There are relatively few things I've read that I can definitively point to as having almost instantly changed my mind on something. This is one of them. Reading often offers a broader understanding or different perspective, but seldom a sudden flash on insight. Others short reads that have changed my mind in that way include: - "The Inner Ring" by CS Lewis ( https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ ) - "On Photography…
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
41–50 of 75 posts
Re: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Because Adam Curtis spent something like 3 films and 10 hours to argue otherwise and not without a lot of examples. When there is no authority, predators become the authority.
"Flat" != "no authority". Flat structures may, or may not, have a head. What they don't have is deep hierarchy. Mind that this has its own set of benefits and disadvantages. Fewer deparmental turf battles, but very broad spans of control and/or highly autonomous roles. An ant or bee colony is a flat structure with a strong central control, at least reproductively: the queen. This isn't an ideal comparison, of course,…
Moreover it is arguably the converse - organisations with a deep heirarchy and a lack of operational structure - that are most prone to predators. Individuals with narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies are attracted to positions where they wield power over others but have little to no accountability. This is why it's so important for misdeeds to be brought to light and justice.
An example is the UK political system, where it's clear who has "say", but the structure for dealing with quite serious misbehaviour is very outdated. Only today there was an article in the BBC about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65856484
Re: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
#43There are relatively few things I've read that I can definitively point to as having almost instantly changed my mind on something. This is one of them. Reading often offers a broader understanding or different perspective, but seldom a sudden flash on insight. Others short reads that have changed my mind in that way include: - "The Inner Ring" by CS Lewis ( https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ ) - "On Photography…
I concur and thanks for the list. Mine would be the Gervais Principle.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Re: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
#44There are relatively few things I've read that I can definitively point to as having almost instantly changed my mind on something. This is one of them. Reading often offers a broader understanding or different perspective, but seldom a sudden flash on insight. Others short reads that have changed my mind in that way include: - "The Inner Ring" by CS Lewis ( https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ ) - "On Photography…
I like Peter Singer's 1971 essay 'Famine, Affluence and Morality', when taken with a little Jung.
Re: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
#45After reading this essay I became convinced several different government institutions realized they could tank any grassroots movement by inserting a crazy and letting it go from there. This was of course proven to be the case with the Black Panthers where most of the violent agitators turned out to be FBI agents. This fundamentally changed my view on flat organizations, realizing they were vulnerable to predators wi…
You are confusing structure and unaccountable power.
Having structure and roles is OK in a grassroot, horizontal movement.
> inserting a crazy and letting it go from there
A professional agitator with a covert political agenda is hardly a "crazy".
Re: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
#46> People would try to use the "structureless" group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive.
Negations are really hard. I'm sure the above sentence has one too few or one too many.
Re: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one that really changed how I think about the world was "A Muscular Empathy" by Ta-Nehisi Coates https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu...
I appreciate the thought experiment of considering whether we would truly act differently in difficult circumstances, as most never engage in that level of self-reflection. However, this article seems to beg the question. Specifically, it starts by assuming that in the face of challenges like being born in poverty, the average person would not overcome them through will or effort alone. As a result, it cultivates emp…
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Re: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
#48There are relatively few things I've read that I can definitively point to as having almost instantly changed my mind on something. This is one of them. Reading often offers a broader understanding or different perspective, but seldom a sudden flash on insight. Others short reads that have changed my mind in that way include: - "The Inner Ring" by CS Lewis ( https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ ) - "On Photography…
> - "The Inner Ring" by CS Lewis ( https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ ) CS Lewis predicted the impact of social media 50 years prior to its existence: > And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring.…
If anyone likes to check the clarity of his view, I suggest "The abolition of man" -- chapter 3 in particular. I find it so prescient of modern times in so many ways. Astonishing.
Re: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
#49David Graeber on "Tyranny of Structurelessness": "[Many] completely misread Freeman’s essay, and interpret it not as a plea for formal mechanisms to ensure equality, but as a plea for more transparent hierarchy."
That's a more controversial and interesting take than "an informal structure in an organisation is not necessarily better than a formal one".
Re: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
#50This is really a good essay and surely deserves a high profile, but it's disappointing that it, and some bits of angst about Valve's internal situation, seem to be the only discussions of organisational structure that get widely shared these days. Back from about the '70s to the early '90s it seems that there was quite a lot of management-theory/theory-of-the-firm research into different organisational structures and how they affected innovation, ability to change and other desirable or undesirable characteristics of organisations. And it didn't just stay hidden in academia, as the results got a fair amount of coverage in newsmagazines and the like in the early '90s. (Which is how I heard about it: I'm no expert.) As you might expect, the findings on relatively "structureless" orgs seem to have been pretty compatible with Freeman's observations. But there was also research on many other unusual forms of structure and hierarchy, for example the "matrix management" which famously got implemented at Dow Chemical in the 1970s https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations .
But for some reason interest and attention seems to have completely faded out, at least at the popular level, by about 2000 or so. So the Valve situation gets reported on as if it's some kind of unprecedented novelty, and not an example of a sort of situation whose outcomes had been hashed out pretty thoroughly a decade or more earlier.