Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

doist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 325 posts

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

#301

Post by veddox »

portroyal wrote: post #293
veddox wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Questions for you, Does your student org suffer from student churn? As in, it's active from Sept-Apr, and 'dead' between May-Aug? Is the idea of student buy-in/engagement something your org has to contend with with?

We are the SMD, an association of Christian student unions in Germany. Although we do have some supporting full-time staff members, all of the work in our local chapters and quite a bit of the work in our national leadership is the responsibility of student volunteers (like myself).

Speaking locally: if we as students want something to happen, we make it happen - if we don't, it doesn't. Obviously, attendance at our events varies widely between term-time and holiday-time, but we do have enough active members to guarantee our weekly meetings taking place whenever.

Of course, recruiting new active members is a constant and central challenge, but thankfully, my group has been able to maintain a pretty good level (~20 active members out of ~60 regular visitors). Most of the work our regional full-time staff do relates to coaching these active members, and especially the group leaders they elect each semester.

Does that answer your questions, or did you want to know something else too?

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

#302

Post by veddox »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #258
veddox wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't doubt this but I'm going to point out this will also introduce politics and campaigning. People will probably tend to group up.

That is a danger, although I personally haven't experienced it yet. Actually, we tend to have the opposite problem, that too few people are willing to take on the responsibilities of a leadership role. We have more potentially good leaders declining to take the role out of lack of self-confidence than we have bad leaders trying to take it.

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

#303

Post by tedmcory77 »

emilecantin wrote: post #300
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…

It's the last place you'd expect, but the (Canadian) military actually has this in a certain measure. Unit commanders are only appointed for a limited term (usually 3 years), after which they're expected to move on to another unit. In the Canadian Cadets program, we dont have that expectation, so corps commanders usually stay in the same corps and either mentor the new commander or take on a specific role if there's…

US military does this as well (shorter duration). The reason is so that people are loyal to the role, not the person.

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

#304

Post by Sean1708 »

aeternus wrote: post #230
veddox wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One method I've found to work well, especially with engineers: Make it clear to the team that the new leader is stepping up temporarily to fill a significant business need. That the engineer is doing the team a favor by doing this and that the plan is for it to be temporary because that engineer is a great IC. It then becomes very easy for the new leader to go back to being an IC. They can even be thanked for steppin…

IC?

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

#305

Post by ironchef »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #260
ironchef wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Not giving you extra money for it is probably the best role but how does one ever actually move up at this place in that case?

In general we hire folks who've already been peak career (think like MS premier field engineers for 15+ years), give them an amorphous organization to work with, and treat them like adults. People lift each other up and successes are celebrated. It's not really a place where folks want to be "senior executive vice president" type title BS. Comp is based on a cut of revenue which encourages teamwork like nothing else (every customer's problem affects you).

It's unique .. and not for most people probably.

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

#306

Post by simonask »

veddox wrote: post #183
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.

> Suddenly everything becomes easy and self organized. Unfortunately not. A technocracy works great works great when choices are straight-forward, but one of the great responsibilities of leadership is taking decisions when things are anything but. A good leader is not one who always knows the right answer, but one who knows how to figure out a good enough answer more often than not. And who does so under confusing c…

And far more often than we like to admit, making a decision is more important than making the best decision.

And when wrong decisions are being made too often, formal structure helps to hold leaders accountable for their decisions.

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

#307

Post by simonask »

pizzazzaro wrote: post #290
sametmax wrote: post #80

Earlier 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…

Lets examine this against the top, root comment, and their comparison to white water rafting. We can debate our course while we cruise slowly on smooth water. But in choppy waters, we need a Captain to decide whether we go left or right around that big rock. I dont see this as such a bad thing for Flat Orgs. Nobody is in charge, but someone has to make the decisions. If we need to switch out who's in the role? Its a…

> If we need to switch out who's in the role? Its a lot easier when there's no official title, no extra prestige, no pay raise, nothing but the burden of leadership actually felt as a burden.

No, it's harder. If nobody is actually named the leader, there can be no official point in time when the role changes hands. The organization will most often break apart at that point.

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

#308

Post by drakonka »

Sean1708 wrote: post #304
aeternus wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One method I've found to work well, especially with engineers: Make it clear to the team that the new leader is stepping up temporarily to fill a significant business need. That the engineer is doing the team a favor by doing this and that the plan is for it to be temporary because that engineer is a great IC. It then becomes very easy for the new leader to go back to being an IC. They can even be thanked for steppin…

IC?

IC stands for Individual Contributor.

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

#309

Post by waylandsmithers »

My org uses a similar ranking method for hiring panels-- your feedback can be anywhere between "I'd quit if we hired the candidate" to "I'd quit if we don't hire this candidate" with a couple options in between, and no option for "maybe" or "I don't know". Of course people try to get around that by saying things like "soft yes"...

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

#310

Post by cat199 »

surge wrote: post #56
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I joined a company with "self-organizing" teams, which have many similarities to "structureless". It was an awful experience, for me at least. Many important choices were made by people trying to avoid ruffling the feathers of the least-mature team member. My woes were likely compounded by being mildly affected by Asperger syndrome: First, I have an innate preference for clear organization and structu…

I prefer the Scandinavian (specifically Swedish approach) that I experienced at a prior company. It has its shortcomings of course. But put simply, there is a clear hierarchy, but generally most decisions are made by establishing consensus or compromise between all involved parties, the "manager/boss" only steps in to resolve or veto/tie break if none can be reached. It's not structure-less, and there are certainly t…

ironically given the article title, this is basically the definition of a good monarchy..
Post reply on HN