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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?

#231

Post by singron »

mwfunk wrote: post #213
andrei_says_ wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, authority by expertise vs authority by hierarchy make a big difference. As in, people have the security guy vet their security decisions — not because he has power over them but because they trust his expertise. Suddenly everything becomes easy and self organized.

I don't believe there's any such thing as authority by expertise for any meaningfully sized group of people. It works right up until there's a conflict between the security expert and the UI expert, or any other expert. Then whoever "wins" ends up being whoever has the most unspoken political power or the more forceful personality. And maybe the best choice ends up getting made for the product, and maybe it doesn't.…

> Then whoever "wins" ends up being whoever has the most unspoken political power or the more forceful personality.

I suspect the forceful personality can be a learned behavior as well. I.e. your ideas get accepted when you really push for them, so then you do that more often. Then your peers expect this from you, so your lack of aggression might be seen as an implicit disapproval somehow (e.g. "X is usually excited by their good ideas, so this one must suck"). Pretty soon you are just being a dick all the time.

I hypothesize that in-person/video/audio meetings exacerbate this. In my experience you have to be forceful to interrupt whoever is talking to introduce your idea. Some people will talk in any gap and just keep going so it's a struggle to wait for natural breaks. However I always felt too rude to give feedback like "you generally talk too much" since that's essentially an attack on their personality, so it never seems to get better. In formats with more concurrency, (email, chat, collaborative documents, code review, etc.), this issue doesn't seem as bad (although async formats tend to have the opposite problem of chronic absenteeism, which I also found difficult to give feedback on).

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

#233

Post by discreteevent »

ivanhoe wrote: post #209

There's one thing I've learned from white water rafting: On slow parts democracy works fine - everyone discussing about the best path - but when things start happening fast you need a single captain to make the calls, otherwise you end up hitting every single rock in the river while trying to agree if it's better to go left or right around it.

That's a good point when in that situation. But it's worth remembering that in development people are rarely in that situation. For various reasons, however people (including me) often bring that kind of emergency thinking into development and it just shows things down. Rushing into the debugger instead of slowing down for a minute and thinking about it for a minute. Doing a little bit of design and thinking about what I want from the system instead of getting lost in the details of the existing implementation.

Most of the time in development we need to slow down to go much faster. It's nothing like white water rafting (it would be cool though if it could be like rafting sometimes - everyone gets sick of having to slow down all the time at some point)

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

#234

Post by bitL »

ivanhoe wrote: post #209

There's one thing I've learned from white water rafting: On slow parts democracy works fine - everyone discussing about the best path - but when things start happening fast you need a single captain to make the calls, otherwise you end up hitting every single rock in the river while trying to agree if it's better to go left or right around it.

Perhaps you need "situational captains"? Identify strengths/weaknesses of your own staff and when SHTF, delegate to one that can employ their strengths to resolve your situation, while keeping communication channels open to the rest of your team in case somebody has a better idea?

I believe most people would appreciate if they weren't infantilized and forced to defer to some dysfunctional hierarchy.

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

#236

Post by EGreg »

ip26 wrote: post #210
EGreg wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

You really should read the essay. One of the takeaways for me was that it is easier to concentrate power in a "structureless" group because it is simply taken . Structure is expressly one way to control & limit the concentration of power.

I agree. I am just saying that structure can be a computer program that makes it costly to collude and organize for long periods of time, and somehow penalizes any gains that the colluders would get to make collusion not pay.

Consider upvoting comments on HN for example. That there is a microcosm of what we are talkung about. We want each vote to be an honest signal, to detect and punish voting rings. But how? There is a computer program in charge ultimately of various things including banning some accounts.

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

#237

Post by sbhn »

bitL wrote: post #234
ivanhoe wrote: post #209

There's one thing I've learned from white water rafting: On slow parts democracy works fine - everyone discussing about the best path - but when things start happening fast you need a single captain to make the calls, otherwise you end up hitting every single rock in the river while trying to agree if it's better to go left or right around it.

Perhaps you need "situational captains"? Identify strengths/weaknesses of your own staff and when SHTF, delegate to one that can employ their strengths to resolve your situation, while keeping communication channels open to the rest of your team in case somebody has a better idea? I believe most people would appreciate if they weren't infantilized and forced to defer to some dysfunctional hierarchy.

If you haven’t got a situational captain on your floor then, well, you probably don’t have a highly profitable and hugely successful multinational company.

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

#238

Post by erikpukinskis »

bitL wrote: post #234
ivanhoe wrote: post #209

There's one thing I've learned from white water rafting: On slow parts democracy works fine - everyone discussing about the best path - but when things start happening fast you need a single captain to make the calls, otherwise you end up hitting every single rock in the river while trying to agree if it's better to go left or right around it.

Perhaps you need "situational captains"? Identify strengths/weaknesses of your own staff and when SHTF, delegate to one that can employ their strengths to resolve your situation, while keeping communication channels open to the rest of your team in case somebody has a better idea? I believe most people would appreciate if they weren't infantilized and forced to defer to some dysfunctional hierarchy.

Sounds kind of like holocracy.

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

#239

Post by Kalium »

fishtoaster wrote: post #119
claudiulodro wrote: post #12

Assuming whatever you're trying to do is a good idea, my method is to just write a "heads-up"-type message and just go for it. For example, "I'm going to do foo. If anyone has any concerns or anything, please let me know". This covers your ass, provides a discussion/feedback area, and lets you actually get things done without a lengthy bike-shedding process. One important lesson I have learned in my career is that fo…

Oh man. This is one of those things that's great when done well and terrible when done poorly. Miss the head-up memo until the following day? Too late, the author's already a day into the work and you'd be a jerk to make them back all that out. If it happens often, you have to constantly monitor communication channels or risk missing an important "heads-up," since that's how serious decisions are being made now. In t…

I've actually seen this go pathologically bad. Heads-up emails, sent out 14, 7, and 1 day in advance. Similar set of Slack messages.

Somehow literally nobody has noticed until the change lands, at which point everyone has an opinion.

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

#240

Post by roenxi »

ivanhoe wrote: post #209

There's one thing I've learned from white water rafting: On slow parts democracy works fine - everyone discussing about the best path - but when things start happening fast you need a single captain to make the calls, otherwise you end up hitting every single rock in the river while trying to agree if it's better to go left or right around it.

Look at the time, it is hair-splitting o'clock! >_>

Having a single captain can still be a democratic system; what is being replaced isn't the democratic element (where power rests with the people) - that is still in place. What is being changed is swapping a deliberative assembly (or committee or something) for a single executive for making decisions.

So what is being identified is technically something like 'deliberative assemblies are better at dividing up resources and responsibilities but single executives are better at implementing policies and achieving outcomes'.

Interestingly, this is a lesson that is implicitly very well understood by major democracies without being explicitly bought up very often.

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