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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 hie

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.

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.