4 ms·

The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1973)

115 points by sillysaurus3 8y ago

cirgue 8y ago
My experience with this dynamic is that leaders and power structures emerge in “leaderless” organizations despite the best efforts of participants. This leads to a lack of accountability for the excercise of de facto authority because it supposedly does not exist, and rapidly creates toxic and exploitative environments with zero recourse for grievance.
- solidsnack9000 8y ago
  Companies with "flat" engineering hierarchies -- a CTO/cofounder and everyone else as senior engineer -- often exhibit the same phenomenon. Some senior engineers are more senior than others.
- wpietri 8y ago
  Yes, exactly. Primates gonna prime. There was an extended tweetstorm from a former Valve employee that just screamed "tyranny of structurelessness": https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_... I strongly believe that there must be better organizational structures than the white-collar neo-feudalism that is the average American corporation. But I think we have enough examples to say the pure "leaderless" model is on average worse once you get above a very modest number of people.
  - fhrow4484 8y ago
    I believe this essay was submitted since it's mentioned in the top comment of the Valve guy story on the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584563
  - squeed 8y ago
    The phrase "white-collar neo-feudalism" is probably the best characterization I've heard - thanks for that. The metaphor makes me wonder: who is the church - those who convince the masses that there's a bigger meaning to sitting around an obeying orders?
    - wpietri 8y ago
      Ooh, that's a really good question. My first thought is that it's the advertising industry. Or more abstractly, the system of consumerism. But I'll have to think about that.
    - cirgue 8y ago
      Agile coaches, HN talking about the revolutionary power of disruption.
- rixed 8y ago
  Isn't the solution then to make authority (and thus also accountability) temporary and/or to spread it amongst many smaller areas? For instance, every employee could take turn at non technical but honorific positions. Regarding technical tasks, each person could also rule absolutely over many small areas of expertise that they also take responsibility for? I hope there is no need for a fixed arbitrary hierarchy for accountability.
  - gersh 8y ago
    I think that can work to an extent, but who decides what code gets pushed to production? You can decentralize responsibility for tasks, but ultimately you need some method of resolving competing pull requests. If someone can take control of that process, they can bully everyone else. This can then result in harassment and discrimination.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    Idealistic. You have to treat each position of power in a defensive mode - each can be exploited or suborned in different ways. There would need to have "watchers who watch the watchers" - a problem that regresses infinitely. Meanwhile even if you do a good job at that, the REAL job is done poorly if at all.
  - noio 8y ago
    The article mentions at the end some strategies. (points 3 and 4 seem relevant, 5 perhaps counters your argument) 1) Delegation [...] 2) [Responsibility] 3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. [...] 4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. [...] 5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. [...] Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. [...] 6) Diffusion of information [...] 7) Equal access to resources needed by the group.[...]
- noobermin 8y ago
  It's a long piece, but skimming shows that Joreen's piece makes that point and she proposes a rather democratic structure as a way to both avoid the problems with usual hierarchies and complete structurelessness.
hkai 8y ago
Great read for some ex-Valve employees.
unwind 8y ago
Meta/OT: Mods, please fix the missing 'p' in the title. Thanks.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
albacur 8y ago
I’ve seen flat organization work well at one organization, essentially a consulting firm where we worked on short-lived projects. Teams had to assemble and disassemble within a span of two or three years. It really worked well, in retrospect. Our clients (from one branch of the military or another) came to us with actual clearly-defined problems, and gave us space to engineer real solutions. I left because I didn’t want to spend my time developing tech for the military, and I joined an industrial R&D lab. What a mess I walked into. Layers and layers of hierarchy, all decided by political in-fighting rather than merit, and every team is pushing mocked-up half-solutions to imaginary problems.
- azernik 8y ago
  I'm curious how many of these applied: """ While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group; 1) It is task oriented. 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. 2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise. 3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily. 4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts. """
nemild 8y ago
One reason this has been discovered as of late in tech circles is Bitcoin. Professor Arvind Narayanan at Princeton cited this in May 2015, as the Bitcoin community was having debates about decentralization and what it meant for governance. See the fifth footnote in this blog post entitled "Bitcoin faces a crossroads, needs an effective decision-making process ": https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/05/11/bitcoin-faces-a-crossroads-needs-an-effective-decision-making-process/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/05/11/bitcoin-faces-a-cro... Also, this tweet: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1005151684807610368 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1005151684807610368

115 points by sillysaurus3 8y ago

My experience with this dynamic is that leaders and power structures emerge in “leaderless” organizations despite the best efforts of participants. This leads to a lack of accountability for the excercise of de facto authority because it supposedly does not exist, and rapidly creates toxic and exploitative environments with zero recourse for grievance.

solidsnack9000 8y ago
Companies with "flat" engineering hierarchies -- a CTO/cofounder and everyone else as senior engineer -- often exhibit the same phenomenon. Some senior engineers are more senior than others.
wpietri 8y ago
Yes, exactly. Primates gonna prime. There was an extended tweetstorm from a former Valve employee that just screamed "tyranny of structurelessness": https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_... I strongly believe that there must be better organizational structures than the white-collar neo-feudalism that is the average American corporation. But I think we have enough examples to say the pure "leaderless" model is on average worse once you get above a very modest number of people.
- fhrow4484 8y ago
  I believe this essay was submitted since it's mentioned in the top comment of the Valve guy story on the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584563
- squeed 8y ago
  The phrase "white-collar neo-feudalism" is probably the best characterization I've heard - thanks for that. The metaphor makes me wonder: who is the church - those who convince the masses that there's a bigger meaning to sitting around an obeying orders?
  - wpietri 8y ago
    Ooh, that's a really good question. My first thought is that it's the advertising industry. Or more abstractly, the system of consumerism. But I'll have to think about that.
  - cirgue 8y ago
    Agile coaches, HN talking about the revolutionary power of disruption.
rixed 8y ago
Isn't the solution then to make authority (and thus also accountability) temporary and/or to spread it amongst many smaller areas? For instance, every employee could take turn at non technical but honorific positions. Regarding technical tasks, each person could also rule absolutely over many small areas of expertise that they also take responsibility for? I hope there is no need for a fixed arbitrary hierarchy for accountability.
- gersh 8y ago
  I think that can work to an extent, but who decides what code gets pushed to production? You can decentralize responsibility for tasks, but ultimately you need some method of resolving competing pull requests. If someone can take control of that process, they can bully everyone else. This can then result in harassment and discrimination.
- r00fus 8y ago
  Idealistic. You have to treat each position of power in a defensive mode - each can be exploited or suborned in different ways. There would need to have "watchers who watch the watchers" - a problem that regresses infinitely. Meanwhile even if you do a good job at that, the REAL job is done poorly if at all.
- noio 8y ago
  The article mentions at the end some strategies. (points 3 and 4 seem relevant, 5 perhaps counters your argument) 1) Delegation [...] 2) [Responsibility] 3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. [...] 4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. [...] 5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. [...] Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. [...] 6) Diffusion of information [...] 7) Equal access to resources needed by the group.[...]
noobermin 8y ago
It's a long piece, but skimming shows that Joreen's piece makes that point and she proposes a rather democratic structure as a way to both avoid the problems with usual hierarchies and complete structurelessness.

hkai 8y ago

Great read for some ex-Valve employees.

unwind 8y ago

Meta/OT: Mods, please fix the missing 'p' in the title. Thanks.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

albacur 8y ago

I’ve seen flat organization work well at one organization, essentially a consulting firm where we worked on short-lived projects. Teams had to assemble and disassemble within a span of two or three years. It really worked well, in retrospect. Our clients (from one branch of the military or another) came to us with actual clearly-defined problems, and gave us space to engineer real solutions. I left because I didn’t want to spend my time developing tech for the military, and I joined an industrial R&D lab. What a mess I walked into. Layers and layers of hierarchy, all decided by political in-fighting rather than merit, and every team is pushing mocked-up half-solutions to imaginary problems.

azernik 8y ago
I'm curious how many of these applied: """ While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group; 1) It is task oriented. 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. 2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise. 3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily. 4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts. """

nemild 8y ago

One reason this has been discovered as of late in tech circles is Bitcoin. Professor Arvind Narayanan at Princeton cited this in May 2015, as the Bitcoin community was having debates about decentralization and what it meant for governance. See the fifth footnote in this blog post entitled "Bitcoin faces a crossroads, needs an effective decision-making process ": https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/05/11/bitcoin-faces-a-crossroads-needs-an-effective-decision-making-process/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/05/11/bitcoin-faces-a-cro... Also, this tweet: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1005151684807610368 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1005151684807610368