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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 disa

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. """
- albacur 8y ago
  #1 held: we defined the tasks required to solve the problem at hand, and focused in on them. #2 held: the teams were fairly small and homogenous. #3 held, mostly. The project lead would occasionally withhold potentially-useful information, which felt like some kind of egocentric power play, but overall communication was very good. #4 didn’t hold. We were all specialists in various areas. Fortunately, people rarely left mid-project.
  - hitekker 8y ago
    Thanks for running your experience by these conditions. #4 seems like almost everyone in the team was indispensable since they were all specialists, which might not contradict the point of the condition (no one believes they’re less replaceable than their peers)
- hitekker 8y ago
  I really like how she distinguished between each condition because you can tell she basically asked “how can a team be productive without (formal) structure?” This essay should be require reading for startups.

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. """

albacur 8y ago
#1 held: we defined the tasks required to solve the problem at hand, and focused in on them. #2 held: the teams were fairly small and homogenous. #3 held, mostly. The project lead would occasionally withhold potentially-useful information, which felt like some kind of egocentric power play, but overall communication was very good. #4 didn’t hold. We were all specialists in various areas. Fortunately, people rarely left mid-project.
- hitekker 8y ago
  Thanks for running your experience by these conditions. #4 seems like almost everyone in the team was indispensable since they were all specialists, which might not contradict the point of the condition (no one believes they’re less replaceable than their peers)
hitekker 8y ago
I really like how she distinguished between each condition because you can tell she basically asked “how can a team be productive without (formal) structure?” This essay should be require reading for startups.