The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
Comments
PaulHoule
leoc
There was and is a whole literature about unstructured and less-structured and alternatively-structured organisations; it even used to get a fair amount of coverage in mainstream news publications. But some time shortly after the year 2000 someone rang a bell, and now the only way to discuss the subject is to reshare "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" (which to be clear, is very good) every so often. (EDIT: And to re-emphasise, I'm not criticising yamrzou for sharing it!) Pasting one of my earlier comments on one of the earlier reposts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292289
> This 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.
neilk
Management theory, at least the aspects of it which become popular, seems fad-driven.
Matrix managment, holacracy, consensus, etc etc.
Is this a field where people discover things that last? For instance, fundamental limits to human communication, fundamental quantities that are conserved no matter what the configuration of management is.
Computer science has Brooks' observations on team size and communication, but that was only ever a guess, it's not really a law.
Generally people seem to adopt decision and management mechanisms that purport to address the pain they were having in their previous organization, while being proven enough to be plausible ("$FAMOUS_COMPANY does it") and not quantifiable enough to be a definite failure yet. Probably someone is writing a new airport book on "Founder Mode" right now!
So... what is known about human management? I'm not a fool, people are ever-changing and complex and what they want from their organizations changes all the time, but are there any eternal truths?
PaulHoule
Ashby's law is the only law. [1]
That is, a control system (management structure) needs to match the system it controls in complexity. [2]
This book lists many of the major variables you need to control to run a project [3] such as "hiring/managing employees", "communications with stakeholders", ... A project has a beginning and end, unlike the activities of an ongoing business, but the list in PMBOK is pretty exhaustive. A small project/organization doesn't required a dedicated part for each one of them but as you get larger you need HR, PR, the dedicated project manager and such.
[1] A reductivist statement, yes, but Ashby's law takes the reductivism out of reductionism.
[2] The index case is the Wright Brothers' flier. People thought aviation was a matter of lift and thrust but it's actually a matter of controlling roll, yaw and pitch so you don't tumble and had Galileo understood that he could have built a glider.
MichaelZuo
Didn’t Norbert Wiener come up with some during his work on cybernetics?
PaulHoule
Yeah, there are other laws. But I'm trying to develop a joke where a criticism of reductivism (too simple analysis, see Marxism or Looksmaxxing) is capped off with "Ashby's Law is the only Law"
PaulHoule
The book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone
is of interest. In my mind the most interesting application of that was the contemporaneous Falun Gong movement in China.
Falun Gong practitioners would show up at a park and practice a set of simple physical and spiritual practices; the organization was deliberately structureless because organizations of all kinds in China are required to admit a cadre of Communist Party members to surveil and control the organization. No organization = no control network. (The very act of gathering a group of people at a point, however, is a basic practice of military science)
The one bit of authority in the organization is a book which is said to be infallible, which defends them from having the book rewritten by the authorities. (We know pretty well how the Communists and Republican governments oppressed folk religion movements such as the Huxian cult, but Taoism in its established form has always been some selection of folk practices which are approved by the authorities as long as China has had governments)
An unfortunate consequence of this is that Falun Gong cannot change any doctrine, such as their belief that "being gay is bad for your gong." They lost the support of mainstream western organizations and descended into pandering to right-wing nuts to get what support they could.
monadINtop
I think this misses the deeper relationship between the Falun Gong and western intelligence agencies, that goes beyond just "pandering to right-wing nuts" after a period of "spontaneous" support from mainstream western organizations.
keybored
The organic reasons seem straightforward enough. In its context it’s an interesting perspective on a certain type of left-wing experience from that era. It fits in with a wider discussion. In the mainstream however it gets co-opted as (1) this is how left-wing structures work, they’re all like this, and (2) they’re just tyrannies with extra and indirect steps. Ergo traditional structures were right all along. No need to think about it. That feminist/left-wing stuff is just naive kids.
PaulHoule
It wasn't just that era, but the second wave of feminism was coming on strong then and there was a lot of writing about that movement then.
I think a right-wing movement is more comfortable with the idea of social hierarchy, whether it is a formally structured group where "he who pays the piper pays the tune" [1] or the kind of group that the article describes where there are people who run the group without formal authority. There have been "left-wing" groups that have a strong hierarchy, such as Lenin's Bolsheviks, but groups like that have limited appeal to most people by the 1960s [2] [3]. There are also the various membership-based groups such as the Sierra Club and NOW which have limited effectiveness because they aren't accountable to members [4]
So conflicts like the above vex leftists because they'd like to put their egalitarian values to work.
My "3 year" case study was the time I was a leader in the Tompkins County Green Party. After the 2000 Ralph Nader campaign we had a lot of energy and decided we wanted to build an organization to contest local elections. We had luck early on taking advantage of fusion voting [5] to decisively settle a power struggle within the local Democratic party so people perceived we had power.
There were about 50 people who turned up to meetings, but 3 or 4 people had the time and energy to do the work, I don't think we formed a clique, we would have accepted just about anyone who was basically aligned with us and willing to put in the work. I ran a web site and plastered the town with posters and mostly did as I pleased except for the few times somebody said "you went too far with that poster", that is, most of the members were basically deferential to the people who did the work.
As time went on though the issue of being a spoiler [6] came up over and over again. We got a famous green thinker who was shortlisted for the 2004 Presidential race by the national party [7] to run for mayor, but people in our own party were afraid "if we run Glover, the cop is going to win". Each time we the prospect of running a candidate happened the group would split in half and by the 2004 race we couldn't really go forward because locally, statewide, and nationally we couldn't make up our mind if we even wanted to run a candidate. My strongly held opinion was "Fuck 'em" when it came to the Democrats and that a political party that didn't run candidates had no reason to exist; but I couldn't force that opinion on people that I felt a representative of and the other leaders felt the same way so we folded the organization up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network
[2] https://genius.com/The-beatles-revolution-lyrics
[3] A Leninist would say you're a poseur if you aren't part of an organization with the resolve and discipline to smash the capitalist class and the state the supports it.
[4] A case study in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
[5] https://ballotpedia.org/Fusion_voting
[6] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/reflections-on-the-2000-u...
romanhn
I'd love to hear more about how an org structure (or lack thereof) killed a public company in 3 weeks.
lkrubner
This is one of the main topics that I teach entrepreneurs about.
I wrote something reasonably short here:
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/to-grow-you-must...
I wrote something much longer here, but this material is mostly from other CTOs who I surveyed:
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos...
If you are in New York City, we have 2 different speakers who will speak to 2 different aspects of this problem, at our event on February 27th.
PaulHoule
See
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=etoy+vs...
First you need to know how conformist the culture was in the 1990s, when my wife and I would visit Manhattan we looked like two hippie throwbacks to the 1960s and got told we were the weirdest looking people in the city. I couldn't have stood to live there because you would look up and see a Tommy Hilfiger billboard and look down and see a lot of people wearing Tommy and if you couldn't take it, you couldn't take it. You couldn't get as good of a cup of coffee as you could get at an indy espresso bar in a small town in a flyover state because there was a Starbucks on every block to convince stock market analysts that it was like that coast to coast.
In Dec 1999 there were the WTO riots which have broken the WTO ever since (e.g. the old "corn law" fight over free trade in agriculture reached the impasse it at now) and it had an effect that washed over everyone. For a few weeks there was a wave of honesty, for instance I saw an article in the tech press that somebody went to a Microsoft press conference and he was bored out his mind.
So when Etoy had their domain stolen by Etoys many people from radical artists to people who didn't want to have their private property taken away rallied. We had a system where people would visit our web site and we'd use iframes to DDOS their web site. It ran for a few days with no effect, then I contributed a code snippet that made the attack many times more effective and brought the site down for a short time during the last shopping day of the year. Immediately they called the FBI who pulled the server out of the rack.
We put a lot of effort into public relations and talking to the media, never mind flooding stock market discussion groups with propaganda. We knew we were being infiltrated by the FBI so we used the tactic of creating new mailing lists with (we believed) a clean list of participants periodically. (A general answer to "Eternal September" problems)
The stock dropped precipitously when we were working on it, and a few weeks later they settled with etoy, an event we knew about before it was announced at their earnings call. It wasn't a good earnings call and the stock price spiraled downward and eventually the company folded (might have been more than three weeks but the critical part was about that long)
The management and IT folks at Etoys would minimize the contribution of activists, wrote a blog about how they defeated our DDOS (but we scared them enough to call the FBI, caused a panic on the most critical day of the year, and could boast that the registration numbers that they triumphantly announced were inflated dramatically by fake users we injected) and would say that the company failed because the earnings were not good.
I would say, however, that Etoys could have been a viable business in the long term if investors believed in management, selling toys online in 1999 was an idea with legs. Activism contributed to investors not believing in management, so they were forced to throw in the towel.
flerchin
This is an interesting piece of history, but doesn't seem to be a company folding after 3 weeks due to lack of org structure.
rout39574
I think the intended parable is that an unstructured group of activists took down a much larger, much better resourced, hierarchy.
krisoft
You misread the original comment I’m afraid. It doesn’t say that the company folded after 3 weeks due to a lack of org structure. It says that a structureless group caused the fall of a public company in 3 weeks of working on achieving that goal. Presumably the company had a structure.
akoboldfrying
You're right about the writer's intention, but I "misread" it the same way. Even after going back and checking, I still think it could be interpreted either way, and that GP's and my interpretation is the more natural one.
krisoft
100%. I don’t fault anyone who would misread it. The structure of the sentence is such that it contains multiple assides within one sentence. That makes is very prone to be misread.
samatman
YMMV but the way the OP describes the entire cycle occurring in three weeks seems to preclude the founding of a public company, which does take considerably longer in general. That leaves toppling it from the outside.
a_square_peg
I recommend this essay often to people, especially in a start up. When someone describes their organization as being "flat", it's often a red flag because it means that there are unwritten power structure that newer employees will likely be excluded from.
kqr
That is a beige flag at worst. Every organisation has unwritten power structures that (often) exclude newcomers. Some organisations also have additional written power structures that (often) exclude newcomers.
lolinder
While you're correct, my experience has been that the unwritten power structure is much stronger in places where there is no written power structure.
Where there is a written power structure you can usually appeal to it and eventually get something done. Where there exists no written power structure at all, you're out of luck unless you can quickly figure out what the power structure is.
A written power structure is a low resolution map. It's not perfect, but it gives you some idea of where to start making sense of things. A flat organization is never actually flat, but it also has no guideposts at all to show you even the rough outlines of the real hierarchies.
watwut
I worked in an organization with a low written structure. Creating unwritten structure is necessary consequence - each it happened as a reaction on serious dysfunction. And each time it improved things. And what you learned each time is that if you dont keep power, things will get very bad again.
Imo, that is argument for written structure. Written structure is easier to talk about openly talk about, reason about and fix. Unwritten structure is inferior consequence of its lack.
abdullahkhalids
Indeed, flat or unstructured social organizations are going to lead to abuse if not coupled with some explicit philosophy that ensures that the group doesn't devolve into "might is right" or ingroup/outgroup thinking. Anarachists as in OP have one such philosophy and corresponding actionable processes to prevent abuse in unstructured groups.
So yes, the startups or orgs have to very explicitly lay down processes, otherwise the red flag is probably warranted.
npstr
In Germany it just means it's a bad place to have a career in. Thankfully most HRs will happily advertise it in the job description making it easy to dodge.
Barrin92
>especially in a start up
It's an example that Zizek has often given. The startup boss is more insidious than the old school boss because he's "just your pal". The traditional boss you can rebel against, in the startup you can't because duh, you have no boss, so what are you complaining about? It's a way to disguise power.
Another thing is that it's also a way to dodge responsibility, as you see in tech. When a Japanese company fucks something up, you'll often see CEOs take salary cuts and sincerely apologize in front of the public. No need in startup land, nobody was responsible.
paulddraper
There's a big difference between "flat"/shallow and "flat"/we don't have job titles.
Good organizations allow interactions without too many gates. Which is what the good kind of flat refers to.
whatshisface
There should be a counterpart to this, "the tyranny of trying to encode an entire human mind in procedure."
As well as, "the tyranny of pretending that rules are much more absolute than their authors." :-)
jkaptur
Probably "Seeing Like a State", no?
ndileas
I had thought that the thesis of seeing like a state is that when you attempt to rationalize a complex system, you necessarily simplify it and sometimes destroy the value in it. E.g. If a government wants to raise money via taxes on food production, growing food becomes disincentivized. Or the simple fact that maps can't show everything about the piece of land they represent.
I think the opposite of the tyranny of structurelessness looks more like our legal + regulatory system where sometimes you need a team of experts to tell you where you can build a building, or the military where everything is so regimented so that you need to fill out forms to buy toilet paper.
sonofhans
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man’s mind.”
mjw1007
The part which describes the circumstances where she's seen an unstructured group work is interesting.
In particular, this condition
> Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.
is a good match for many free software projects.
That's one of four conditions she thinks are necessary. The other three are interesting too.
creer
> It is the task that basically structures the group.
Interesting idea. But the illustrations are lacking for now. I have seen events put up - and the thing is less that there was no structure (there are a core of people who know what they are doing, and the others who need their leadership) and more that (1) there is no time to haggle about the structure and (2) what you do notice is the people who are willing to put hard work on anything that needs it and the people who are there socially.
In the case of software projects, there is the thing of people putting in programming work on whatever they feel like - but meanwhile there is a structure of people defining the project, prioritizing bugs, etc. And there is very often a project owner or BDFL. We can rationalize it by saying that it's a technical structure or leadership but it's still there.
What I don't see much of is projects where being willing to show up and do the work is "enough". There are many project where people self assign themselves to this or that group - but that's not the same.
kqr
It seems like a lot of people do not make it to the end of this essay. Any time it comes up people invariably go, "Yeah, so that is why we should institute a hierarchy" which is not at all what Freeman was saying.
> Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization.
She mentions some concrete ideas:
- Leaders do not select their teams, instead, teams select their spokesperson. A spokesperson does not have authority over the team but can make decisions on their behalf in conversation with other spokespeople.
- Rotating the role of spokesperson among the eligible of the team. Possibly even having multiple spokespeople on the same team for different types of decisions.
- Set up processes to ensure someone does not sit on important information others do not have access to. All data should be public in the group.
- etc.
This is far from instituting an explicit hierarchy!
abdullahkhalids
Yes, anarchists think that the right set of social processes can allow for organizations that don't have abusive hierarchies. But these processes themselves are very structured and take a lot of careful work.
This is so far from popular understanding of anarchism.
duxup
There was an interesting story someone wrote about their time with some anarchists who traveled to New Orleans to help in the wake of the hurricane to help. The had a house and kitchen and in addition to traveling around and helping on an individual basis they planned to provide free meals to the locals.
They ran into the problem where one group of volunteers that aligned to cook together were vegan and insisted on making only vegan food (it also sounded like the dishes were very strange to the locals). This made sense for the cooks, but the locals didn't want the food. But nobody could convince this group to do anything differently.
Their system resulted in a sort of rotating hierarchy that meant every few days they couldn't provide for the locals.
Functional anarchy seems like it takes a lot of work.
abdullahkhalids
Funny. Anarachism, like every other political philosophy, is not an antidote to stupidity.
That said, it is easy to think that some other decision making mechanism (besides the rotating decision makers these guys were practicing) would always lead to better outcomes. A common consensus mechanism is decision by majority voting. Which often works, but often just picks the suboptimal solution, because it the average of the actual close to optimal solutions different subgroups are advocating for.
Every decision making mechanisms has some failures (and advantages). It's good to know what they are.
duxup
Even if just putting someone in charge of collecting some data that might say "looks like we feed more people with PPJ sandwiches than X,Y,Z, let's mix that into the rotation a bit more". Could even satisfy all parties.
Unfortunately there's an underlying "i do what I want" in a lot of political philosophies where it just doesn't work that way, even for getting what they want..
JackMorgan
Imagine being homeless from a hurricane yet still so privileged you can turn your nose up at a free vegan meal! Guess they didn't really need the meal after all...
I feel like this is more a commentary on the "needy" folks.
No one goes into a soup kitchen and expects to get their favorite meal, but I guess these folks were expecting the vegans to give up their beliefs and cook them hamburgers.
duxup
The people who they were helping weren't starving on the streets, I don't know what you imagine the aftermath of in New Orleans was like, but it wasn't that.
There's a strange cruelty to your comment where you're thinking of homeless people who went through a natural disaster ... so you can call them 'privileged'.
JackMorgan
I'm not trying to be cruel, but rather point out perhaps these community meals weren't that valuable if locals just turned their noses up at the free food. When folks are really hungry, it wouldn't matter if lentils isn't their normal cuisine, they'd eat it anyway and be grateful. It would be a different story if the meals violated some religious taboo, but the way you wrote it really makes the survivors sound ungrateful.
crawfordcomeaux
People in this country, across class lines, are addicted to their likes/dislikes being catered to, particularly in challenging times.
The issue is deeply cultural & until it's being worked on, solidarity is key: serving people in the ways they choose to receive care.
_DeadFred_
At a men's shelter I have seen the guys trash and refuse the carrots because they were purple. I think on some level a dignity thing kicks in. Like I will take the charity but I'm not going to let you treat me like a lesser person because of it. I tried explaining that the purple carrots were actually fancier but they weren't having it.
duxup
I think folks in desperate situations .... could use the gift of allowing them some dignity / choices. If you're in a bad spot your choices are so limited.
Don't want to go too far down the religious hole considering where some folks have taken religion, but the whole story of Jesus washing people's feet wasn't just about his own humility / setting an example. I think it was also about treating others with some respect.
goatlover
If you're cooking for other people, shouldn't it be the kind of food they want to eat? Otherwise, who are you cooking for, your principles?
keybored
Or they could have just gotten over themselves and served them what they wanted.
Things breaking down over veganism sounds like the typical anarchist self-own.
akoboldfrying
I think it's quite likely that the locals legitimately were just not that desperate for food in this specific neck of the woods, which would simply mean that, unfortunately, well-intentioned efforts to help with that were misallocated.
But if they really were short of food: I'll side with smug vegans over choosing beggars.
sph
Anarchism's name has been smeared so much no one agrees on what it means any more. It simply is the rejection of any form of coercion, especially from the State with its laws and monopoly on violence. It does not care at all about how people organise themselves.
The ideological hate for any form of hierarchy and structure is not anarchism, it's chaos.
goatlover
I have my suspicions that people organizing themselves at scale leads to the State. It happened historically.
yamrzou
It seems that those ideas are mainly optimizing for making sure that the group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary, or what she calls "democratic structuring" in the essay.
If one wants a default, well-tested structure, hierarchy seems to be a good candidate[1]. Another idea is to optimize for viability, meaning the ability to adapt to and survive changes in the environment, described by the Viable System Model[2].
I wonder if there are studies on the different ways of structuring and their goals and tradeoffs.
[1] Choose Boring Culture — https://charity.wtf/2023/05/01/choose-boring-technology-cult...
[2] Tools for Viable Organizing — https://vsru.org/articles/tools-for-viable-organizing.html
PaulDavisThe1st
"Heirarchy" describes a set of power and/or decision-making and/or accountability relationships.
It does not describe how the individuals who hold particular positions within the heirachy may change over time, which is a central part of the ideas Joreen gets to in the latter part of the essay.
Or in click-bait terms: you can have heirarchy without heirarchy :)
Aunche
A traditional hierarchy is a tree, whereas a flat governance aims to be as close as possible to a connected graph. It's significantly easier to maintain a tree than a connected graph, especially with a sufficient group size. You're unlikely to find many people willing to invest so much effort into maintaining a flat organization, and even if you do, often times it's a better investment for those people to be actively making progress on that shared goal rather than governance.
IMO, a regular representative democracy is "good enough." It may be biased towards the elite, but it's still by far the most successful form of governance when it comes to creating large systemic change. The perceived ineffectiveness of it comes from people's unwillingness to put actual work, which applies to any other form of organization as well.
mordae
No, it's not. It heavily favors the elite to the point it ended up like it is today all over the world - halfway to plutocracy with a touch of oligarchy.
Aunche
What people consider oligarchy is actually allowing the outsourcing of governance to the elite. Corporations are disproportionately represented because they are the ones who do the most research and strategizing. The high profile victories of the post WWII era (e.g. Civil Rights, the Clean Air Act, OSHA) were achieved by grassroots groups dedicating themselves to similar levels of effort. On the other hand, modern day advocacy and political engagement prioritizes entertainment and memeyness. Even today, people achieve victories over the elite when they take civic engagement seriously like NIMBYs blocking billionaire developers.
marxisttemp
What you’re describing sounds a lot like syndicalism, which is an idea that many people interested in structure without hierarchy end up at! Including Noam Chomsky[0], who is perhaps better known here for his hierarchy (lol) of grammars.
baxtr
Thanks for surfacing her ideas.
Although I have to admit that these sound all like ideas that sound great "in theory" but don’t work in reality. At least I’m not aware of good examples.
scarecrowbob
Oh, I dunno- my experience is that in "reality" almost every group of folks I have worked with, from software teams to stage hands to bands has (when functioning well) been more or less organized around those kinds of ideas.
It may sound hyperbolic to say that "anarchism is the default way humans work together". At the same every production I have worked in may have a boss, but at the same time usually the folks actually doing the work are getting along with very little direct hierarchy- people who know what to do go do it, folks who don't get tasked with doing things.
Most folks have watched stuff really get into the weeds when every action needs to be dictated from above.
atq2119
It is common in universities in at least some parts of the world for the dean(s) of departments to rotate among the faculty.
That seems to align somewhat with those ideas.
nabla9
The basics of representative democracy with different words.
MarkPNeyer
“Teams selecting leaders” or “randomly choosing the spokesperson” still gives rise to an explicit hierarchy, but in this case it’s not permanent and there’s a mechanism that prevents it from becoming permanent.
The idea that you can avoid hierarchy is, I think, confusing “social hierarchies with permanent places” - yes, bad, avoid that - with the _concept_ of hierarchy at all.
red_admiral
Yes, it's the time of year (olympiad?) when we remind ourselves that elections push power upward, then the elected push it downward.
watwut
> Leaders do not select their teams, instead, teams select their spokesperson. A spokesperson does not have authority over the team but can make decisions on their behalf in conversation with other spokespeople.
I have seen this and result is that no one wants to be the spokesperson except really really aggressive people able to bully others into compliance. Because the "spokeperson" gets to experience all the negative consequences of the decisions without having the authority to do anything about it. They are effectively secretaries. Most people, including good leaders, nope out.
sitkack
I would be curious what others would recommend as management books or anything related to organizational psychology in this topic.
Books I can think of are
"Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Organizations
"Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivering_Happiness
bunderbunder
I find "Turn the Ship Around!" to be an interesting companion to this essay. It provides an excellent example of how, if you do it right, a well-defined structure can actually be quite empowering to people at all levels of the organization.
Speaking from personal experience, I've seen it myself at one previous employer. The clear hierarchy and delegation of ownership and responsibilities made it easier for everyone to get things done and enhanced everyone's sense of psychological safety. People explicitly knowing exactly what authority they do and do not have means they can make confident decisions without feeling the need to play wasteful and exhausting games of "mother may I" with the latent power structure for fear of accidentally stepping on influential toes.
tikhonj
Seconding that book. It's one of several things that got me to realize that a lot of the problems I had seen with hierarchies were not fundamental to the idea of a hierarchy but rather functions of culture, practices and individuals.
It's also made me sad that finding teams that operate like that is really hard, and they often don't changes in management :( I had an absolutely amazing several years working on a team like that at Target of all places, until the broader Target culture caught up to us...
sitkack
If you were willing to write a larger passage, I would sure appreciate your good experience at Target and what made it special relative to "Turn The Ship Around".
sitkack
Yeah, I think having clear agency boundaries is a key property for all organizations that aren't run like a dictatorship.
Here is a talk given by the author of "Turn the Ship Around!", David Marquet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJL8zX3EVk
dbspin
Here's one about the 'Semco Way' - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Wor...
Semco, like Valve is a 'horizontal organisation' with a BDFL. The difference being that Semco is a massive organisation and employer operating across a range of industries.
Here's a quick read on the company - https://hatrabbits.com/en/ricardo-semler-does-things-differe...
TuringTest
I'd recommend The Fractal Organization,[1] or any other about Viable System Models.[2]
This framework based on cybernetic science provides good heuristics to both understand and design complex social structures.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Organization-Creating-sustain...
Matticus_Rex
Aaron Dignan's "Brave New Work" isn't particularly revolutionary, but synthesizes insights from Teal/Holacracy and other popular-but-hard-to-systematize org management stuff in a way that's very incremental and generally palatable for larger orgs. The Corporate Rebels blog (https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog) has a lot of good content in this vein as well.
Teal hasn't really seemed to develop much except through outlets like Corporate Rebels, but IMO Holacracy has shown some real continued promise. The Zappos adoption had middling success over time (and while they're no longer practicing, their market-based model owes a lot to it), but overall Holacracy and the similar structure-heavy self-management stuff it has inspired is continuing to press on. It's not growing, but it's fairly steady. They released a new version of Holacracy a few years ago set up for "modular adoption" instead of all-at-once adoption, and I think it's a significant improvement.
Jtsummers
Donella Meadows' "Leverage Points" (also a chapter in her book Thinking in Systems: A Primer), particularly the #1 one (transcending paradigms), addresses some aspects of this. To relate to this essay, freeing yourself from the idea that structurelessness is what you need, or a strict hierarchy at the other extreme, or anything in between. After that, you're free to actually develop and select good ideas and trial ideas without being constrained by your initial paradigm and the magical thinking associated with locking yourself into a paradigm.
In the software world, check out Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming which touches on these ideas (more about how to look at and examine systems, not prescriptive). The book was more of a starting point (or intended as such) so it's hardly comprehensive, but he looks at various organizational approaches within software teams and where they work and fail.
https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t...
SatvikBeri
My Years at General Motors by Alfred Sloan is one of the best, because he actually goes through several iterations of making the company more or less centralized, based on specific problems they had at the time and the best ways to solve them. So the reasoning ends up being much more nuanced than most pro-centralization or pro-decentralization books.
sitkack
I can see how a little centralization at the right time can align teams. Something akin to an air traffic controller or mediator.
varsketiz
I don't have particular books to share, but to me this is very close to group dynamics topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics
You can find Key Theorists section there with book recommendations.
sitkack
Speaking of Gustave Le Bon, I just came across him in this new book on propaganda
Early Media Effects Theory & the Suggestion Doctrine https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/nb-early-media-effects/re...
Full pdf https://github.com/mediastudiespress/singles/releases/downlo...
Chapter 1 is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popu...
Propelloni
I don't know if the newer books by Niels Pfläging are available in English, but they are superior to those mentioned. Be warned, though, Pfläging is a bit of an obstructionist.
Another interesting fellow is Daniel Mezick, whose writing is definitly available in English.
jll29
Clicked on it in the expectation of encountering an attack on schema-free databases and "NoSQL"... only to find it is about social groups ;)
treetalker
This has been posted several times over the last several years, with a total of about 100 comments.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jofreeman.com%2F...
eesmith
You missed the 120 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 because it links to https://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm .
There are about 11 other non-jofreeman.com comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... including some about the Wired article "A 1970s Essay Predicted Silicon Valley's High-Minded Tyranny" at https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-tyranny-of-struct... .
robertclaus
I've run into a similar problem many times at small companies. Effectively rejecting the idea of structure because of slippery-slope arguments. I've had pretty senior folks make comments like "If we require PR reviews on every little change, we'll be just like <pick an unpopular large tech company> and take forever to do anything."
duxup
Great read.
>The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific.
I do think of some of the "awareness" activism I see where it never seems to lead anywhere. Folks are just busy with their awareness activities and everything is deemed good because they're generating awareness. Like minded people do their awareness thing, they like to do it, and there ya go... awareness is sort of its own means to an end and I'm not sure the given individuals or groups are structured in a way that they'll ever be capable of more.
I'd even argue that some of these structureless groups are incapable of much critical discussion as their group exists purely because of their awareness raising efforts, it is what they are, change might take some leadership.
nialv7
This made me lose a bit of faith in humanity, because it seems like when a group of humans get together, no matter what kind of structure the group take, it's going to be bad in some way.
Hierarchical, flat, or structureless (as pointed out by this article); with a rigid procedure, without a rigid procedure. Doesn't matter how the group is organized, it's going to be bad in some way.
IshKebab
That's not the case. There are plenty of very functional groups of people. They usually aren't flawless, but I don't see why "people aren't perfect" would make you lose faith in humanity.
gunian
because the chasm between people aren't perfect and the fourth reich is very tiny
rmah
That people almost always self-organize into structured organizations gives me hope for humanity. Social structures provide people with means to make life easier. They provide support and a guide on how to accomplish things without having to worry about all the details or the "big picture". And, of course, no organization is perfect. Hoping for perfection is not only folly, it is the enemy of good.
KineticLensman
Check out Dunbar's Number [0] (you might already know this). It's a theoretical constraint on the size of successful human groupings where everyone knows of everyone else, and is approximately the size of company-sized (in the military sense) subunits. Of course, these have very explicit structure, even if they contain 'characters'
bokoharambe
Definitely read the criticisms section of this article, because it shows how strange and unsound the whole notion is.
nonrandomstring
A group with superpowers is one that can spontaneously and optimally reconfigure structure. Including dissolving and spontaneously re-emerging. Group dynamic arrangements grow quickly, combinations for without rank, permutations for ordered ones, both factorial. Then there's distributing N tasks over M people. Lots of unique and special ways build a team, if it's able to change.
heymijo
This was a key insight Alexander Hamilton had after growing up in the West Indies seeing the worst of slavery and then moving to the American colonies and receiving a classical education.
The American democracy he sought to co-create was one that could reign in humanity's worst impulses while enabling our better ones.
awongh
The issue is assuming that your dogma of organization building is correct and that it absolves you from actually resolving inevitable issues between people and between people and the organization.
If you don't take on this assumption I think it will go smoother than if you're relying on structure or lack of structure to save you from actually taking on each issue (where each issue will, each time, have their own sets of tricky, subtle and thorny trade-offs).....
jmcqk6
It's almost like you can't really make generalizations about what good human groups look like.
sethgoodluck
I think it more imperative that we are mindful of the natural evolution of groups and consciously put structures in place at the right time.
Knowing that initial structurelessness is good and eventually becomes bad can help us preempt failures
quotemstr
The best you can do is at least make the badness legible so you can fix and optimize your structure in an intelligent way instead of getting randomized default primate settings.
keybored
Have you heard of people who need to have a very clear structure to their lives in order to live a good life? Does that make you lose faith in existence?
Well some commenters here are about a hair-width away from declaring losing faith in humanity. Anyway.
velcrovan
Reminds me of the Zappos holacracy madness.
https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-f...
Matticus_Rex
"Structurelessness" is the polar opposite of Holacracy. Holacracy is more structured than traditional management.
dr_dshiv
I love "lessness" words in english. Structurelessness is a pretty great word.
qntty
The Tyranny of Structurelessness and The Gervais Principle are the two essays that I think about a lot at work.
matthest
On the flip side, Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" is a fascinating read on the benefits of decentralization.
The premise is that in the 1500s, no one thought Europe was going to be the next great power. The dominant civilizations at the time were the Chinese and the Ottomans.
Why did Europe win? Because no one could unify Europe. It was basically a collection of states.
Whereas China and the Ottoman Empire were centralized. The problem with centralization is that if the guy at the top says to do something, everyone must fall in line, even if it's a bad idea.
China used to have the most dominant navel fleet in the world. Then in the early 1500s, their government decided to stop building ships. Which ultimately led to them falling behind in the world order.
In Europe however, even if one country received a decree to stop building ships, it wouldn't stop the others from doing so. This created a hotbed of innovation and competition that allowed them to develop rapidly. And establish dominance.
The trade offs between centralization and decentralization are fascinating.
Aloisius
Isn't who is decentralization vs. centralization in your argument seems to be more about comparing a group of states to a single one than anything else?
Seems a bit like an apple vs. fruit basket situation.
jandrese
It mirrors in a lot of ways capitalism vs. communism. Or more precisely market based economies vs. command economies. The ultimate problem is that efficient distribution of resources depends on the unique conditions at thousands or millions of sites across the country. The people who are most well informed about what is needed are the people at those sites. The fundamental problem with command economies is transmitting that information up to the central source without overwhelming the system. Because it is way too much information to deal with they have to make simplifying assumptions, which lead to inefficiencies that compound over time.
The more decentralized your decision making the more efficient the system runs. However, this has drawbacks as it becomes hard or impossible to focus on big problems. On the flipside centralized systems are highly vulnerable to corruption. No system is perfect, and the most sensible systems use a combination of both.
matthest
100% agree. Market economies really do seem like the only way to prosperity in the modern era.
Mao's command economy had the country stuck in poverty. Deng's market economy reforms turned them into a superpower.
jandrese
Yep, but remember that not everything works efficiently on a market. Utilities like water and power with high barriers, at least on the distribution side, shouldn't be left to the whims of a free market. We have plenty of historical precedent where market based solutions fared poorly compared to a more command oriented approach.
You often see politicians and ideologues who insist that the market is the only solution to any problem, and these people are wrong and their solutions can lead to tragedy.
matthest
Agree regarding water and power, and really anything environmental.
As far as the market goes, I think part of the problem is that most industries are not true free markets, AKA: high competition, low barriers to entry.
Industries that are close to true free markets: restaurants, barbers, spas, handcrafted goods, almost any manner of small business.
These are some of the most ancient industries and have never collapsed or become overrun by corporations.
The issue with something like deregulating banks is that banking is not a true free market. There is no high competition (it's concentrated by a few corporations). So deregulating it can be disastrous because it's basically allowing a corporate monopoly to run wild.
If they deregulated it AND made a massive concerted effort to bring a ton of new, smaller, independent banks to the market, perhaps it could become a self-sustaining free market that truly benefits the people, with little need for government intervention.
TuringTest
> As far as the market goes, I think part of the problem is that most industries are not true free markets, AKA: high competition, low barriers to entry.
That sounds like the classic "if all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails".
It's true that decentralised decision making can make good use of local information. But you're ignoring the kind of problems that are created by decentralisation itself, so they can't be fixed by more of it.
A system that is being optimized with only local information is prone to getting stuck in local minima, situations which can be very far from the true optimum.
To escape from the local minima you need to gather global information compiled from the whole system, and use it to alter the decisions that individual actors would make from just their locally achievable information.
That's the role of regulation, and why regulated markets work better than chaotic ones. Regulation can make individuals coordinate to achieve larger goals than what's possible without it. And to enforce effective regulation you need some kind of authority, which is centralised.
Of course that raises the question of how that authority is created and what goals does it set; for that, we get politics, with various groups trying to influence what the authority will decree and whose interests it will pursue harder.
keybored
> 100% agree. Market economies really do seem like the only way to prosperity in the modern era.
From a submission about a left-wing subculture to declaring victory for the “decentralization” of capitalism. What else to expect.
atq2119
Capitalism doesn't have a monopoly (heh) on market economies. Market socialism is a thing.
matthest
Depends on your definition of capitalism.
The original Adam Smith capitalism basically called for a nation of small businesses - ultra decentralized. Modern American industries are very far from that. Some might argue they're more like state-sponsored organizations. Which definitely wouldn't be Adam Smith's capitalism.
keybored
Book 1, chapter 7: The workers want to work as little as possible and get as high a wage as possible while the employers want the workers to work as much as possible and for as small of a wage as possible ... yet it is obvious that the employers have an upper hand in this standoff, being easier to organize since they are smaller in number, having more funds to live off of, and by the fact that they in practice enlist the state to go after workers.
I was talking about the only capitalism that has existed.
dbspin
History is complicated. The reason the Chinese stopped building (and in fact scuttled) their fleets is collective trauma after the mass genocide carried out by the Mongols. Including the decapitation of the Chinese imperial elite and the erasure and sacking of several notable cities. The reason the Mongols were able to do what no steppe people had done before was because of the centralisation of the hordes under the leadership of Temujin, otherwise known as Genghis Khan.
matthest
True. Centralization under the right leadership will always be more efficient than a decentralized system.
But if it's the wrong leadership, the results are far more catastrophic.
Centralization is high risk/high reward.
red_admiral
Every time this comes up, more people get pulled in to understand the point. Long may this continue!
aSanchezStern
Anybody have a link to a description of the "Lot system" mentioned near the end?
dang
Related. Others?
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285097 - June 2023 (73 comments)
Jo Freeman's the Tyranny of Structurelessness (Recommended by Mark Andreesen) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829486 - June 2022 (1 comment)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728477 - Oct 2020 (19 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1973) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17585104 - July 2018 (20 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535834 - Oct 2017 (2 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651406 - May 2016 (54 comments)
“Meritocracy” and the Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495241 - Oct 2014 (1 comment)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762486 - May 2014 (15 comments)
RE: The “Tyranny of Structurelessness” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555013 - April 2014 (7 comments)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 - March 2014 (120 comments)
ewrong
The tyranny of terrible typography?
kazinator
Downvote me to the basement, if you must, but that's too much of a wall of text, which is unlikely to reveal anything earth-shattering about what happens when people form groups without structure.
Can someone comment whether the AI summary below is fair; is it missing anything salient, or twisting anything around?
Jo Freeman's essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" argues that:
* Structure is inevitable: Even in groups that explicitly reject hierarchy, power dynamics and informal leadership will inevitably emerge. Denying this reality can hinder effective action and accountability.
* Informal leadership is often hidden: In structureless groups, leadership often arises organically and is not formally recognized. This can lead to decisions being made by a small, unaccountable group, often based on personal relationships rather than merit.
* Lack of structure can empower the privileged: Without clear roles and decision-making processes, those with existing social or economic advantages may have an undue influence, silencing marginalized voices.
* Formal structure can be beneficial: By acknowledging and formalizing leadership roles and decision-making processes, groups can ensure greater transparency, accountability, and inclusivity.
Essentially, Freeman argues that embracing a degree of structure, rather than blindly rejecting it, is crucial for creating truly equitable and effective groups.
bell-cot
Sounds like she majored in Mathematics - but Wikipedia say Political Science.
killjoywashere
Every data structure comes with costs. You give some to get others. Nothing in here should be surprising.
A classic essay whose significance goes way beyond women or feminism. I've been part of a few "structureless" groups which spontaneously organized around an opportunity and were initially effective because of that structureless (e.g. somebody gets an idea, the whole group moves like a military unit, opponents had no idea something like that could happen) but succumbed to the dynamics in that article on a time scale of three weeks (arguably ended a public company in that time!) to three years.