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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?

#171

Post by joshiefishbein »

maxxxxx wrote: post #145
joshiefishbein wrote: post #101

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…

That seems a like a great place to work.

It has been so far.

And we're hiring: https://www.sanctuary.computer so come see for yourself

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

#172

Post by colordrops »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #9

I 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…

The point of a "flat" organization is not that there is no hierarchy or structure, but that it is not officially prescribed, and instead emerges organically. This allows the structure to change as the needs and members of the team change, whereas in a traditional organization, the leadership and structure often long outlive their usefulness.

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

#173

Post by blotter_paper »

adrianmonk wrote: post #126
dpeck wrote: post #2

Easy, you simply make the decisions within the confines of the shadow hierarchy that exists within all flat organizations.

A slightly radical theory: flat organizations are set up to foster that intentionally. Suppose your company has the idea that they want to identify and reward natural leaders and/or those who test limits and push through boundaries. One way to do it is to tell people your organization is flat, then watch for the people who don't buy that and instead see an opportunity to take charge. You create a situation with a lit…

I like your cynical take, but I'm not convinced it's actually the goal of management in all cases. I could see it drifting in that direction over time regardless. That said, some founders are actually idealists. I frequently discuss this topic with people who are aware of the invisible hierarchy problem and are interested in potential solutions. I think there are well-meaning attempts at this, even if they don't work perfectly.

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

#174

Post by grawprog »

My work's been effectively operating as a flat organization for the last several months as our manager's been away on leave. It works for the most part as we all have our own jobs we do and all know what we should be doing. Until it doesn't work. There's no accountability with the schedule and a big communication problem between everybody. When things change, nobody really knows whats going on, when mistakes are made everybody's quick to point finger and problems take longer to solve. You really notice the lack of a manager when they're gone. All these little things that used to be taken care of now fall onto whoever happens to be around to deal with it and it's definitely been causing problems we never used to have before.

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

#176

Post by blotter_paper »

narnianal wrote: post #122
marcinzm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a common criticism of Valve's model, and it's fair to say that Valve's model isn't clearly obviously better, but those attack's on Valve don't make the case that the traditional hierarchical model, with its own well-known problems, is better. I would say that the key difference is that in the traditional model I can learn about my potential bosses during the interview process. In the valve model I don't even…

Also getting a shitty task might be a lot better than getting no task and then getting criticised for lack of ambition.

If finding tasks is part of your job that might be a fair criticism.

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

#177

Post by wang_li »

colordrops wrote: post #172
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #9

I 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…

The point of a "flat" organization is not that there is no hierarchy or structure, but that it is not officially prescribed, and instead emerges organically. This allows the structure to change as the needs and members of the team change, whereas in a traditional organization, the leadership and structure often long outlive their usefulness.

Unless everyone can spend money drawn from the corporate account, and everyone can fire anyone else, the structure isn't flat. It's just that management is choosing not to manage. There is a difference.

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

#178

Post by hinkley »

I'm sure you've all worked some place that talked about 'meritocracy'. I'm sure most of you have worked some place where every time a promotion happens, people joke about "I thought you were already a ".

Years ago someone put me onto this phenomenon. Some people in a business have no trouble making decisions and others are hesitant for a myriad of reasons, from self doubt to not wanting to be responsible for the consequences, to just not liking being randomized. These people will line up behind folks who seem confident, and as this manager half-joked, all he really had to do was 'show up' and start making decisions and people would follow him.

The best description I've ever heard of this phenomenon, and describes my own experience, is that people are looking for and will line up behind someone they can trust. If you sound confident they will give you the benefit of the doubt. But if things go wrong and you don't jump on the problem, they get burned and they won't listen to you as much in the future, even if you are ostensibly in charge. Strong opinions loosely held, own your mistakes, be good at troubleshooting, talk to other teams (even knowing things an hour before everybody else makes you look a hell of a lot smarter), and people will defer to you even without a title. Because even if the boat goes down they know you'll go down with it instead of running away. People will take your advice, rank be damned.

That said, there are darker patterns here too, that could easily dominate in a 'flat' organization. Hoarding knowledge forces people to defer to you. There are obvious flavors of this that I don't need to explain, but here's one I see all the time but others miss: modelling systems to exactly reflect your mental processes (instead of a simplified version, see Brian Kernighan on debugging) means nobody else can work on it except for trivial things. This makes people feel stupid, and imposter syndrome stops them from fighting back.

As one of my bosses said, you should fire all of the 'indispensable' people because they are holding up progress. An earlier boss started a new project and wouldn't let a bunch of us work on it because we were 'too important' to the old project. I think maybe 2 of us figured out this was a trap and worked to hand off our stuff.

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

#180

Post by lucb1e »

elamje wrote: post #139
jatsign wrote: post #106

"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.

Would that still work after having worked in such an organisation for years, if the question is always phrased that way, or is it just an uncommon way of phrasing that works only so long as people are not yet thoroughly used to it?
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