vote to to cast for them. If they feel that person doesn't represent them, they can…
That's what not voting does...
Oh god, no. By not voting, I've surrendered to what the entire crowd wants by average (which might be entirely counter to the direction I want). By giving my vote to someone else to cast, I temporarily empower my leader who stands for my principles or movement, who may understand better which policies to vote for on my behalf.