Good advice. The speed of decision making can slow down momentum in a startup and reaching consensus quickly and efficiently is important.
No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
311–320 of 325 posts
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Large companies tend towards politics because it’s hard to build empathy and trust across thousands of people. Academic departments tend towards politics because nominal leaders either have no training or no power
The battles are so fierce because the stakes are so low.
Not always true. My wife is in academia and involved in multimillion euro projects, and oh boy - do they fight. Usually dirty.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Large companies tend towards politics because it’s hard to build empathy and trust across thousands of people. Academic departments tend towards politics because nominal leaders either have no training or no power
The battles are so fierce because the stakes are so low.
Yes and no. The stakes are low in terms of the organization as a whole, but extremely high for the participants because the tiny stakes represent the bulk of their available resources.
Picture a hungry crowd of 100 people. They will fight each other over 10 sacks of rice because without those 'low stakes' some people are going to starve and die. They can't wait for there to be a bigger prize worth struggling over because if they they'll be dead. So what looks like petty conflict from above is actually desperate struggle for survival from below.
When someone at the top of a hierarchy points to a conflict at a lower level and says it's petty and invalid, the higher-up(s) have generally made it that way and are lying about that fact to preserve or increase their power, by offering implicit bribes to whoever is willing to kick their peers on behalf of the higher-up(s). Any time such a person talks about 'the bigger picture' it's an invitation to participants in a lower-level resource conflict to defect to the hierarchy in exchange for a minor elevation in status.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#314I 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…
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…
That's what the essay is about.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#315The 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…
I think that this is an excellent insight. Explicit leadership roles also inevitably result in situations like, "well, they were the best person we had at the time" whereby a very unsuitable leader is kept in power. The worst orgs I've participated in have suffered from this kind of problem. People only fantasize about flat orgs when theirs is led poorly.
This is a really underrated comment. I was gung ho about weakly-hierarchical organization in the workplace until I worked for a very talented manager with lots of experience who worked hard to facilitate his team, in a company run by a ruthless dictator. One of the most oft-repeated mantras overheard in the army is "Shit rolls downhill" and this guy seemed to concern himself solely with shielding the team from the frequent bloodbaths happening elsewhere in the company while also sweating hard to chase down the things each one of us needed to excel.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I am wholly convinced that the reason terrible young shitbags (like myself) can join the army and end up doing very well is because the army does what seemingly no one else does, which is treating them like adults by giving them pretty huge responsibilities and holding them accountable.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"You don't have to respect the man but you have to respect the rank."
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I was probing for the nature of your org because I hail from one of the largest student housing coops in Canada. It sounds nice at first, but the headaches/politics/etc are proportionately sized. We instituted terms of office for board execs some 6/7 years ago, though the internal power structures that people spoke about in this thread are very much a thing here.
It was a soberly disappointing read, if I'm being honest. When you say, "if we as students want something to happen, we make it happen - if we don't, it doesn't", I wish I could jam that into the minds of our members. That said, there was a post on HN about loneliness the other day that had over 1000 comments, and I believe that's exacerbated in our metropolitan city; an existential threat to the cooperative spirit. We're working on it, will continue.
PS: Greetings, and blessings, from Canada.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think perhaps I could have been more perspicuous in my post, as both replies to my original post seem to focus on specifics when I'm talking about the more general case. In that regard, I'm not talking specifically about flat hierarchies, feminism or these individuals (though certainly it is true in some cases).
> it's hard for me to see anything but a person that wants to hijack the tyranny for themselves If you're speaking generally, who is "a person" you are referring to here? The person who writes about the structurelessness?
The person who talks about shunting in their own authority to make value judgments in place of existing ones.
Re: No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I was probing for the nature of your org because I hail from one of the largest student housing coops in Canada. It sounds nice at first, but the headaches/politics/etc are proportionately sized. We instituted terms of office for board execs some 6/7 years ago, though the internal power structures that people spoke about in this thread are very much a thing here. It was a soberly disappointing read, if I'm being hone…
I wish you all the best, and thank you for the greetings! :-)