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Most organisations structure power in hierarchies, meaning a small number of people at the top of the pyramid are responsible and supposed to be ultimately acco
by harryf 8y ago
Most organisations structure power in hierarchies, meaning a small number of people at the top of the pyramid are responsible and supposed to be ultimately accountable for ALL decisions being made under that structure.
This naturally leads to a situation where those working at the top are being overwhelmed with demands for their attention and decision making approval.
A conscientious person - arguably a good _leader_ - will take this responsibility seriously, and devote their time and energy to handle all those demands as best they can.
But another type of person - a "player" - will realise that the work of decision making actually _detracts_ from their success within the organisation. A "player" will figure out they should avoid the work of leadership as much as possible and instead devote their time to fostering their own image, gaining popularity, claiming responsibility for other peoples good decisions and generally working their way up the pyramid.
For me hierarchical power structures are the root cause of the problem here, not human nature - the "player" is really acting rationally, taking the path of least resistance to achieve their goals.
The problem IMO is we're using legacy approaches to organising ourselves groups that stems from military theory of the 18th century - that most armies themselves have now moved beyond - see https://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-Marines/dp/0066619793 https://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-....
We need smarter ways to organise and we probably need AI at some level to help us scale up to higher volumes of effective decision making.
- asplake 8y agoDistributed decision-making works just fine without AI. As Marquet puts it: “move the authority to the information” (as opposed to the converse more typical of the hierarchical organisation). Read “Turn the ship around!”, also a great audiobook.
- xigma 8y agoMilitary people applying their experiences to company leadership are problematic, because they worked with a selection of people that doesn't reflect the general population. In the general population, not everyone wants to be a leader, not by a long shot.
- xigma 8y agoPeople tend to have a strong urge to avoid responsibility (and therefore making decisions), that's the whole point of having superiors. If everyone's fully responsible for what they do, they don't do their work. Even an incompetent superior helps here, because at least in theory you can divert responsibility to them. It allows people do their work for the majority of the time when things don't go wrong. If they do go wrong, everyone gets to blame everyone else somehow, maybe the company tanks, but really life goes on. You may point out problems here and there, but no other obvious alternative (like flat structures) are devoid of problems. I'd be wary of solutions that take human responsibility completely out of the equation (such as AI). Sometimes a decision not made is actually for the best.
- darkerside 8y agoThere's a lot of wisdom in this comment. > If everyone's fully responsible for what they do, they don't do their work Just to clarify, I think this means because they're busy rationalizing their decisions to invested stakeholders instead. Is that right?
- gbear605 8y agoOr rationalizing their decisions to their bosses or their bosses’ bosses.
- darkerside 8y agoI think the idea is, rationalizing to one person, who can then represent your ideas to the many others with a vested interest, provides leverage to you as an employee (easier to convince one person than to convince every person). Of course, managers can do a good or bad job of this, and done poorly, can create more work for their employees.
- js8 8y agoI agree. However, I don't see any other way how to prevent players doing this except democracy - a system where every person has (prescriptively) the same amount of power. However, many people reject the idea of economic democracy, despite studies showing that e.g. worker cooperatives often have higher productivity and despite the fact that we accept democratic governance as a way to operate the government.
- darkerside 8y agoI don't think anybody is rejecting the idea, it's just that it isn't considered as a default way to build a new organization. And it makes sense since, for a founder, you take on extra risk, put in extra work, and demand a lion's share of the rewards. It takes a special person to do the first two but not the latter. If people were actively rejecting worker co-ops, you'd expect to see them failing in practice. But what actually seems to happen is, they're very difficult to start up, but once running, run effectively with little centralized leadership.
- wolf550e 8y agoFlat organizations aren't really flat. Instead of written org chart you have an unwritten org chart and it might be harder to replace a bad informal manager than a bad formal manager. See: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- js8 8y agoDemocratic and flat is not the same (I was wondering if this confusion comes up). Flat doesn't necessarily prescribes what the power distribution is, but democracy does. On the other hand, democratic systems can have an organizational hierarchy too, as is a case with representative democracy.
- delias_ 8y agoIt sounds like you might be interested in rhizomatic actor networks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor–network_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor–network_theory