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Hierarchy may be bad for cooperation, but it is great for quick decision making. Further, I would argue that the decrease in "investment" shown in lower-level m

Hierarchy may be bad for cooperation, but it is great for quick decision making. Further, I would argue that the decrease in "investment" shown in lower-level members of a team is not a symptom of hierarchy, but a symptom of bad leadership--the appoonted leader doesn't know how to lead, and the decision to make him leader seems unfair.

InclinedPlane 11y ago
It really isn't. It's great for quick bad decision making, but so is rolling a die. It takes so much time and effort for information to flow up and down the hierarchy that it takes a long time for informed decisions to get made, let alone good ones.
- dawnbreez 11y ago
  That's where chain-of-command and executive decisions come into play. In an army field manual for tactics, it states that each level in the hierarchy of a chain of command should be responsible for a certain level of the battlefield; the Commander in Chief decides who to go to war against, the general decides which city is a priority, his liutenants decide how to assault the city, the sergeants decide which building to run to, and the private decides how to get to that building in a timely manner. Most businesses do not do this. They rely entirely on decisions from higher up, which are often uninformed about small-picture things, even if they understand the big picture.
  - kitsune_ 11y ago
    This doesn't alleviate the big problem with command hierarchies. If the top decision is wrong, and the commander in chief / CEO is ignorant to the advice of their subordinates, there usually is no other recourse than mutiny (war time) or resignation (businesses). This is played out at every level of the hierarchy.
    - michaelt 11y ago
      Which command structure is most appropriate will depend on the challenges the business is facing. If the business has solid fundamentals and basically needs to keep making incremental improvements and watch the money roll in, almost any management structure will do it. But if a business has needs exit a market with poor fundamentals, and that requires them to close factories, end product lines and fire people? The people getting fired won't be happy about that. So if your management structure requires their consent, you're going to have a bad time.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Whether this is a problem or not depends on the domain. In case of military, it's usually much more important that everyone knows and follows the same plan.
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    That's all fine and good with the military, which has had 1000s of years to hone their model of their domain. Land/sea/air. Geographical boundaries. But in the typical company, there is nowhere near as clear a picture of what exactly the different levels are. Are Design and Engineering on the same level? Are they underneath Product or is product just part of design? Is Marketing? What about the Data team? Are the server and client two teams at the same level, or are they just different regions of the "world"? > They rely entirely on decisions from higher up, which are often uninformed about small-picture things, even if they understand the big picture. That's the thing.... you can't really understand the big picture without understanding the small one. We lionize Bill Gates because he often knew more about about the details of software decisions than the low-level employees who presented plans to him.
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    Even in the military it's a very flawed process, and, in the US anyway, they go out of their way to enable independent decision making at the unit level.
- dsfsdfd 11y ago
  I agree with you. I just cannot understand where people are coming from when they rush to defend the hierarchical organisation of society. It's just like you've attacked their religion.
  - TulliusCicero 11y ago
    Ah, the ol' "discredit my opponents by painting them as irrational extremists" tactic. Good show. Maybe people are defending hierarchy because it's worked reasonably well in many different parts of their lives? Are there any large, successful businesses that aren't hierarchical? What about large governments?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    They're coming from observation. IMO it's the obsession with destroying hierarchies and "democratization" that seems ideology-driven. Centralized solution are good at coordinating and bad at responding to local challenges. Distributed solutions are good at adapting to the local environment, but absolutely suck at coordinating. We have evidence for this evaluation all around us, in every second of our lives, starting with how our bodies are structured (hierarchy which is made of distributed elements at each level), going through basic social interactions (ever been to a YouTube party, or tried to organize a family trip?), and ending with politics.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  You know what's worse than rolling a die? Distributed decision making. Yes, moving information up and down the hierarchy takes time, but coordinating a distributed structure takes exponentially more time (and I mean it literally, it's graph theory 101), and with decision making it's usually more important that everyone is on the same page than that the decision is optimal. Army, which pops as an example in this thread, understand that perfectly well, hence the chain of command.
RobertoG 11y ago
Never mind how good is the leader. I think you miss what, in my opinion, is the most relevant point: The collaboration phase doesn't change the splitting phase, they are independent. That means that never mind what you did in the collaboration phase, what decide the result in the splitting phase, is your place in the hierarchy. Of course, that leads to those low in the hierarchy investing less, as they know that, never mind what they invest, what decide what they will get is the hierarchy that is already decided.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Hierarchy may be bad for cooperation, but it is great for quick decision making. Not really. Its good for applying established processes and resisting change, which includes being good at making quick decisions on situations that have been anticipated (but, also, often very bad at making quick decisions outside of the realm of pre-considered possibilities.)
- mwfunk 11y ago
  I would think it'd be even more efficient the more unknowns there are. If no one has the ability to listen to the differing opinions of the group and then initiate a course of action by deciding on one or more of the available paths, there are plenty of cases where no consensus is reached and everything goes in a bunch of different directions at once, or nowhere at all (as anyone who has witnessed the parade of "YYYY will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" jokes every year for the past 15+ years can attest to). Now, hierarchy may not produce the most correct decision making, but it does produce decision making (not even "quick decision making", just "decision making"). Nonhierarchical organizations can't guarantee that. I also think there are large categories of business, design, marketing, or engineering decisions about which groups might never reach a consensus because each position is true and correct and attainable in isolation, but are not attainable when combined together. I strongly believe that good engineering is all about optimizing compromises, and that it's irrational human nature for us to even think that "no compromises" solutions to any nontrivial problems even exist. We might convince ourselves that the compromises we're making don't matter, but all that does is help hide a potential source of future problems. Compromise isn't a dirty word in engineering, or at least it shouldn't be. That's what having a hierarchy gives you- a way for people to argue their position as strongly as needed, an understanding that it's natural for people to focus on different ways of looking at the same problem and coming to conclusions that are simultaneously correct and incompatible, and a mechanism (the hierarchy) that ensures action by either enforcing compromise or just picking a winner in situations in situations where a decision must be made but more than one correct but incompatible solution is being fought for within the group.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago

InclinedPlane 11y ago

It really isn't. It's great for quick bad decision making, but so is rolling a die. It takes so much time and effort for information to flow up and down the hierarchy that it takes a long time for informed decisions to get made, let alone good ones.

dawnbreez 11y ago
That's where chain-of-command and executive decisions come into play. In an army field manual for tactics, it states that each level in the hierarchy of a chain of command should be responsible for a certain level of the battlefield; the Commander in Chief decides who to go to war against, the general decides which city is a priority, his liutenants decide how to assault the city, the sergeants decide which building to run to, and the private decides how to get to that building in a timely manner. Most businesses do not do this. They rely entirely on decisions from higher up, which are often uninformed about small-picture things, even if they understand the big picture.
- kitsune_ 11y ago
  This doesn't alleviate the big problem with command hierarchies. If the top decision is wrong, and the commander in chief / CEO is ignorant to the advice of their subordinates, there usually is no other recourse than mutiny (war time) or resignation (businesses). This is played out at every level of the hierarchy.
  - michaelt 11y ago
    Which command structure is most appropriate will depend on the challenges the business is facing. If the business has solid fundamentals and basically needs to keep making incremental improvements and watch the money roll in, almost any management structure will do it. But if a business has needs exit a market with poor fundamentals, and that requires them to close factories, end product lines and fire people? The people getting fired won't be happy about that. So if your management structure requires their consent, you're going to have a bad time.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Whether this is a problem or not depends on the domain. In case of military, it's usually much more important that everyone knows and follows the same plan.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  That's all fine and good with the military, which has had 1000s of years to hone their model of their domain. Land/sea/air. Geographical boundaries. But in the typical company, there is nowhere near as clear a picture of what exactly the different levels are. Are Design and Engineering on the same level? Are they underneath Product or is product just part of design? Is Marketing? What about the Data team? Are the server and client two teams at the same level, or are they just different regions of the "world"? > They rely entirely on decisions from higher up, which are often uninformed about small-picture things, even if they understand the big picture. That's the thing.... you can't really understand the big picture without understanding the small one. We lionize Bill Gates because he often knew more about about the details of software decisions than the low-level employees who presented plans to him.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Even in the military it's a very flawed process, and, in the US anyway, they go out of their way to enable independent decision making at the unit level.
dsfsdfd 11y ago
I agree with you. I just cannot understand where people are coming from when they rush to defend the hierarchical organisation of society. It's just like you've attacked their religion.
- TulliusCicero 11y ago
  Ah, the ol' "discredit my opponents by painting them as irrational extremists" tactic. Good show. Maybe people are defending hierarchy because it's worked reasonably well in many different parts of their lives? Are there any large, successful businesses that aren't hierarchical? What about large governments?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  They're coming from observation. IMO it's the obsession with destroying hierarchies and "democratization" that seems ideology-driven. Centralized solution are good at coordinating and bad at responding to local challenges. Distributed solutions are good at adapting to the local environment, but absolutely suck at coordinating. We have evidence for this evaluation all around us, in every second of our lives, starting with how our bodies are structured (hierarchy which is made of distributed elements at each level), going through basic social interactions (ever been to a YouTube party, or tried to organize a family trip?), and ending with politics.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
You know what's worse than rolling a die? Distributed decision making. Yes, moving information up and down the hierarchy takes time, but coordinating a distributed structure takes exponentially more time (and I mean it literally, it's graph theory 101), and with decision making it's usually more important that everyone is on the same page than that the decision is optimal. Army, which pops as an example in this thread, understand that perfectly well, hence the chain of command.

RobertoG 11y ago

Never mind how good is the leader. I think you miss what, in my opinion, is the most relevant point: The collaboration phase doesn't change the splitting phase, they are independent. That means that never mind what you did in the collaboration phase, what decide the result in the splitting phase, is your place in the hierarchy. Of course, that leads to those low in the hierarchy investing less, as they know that, never mind what they invest, what decide what they will get is the hierarchy that is already decided.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dragonwriter 11y ago

> Hierarchy may be bad for cooperation, but it is great for quick decision making. Not really. Its good for applying established processes and resisting change, which includes being good at making quick decisions on situations that have been anticipated (but, also, often very bad at making quick decisions outside of the realm of pre-considered possibilities.)

mwfunk 11y ago
I would think it'd be even more efficient the more unknowns there are. If no one has the ability to listen to the differing opinions of the group and then initiate a course of action by deciding on one or more of the available paths, there are plenty of cases where no consensus is reached and everything goes in a bunch of different directions at once, or nowhere at all (as anyone who has witnessed the parade of "YYYY will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" jokes every year for the past 15+ years can attest to). Now, hierarchy may not produce the most correct decision making, but it does produce decision making (not even "quick decision making", just "decision making"). Nonhierarchical organizations can't guarantee that. I also think there are large categories of business, design, marketing, or engineering decisions about which groups might never reach a consensus because each position is true and correct and attainable in isolation, but are not attainable when combined together. I strongly believe that good engineering is all about optimizing compromises, and that it's irrational human nature for us to even think that "no compromises" solutions to any nontrivial problems even exist. We might convince ourselves that the compromises we're making don't matter, but all that does is help hide a potential source of future problems. Compromise isn't a dirty word in engineering, or at least it shouldn't be. That's what having a hierarchy gives you- a way for people to argue their position as strongly as needed, an understanding that it's natural for people to focus on different ways of looking at the same problem and coming to conclusions that are simultaneously correct and incompatible, and a mechanism (the hierarchy) that ensures action by either enforcing compromise or just picking a winner in situations in situations where a decision must be made but more than one correct but incompatible solution is being fought for within the group.
- dragonwriter 11y ago