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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?

#191

Post by veddox »

blotter_paper wrote: post #173
adrianmonk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the invisible hierarchy problem

I'm not in favour of flat systems for exactly this reason. I think they try to solve the problem of bad leadership structurally, by simply pretending to abolish leadership. IMO, it would better be addressed personally - e.g. by investing in leadership training or vetting candidates for leadership roles more thoroughly.

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

#192

Post by munchbunny »

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'm glad you brought this up, even though I disagree with your analysis.

In my experience, in the power vacuum there are several types of people:

1. Those who are blind to it

2. Those who want power and have charisma

3. Those who want power and lack charisma

4. Those who do not want the responsibility that comes with the power, but take it to save the team

5. Those who do not want the responsibility and explicitly avoid it

The problem is that those five categorizations are independent of competence, in terms of technical skills but especially in terms of leadership skills. So if you do this sort of social experiment, what you get are people who want power regardless of competence.

Now if that's what you're looking for, then by all means, do it, but I'd bet that you're actually hoping to find the capable ones, not the power seeking ones.

I don't have a good answer for how to set up a self-sustaining organization that consistently surfaces excellent leaders, because I've never seen one, but I'm pretty sure the power vacuum won't do better.

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

#193

Post by dragonwriter »

lucb1e wrote: post #189
fuggles wrote: post #124

Have been thinking about this a lot lately. Not just decision making, but how to actually function in a healthy way in the day-to-day, in a flat org. The place I work recently restructured from a more traditional hierarchical structure to SAFe - so the business has a well defined hierarchy, while engineering teams are completely flat. Almost 4 PI's on (~9 months) the promise of "self organizing teams" has not been re…

You're using some lingo I never saw before, what's a SAFe and a PI?

SAFe is the Scaled Agile Framework.

https://www.scaledagileframework.com/

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

#195

Post by veddox »

achenatx wrote: post #79

The problem with explicit leadership positions is that people have no downward mobility. If you are bad, then the organization loses a great resource. I like the model of dept head in academia. Professors really want to be doing research, but they also need a dept head who handles administration. No one really wants to do it, so it rotates through the department. There are some perks like a pay bump, reduced teaching…

That's why democracies have terms of office, and that's exactly what we do in our student organisation.

You're right: there has to be a way to get somebody out of a misfitting leadership role without completely humiliating him. Regular elections are a great way of doing so, and giving many different people the chance to lead benefits both them and the organisation.

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

#196

Post by daniel_iversen »

MisterOctober wrote: post #74
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…

I work for a "flat" company. I've certainly observed some of the troubling characteristics of this organizational approach described above and elsewhere in comments. There are some positive characteristics [in our implementation at least] as well, a few of which are : 1) Decisions with broad effect [i.e., beyond the decider's personal work domain] are handled with the "advice process," wherein all affected parties ar…

Yes AORs are great and is quite a complete system (rough consensus is nice too but that’s only a part of the solution) - here’s more details on AORs:

https://blog.asana.com/2017/12/distributed-responsibility-en...

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

#197

Post by adrianmonk »

dpeck wrote: post #167
adrianmonk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You may be overestimating how much management is paying attention. As long as things are shipped reasonably close to time and no one is filing lawsuits most stay more concerned with their own goals than that of their staff.

You raise a good point. Flat probably doesn't always work this way. It wouldn't be a good idea to assume that every flat organization is doing what I describe.

While I'd personally argue that people development is an essential duty of management, they may not see it as important. Also, in some cases, management may just see it as a way to be less rigid.

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

#198

Post by shanemhansen »

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…

To me flat orgs default to lord of the flies leadership.

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

#199

Post by ironchef »

achenatx wrote: post #79

The problem with explicit leadership positions is that people have no downward mobility. If you are bad, then the organization loses a great resource. I like the model of dept head in academia. Professors really want to be doing research, but they also need a dept head who handles administration. No one really wants to do it, so it rotates through the department. There are some perks like a pay bump, reduced teaching…

Our teams at Tanium do something similar. There’s no pay bump to lead the group... and we have a number of folks who’ve led the a team and then went back to IC. It’s worked quite well overall; however, is a difficult position (sometimes leading north of forty folks)

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

#200

Post by mikeklaas »

narnianal wrote: post #137
kirubakaran wrote: post #10

To 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 c…

That's horrifying.
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