9 ms·

The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)

387 points by rzk 2y ago

rcy 2y ago
I get a 403 on this page. Is there another source?
velcrovan 2y ago
Reminds me of the Zappos holacracy madness. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-f...
- Matticus_Rex 2y ago
  "Structurelessness" is the polar opposite of Holacracy. Holacracy is more structured than traditional management.
PaulHoule 2y ago
A classic essay whose significance goes way beyond women or feminism. I've been part of a few "structureless" groups which spontaneously organized around an opportunity and were initially effective because of that structureless (e.g. somebody gets an idea, the whole group moves like a military unit, opponents had no idea something like that could happen) but succumbed to the dynamics in that article on a time scale of three weeks (arguably ended a public company in that time!) to three years.
- romanhn 2y ago
  I'd love to hear more about how an org structure (or lack thereof) killed a public company in 3 weeks.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    See https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=etoy+vs+etoys https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=etoy+vs... First you need to know how conformist the culture was in the 1990s, when my wife and I would visit Manhattan we looked like two hippie throwbacks to the 1960s and got told we were the weirdest looking people in the city. I couldn't have stood to live there because you would look up and see a Tommy Hilfiger billboard and look down and see a lot of people wearing Tommy and if you couldn't take it, you couldn't take it. You couldn't get as good of a cup of coffee as you could get at an indy espresso bar in a small town in a flyover state because there was a Starbucks on every block to convince stock market analysts that it was like that coast to coast. In Dec 1999 there were the WTO riots which have broken the WTO ever since (e.g. the old "corn law" fight over free trade in agriculture reached the impasse it at now) and it had an effect that washed over everyone. For a few weeks there was a wave of honesty, for instance I saw an article in the tech press that somebody went to a Microsoft press conference and he was bored out his mind. So when Etoy had their domain stolen by Etoys many people from radical artists to people who didn't want to have their private property taken away rallied. We had a system where people would visit our web site and we'd use iframes to DDOS their web site. It ran for a few days with no effect, then I contributed a code snippet that made the attack many times more effective and brought the site down for a short time during the last shopping day of the year. Immediately they called the FBI who pulled the server out of the rack. We put a lot of effort into public relations and talking to the media, never mind flooding stock market discussion groups with propaganda. We knew we were being infiltrated by the FBI so we used the tactic of creating new mailing lists with (we believed) a clean list of participants periodically. (A general answer to "Eternal September" problems) The stock dropped precipitously when we were working on it, and a few weeks later they settled with etoy, an event we knew about before it was announced at their earnings call. It wasn't a good earnings call and the stock price spiraled downward and eventually the company folded (might have been more than three weeks but the critical part was about that long) The management and IT folks at Etoys would minimize the contribution of activists, wrote a blog about how they defeated our DDOS (but we scared them enough to call the FBI, caused a panic on the most critical day of the year, and could boast that the registration numbers that they triumphantly announced were inflated dramatically by fake users we injected) and would say that the company failed because the earnings were not good. I would say, however, that Etoys could have been a viable business in the long term if investors believed in management, selling toys online in 1999 was an idea with legs. Activism contributed to investors not believing in management, so they were forced to throw in the towel.
    - flerchin 2y ago
      This is an interesting piece of history, but doesn't seem to be a company folding after 3 weeks due to lack of org structure.
      - rout39574 2y ago
        I think the intended parable is that an unstructured group of activists took down a much larger, much better resourced, hierarchy.
        mike_hearn 2y ago
        [flagged]
      - krisoft 2y ago
        You misread the original comment I’m afraid. It doesn’t say that the company folded after 3 weeks due to a lack of org structure. It says that a structureless group caused the fall of a public company in 3 weeks of working on achieving that goal. Presumably the company had a structure.
        akoboldfrying 2y ago
        You're right about the writer's intention, but I "misread" it the same way. Even after going back and checking, I still think it could be interpreted either way, and that GP's and my interpretation is the more natural one.
        samatman 2y ago
        YMMV but the way the OP describes the entire cycle occurring in three weeks seems to preclude the founding of a public company, which does take considerably longer in general. That leaves toppling it from the outside.
        krisoft 2y ago
        100%. I don’t fault anyone who would misread it. The structure of the sentence is such that it contains multiple assides within one sentence. That makes is very prone to be misread.
  - lkrubner 2y ago
    This is one of the main topics that I teach entrepreneurs about. I wrote something reasonably short here: https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/to-grow-you-must-build-a-beautiful https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/to-grow-you-must... I wrote something much longer here, but this material is mostly from other CTOs who I surveyed: https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos-how-flat-should https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos... If you are in New York City, we have 2 different speakers who will speak to 2 different aspects of this problem, at our event on February 27th.
- leoc 2y ago
  There was and is a whole literature about unstructured and less-structured and alternatively-structured organisations; it even used to get a fair amount of coverage in mainstream news publications. But some time shortly after the year 2000 someone rang a bell, and now the only way to discuss the subject is to reshare "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" (which to be clear, is very good) every so often. (EDIT: And to re-emphasise, I'm not criticising yamrzou for sharing it!) Pasting one of my earlier comments on one of the earlier reposts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292289 > This is really a good essay and surely deserves a high profile, but it's disappointing that it, and some bits of angst about Valve's internal situation, seem to be the only discussions of organisational structure that get widely shared these days. Back from about the '70s to the early '90s it seems that there was quite a lot of management-theory/theory-of-the-firm research into different organisational structures and how they affected innovation, ability to change and other desirable or undesirable characteristics of organisations. And it didn't just stay hidden in academia, as the results got a fair amount of coverage in newsmagazines and the like in the early '90s. (Which is how I heard about it: I'm no expert.) As you might expect, the findings on relatively "structureless" orgs seem to have been pretty compatible with Freeman's observations. But there was also research on many other unusual forms of structure and hierarchy, for example the "matrix management" which famously got implemented at Dow Chemical in the 1970s https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations . > But for some reason interest and attention seems to have completely faded out, at least at the popular level, by about 2000 or so. So the Valve situation gets reported on as if it's some kind of unprecedented novelty, and not an example of a sort of situation whose outcomes had been hashed out pretty thoroughly a decade or more earlier.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    The book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone is of interest. In my mind the most interesting application of that was the contemporaneous Falun Gong movement in China. Falun Gong practitioners would show up at a park and practice a set of simple physical and spiritual practices; the organization was deliberately structureless because organizations of all kinds in China are required to admit a cadre of Communist Party members to surveil and control the organization. No organization = no control network. (The very act of gathering a group of people at a point, however, is a basic practice of military science) The one bit of authority in the organization is a book which is said to be infallible, which defends them from having the book rewritten by the authorities. (We know pretty well how the Communists and Republican governments oppressed folk religion movements such as the Huxian cult, but Taoism in its established form has always been some selection of folk practices which are approved by the authorities as long as China has had governments) An unfortunate consequence of this is that Falun Gong cannot change any doctrine, such as their belief that "being gay is bad for your gong." They lost the support of mainstream western organizations and descended into pandering to right-wing nuts to get what support they could.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  > "structureless" groups which spontaneously organized around an opportunity and were initially effective [...] but succumbed to the dynamics Even spontaneous groups must filter for Competence. This is fundamental. From domain-specific skills to planning and managing the sustainability of the project, a spontaneous group must be more than superficial associates and barnacles. For a humorously timeless example, see the revolutionary movement in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/The_People%27s_Front_of_Judea https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/The_People%27s_Front_of_... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jll29 2y ago
Clicked on it in the expectation of encountering an attack on schema-free databases and "NoSQL"... only to find it is about social groups ;)
treetalker 2y ago
This has been posted several times over the last several years, with a total of about 100 comments. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jofreeman.com%2Fjoreen%2Ftyranny.htm https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jofreeman.com%2F...
- eesmith 2y ago
  You missed the 120 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 because it links to https://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm https://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm . There are about 11 other non-jofreeman.com comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Structurelesness&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... including some about the Wired article "A 1970s Essay Predicted Silicon Valley's High-Minded Tyranny" at https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-tyranny-of-structurelessness/ https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-tyranny-of-struct... .
whatshisface 2y ago
There should be a counterpart to this, "the tyranny of trying to encode an entire human mind in procedure." As well as, "the tyranny of pretending that rules are much more absolute than their authors." :-)
- jkaptur 2y ago
  Probably "Seeing Like a State", no?
  - ndileas 2y ago
    I had thought that the thesis of seeing like a state is that when you attempt to rationalize a complex system, you necessarily simplify it and sometimes destroy the value in it. E.g. If a government wants to raise money via taxes on food production, growing food becomes disincentivized. Or the simple fact that maps can't show everything about the piece of land they represent. I think the opposite of the tyranny of structurelessness looks more like our legal + regulatory system where sometimes you need a team of experts to tell you where you can build a building, or the military where everything is so regimented so that you need to fill out forms to buy toilet paper.
    - greenie_beans 2y ago
      fwiw, the us government has given meat producers over $2 billion to cull animals infected with h5n1. seems like the government giving money to food production is working quite well.
      - ndileas 2y ago
        That was a hypothetical of a government taxing production. Of course in practice they tend to do the opposite, subsidizing food production quite heavily.
        greenie_beans 2y ago
        oop you're right, i misread.
nialv7 2y ago
This made me lose a bit of faith in humanity, because it seems like when a group of humans get together, no matter what kind of structure the group take, it's going to be bad in some way. Hierarchical, flat, or structureless (as pointed out by this article); with a rigid procedure, without a rigid procedure. Doesn't matter how the group is organized, it's going to be bad in some way.
- quotemstr 2y ago
  The best you can do is at least make the badness legible so you can fix and optimize your structure in an intelligent way instead of getting randomized default primate settings.
- rmah 2y ago
  That people almost always self-organize into structured organizations gives me hope for humanity. Social structures provide people with means to make life easier. They provide support and a guide on how to accomplish things without having to worry about all the details or the "big picture". And, of course, no organization is perfect. Hoping for perfection is not only folly, it is the enemy of good.
  - KineticLensman 2y ago
    Check out Dunbar's Number [0] (you might already know this). It's a theoretical constraint on the size of successful human groupings where everyone knows of everyone else, and is approximately the size of company-sized (in the military sense) subunits. Of course, these have very explicit structure, even if they contain 'characters' [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
    - bokoharambe 2y ago
      Definitely read the criticisms section of this article, because it shows how strange and unsound the whole notion is.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
bell-cot 2y ago
Sounds like she majored in Mathematics - but Wikipedia say Political Science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Freeman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Freeman
qntty 2y ago
The Tyranny of Structurelessness and The Gervais Principle are the two essays that I think about a lot at work.
- treetalker 2y ago
  The Gervais Principle: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
killjoywashere 2y ago
Every data structure comes with costs. You give some to get others. Nothing in here should be surprising.
a_square_peg 2y ago
I recommend this essay often to people, especially in a start up. When someone describes their organization as being "flat", it's often a red flag because it means that there are unwritten power structure that newer employees will likely be excluded from.
- kqr 2y ago
  That is a beige flag at worst. Every organisation has unwritten power structures that (often) exclude newcomers. Some organisations also have additional written power structures that (often) exclude newcomers.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    While you're correct, my experience has been that the unwritten power structure is much stronger in places where there is no written power structure. Where there is a written power structure you can usually appeal to it and eventually get something done. Where there exists no written power structure at all, you're out of luck unless you can quickly figure out what the power structure is. A written power structure is a low resolution map. It's not perfect, but it gives you some idea of where to start making sense of things. A flat organization is never actually flat, but it also has no guideposts at all to show you even the rough outlines of the real hierarchies.
    - watwut 2y ago
      I worked in an organization with a low written structure. Creating unwritten structure is necessary consequence - each it happened as a reaction on serious dysfunction. And each time it improved things. And what you learned each time is that if you dont keep power, things will get very bad again. Imo, that is argument for written structure. Written structure is easier to talk about openly talk about, reason about and fix. Unwritten structure is inferior consequence of its lack.
    - AdamN 2y ago
      This is analogous to the 'unlimited' vacation policy. Now instead of following a codified and shared standard the employee has to negotiate every vacation day and consider how it impacts their standing in the organization.
sitkack 2y ago
I would be curious what others would recommend as management books or anything related to organizational psychology in this topic. Books I can think of are "Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Organizations "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivering_Happiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivering_Happiness https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  I find "Turn the Ship Around!" to be an interesting companion to this essay. It provides an excellent example of how, if you do it right, a well-defined structure can actually be quite empowering to people at all levels of the organization. Speaking from personal experience, I've seen it myself at one previous employer. The clear hierarchy and delegation of ownership and responsibilities made it easier for everyone to get things done and enhanced everyone's sense of psychological safety. People explicitly knowing exactly what authority they do and do not have means they can make confident decisions without feeling the need to play wasteful and exhausting games of "mother may I" with the latent power structure for fear of accidentally stepping on influential toes.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    Yeah, I think having clear agency boundaries is a key property for all organizations that aren't run like a dictatorship. Here is a talk given by the author of "Turn the Ship Around!", David Marquet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJL8zX3EVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJL8zX3EVk
  - tikhonj 2y ago
    Seconding that book. It's one of several things that got me to realize that a lot of the problems I had seen with hierarchies were not fundamental to the idea of a hierarchy but rather functions of culture, practices and individuals. It's also made me sad that finding teams that operate like that is really hard, and they often don't changes in management :( I had an absolutely amazing several years working on a team like that at Target of all places, until the broader Target culture caught up to us...
matthest 2y ago
On the flip side, Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" is a fascinating read on the benefits of decentralization. The premise is that in the 1500s, no one thought Europe was going to be the next great power. The dominant civilizations at the time were the Chinese and the Ottomans. Why did Europe win? Because no one could unify Europe. It was basically a collection of states. Whereas China and the Ottoman Empire were centralized. The problem with centralization is that if the guy at the top says to do something, everyone must fall in line, even if it's a bad idea. China used to have the most dominant navel fleet in the world. Then in the early 1500s, their government decided to stop building ships. Which ultimately led to them falling behind in the world order. In Europe however, even if one country received a decree to stop building ships, it wouldn't stop the others from doing so. This created a hotbed of innovation and competition that allowed them to develop rapidly. And establish dominance. The trade offs between centralization and decentralization are fascinating.
- jandrese 2y ago
  It mirrors in a lot of ways capitalism vs. communism. Or more precisely market based economies vs. command economies. The ultimate problem is that efficient distribution of resources depends on the unique conditions at thousands or millions of sites across the country. The people who are most well informed about what is needed are the people at those sites. The fundamental problem with command economies is transmitting that information up to the central source without overwhelming the system. Because it is way too much information to deal with they have to make simplifying assumptions, which lead to inefficiencies that compound over time. The more decentralized your decision making the more efficient the system runs. However, this has drawbacks as it becomes hard or impossible to focus on big problems. On the flipside centralized systems are highly vulnerable to corruption. No system is perfect, and the most sensible systems use a combination of both.
  - matthest 2y ago
    100% agree. Market economies really do seem like the only way to prosperity in the modern era. Mao's command economy had the country stuck in poverty. Deng's market economy reforms turned them into a superpower.
kqr 2y ago
It seems like a lot of people do not make it to the end of this essay. Any time it comes up people invariably go, "Yeah, so that is why we should institute a hierarchy" which is not at all what Freeman was saying. > Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. She mentions some concrete ideas: - Leaders do not select their teams, instead, teams select their spokesperson. A spokesperson does not have authority over the team but can make decisions on their behalf in conversation with other spokespeople. - Rotating the role of spokesperson among the eligible of the team. Possibly even having multiple spokespeople on the same team for different types of decisions. - Set up processes to ensure someone does not sit on important information others do not have access to. All data should be public in the group. - etc. This is far from instituting an explicit hierarchy!
- baxtr 2y ago
  Thanks for surfacing her ideas. Although I have to admit that these sound all like ideas that sound great "in theory" but don’t work in reality. At least I’m not aware of good examples.
  - scarecrowbob 2y ago
    Oh, I dunno- my experience is that in "reality" almost every group of folks I have worked with, from software teams to stage hands to bands has (when functioning well) been more or less organized around those kinds of ideas. It may sound hyperbolic to say that "anarchism is the default way humans work together". At the same every production I have worked in may have a boss, but at the same time usually the folks actually doing the work are getting along with very little direct hierarchy- people who know what to do go do it, folks who don't get tasked with doing things. Most folks have watched stuff really get into the weeds when every action needs to be dictated from above.
  - atq2119 2y ago
    It is common in universities in at least some parts of the world for the dean(s) of departments to rotate among the faculty. That seems to align somewhat with those ideas.
mjw1007 2y ago
The part which describes the circumstances where she's seen an unstructured group work is interesting. In particular, this condition > 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. is a good match for many free software projects. That's one of four conditions she thinks are necessary. The other three are interesting too.
- creer 2y ago
  > It is the task that basically structures the group. Interesting idea. But the illustrations are lacking for now. I have seen events put up - and the thing is less that there was no structure (there are a core of people who know what they are doing, and the others who need their leadership) and more that (1) there is no time to haggle about the structure and (2) what you do notice is the people who are willing to put hard work on anything that needs it and the people who are there socially. In the case of software projects, there is the thing of people putting in programming work on whatever they feel like - but meanwhile there is a structure of people defining the project, prioritizing bugs, etc. And there is very often a project owner or BDFL. We can rationalize it by saying that it's a technical structure or leadership but it's still there. What I don't see much of is projects where being willing to show up and do the work is "enough". There are many project where people self assign themselves to this or that group - but that's not the same.
jumatier 2y ago
[flagged]
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  Interesting method of spamming. Literally copy part of another comment from the same discussion and put in random links. It's blatantly obvious and is just going to get you flagged. You could at least try to be more subtle. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795472
robertclaus 2y ago
I've run into a similar problem many times at small companies. Effectively rejecting the idea of structure because of slippery-slope arguments. I've had pretty senior folks make comments like "If we require PR reviews on every little change, we'll be just like <pick an unpopular large tech company> and take forever to do anything."
duxup 2y ago
Great read. >The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. I do think of some of the "awareness" activism I see where it never seems to lead anywhere. Folks are just busy with their awareness activities and everything is deemed good because they're generating awareness. Like minded people do their awareness thing, they like to do it, and there ya go... awareness is sort of its own means to an end and I'm not sure the given individuals or groups are structured in a way that they'll ever be capable of more. I'd even argue that some of these structureless groups are incapable of much critical discussion as their group exists purely because of their awareness raising efforts, it is what they are, change might take some leadership.
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285097 - June 2023 (73 comments) Jo Freeman's the Tyranny of Structurelessness (Recommended by Mark Andreesen) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829486 - June 2022 (1 comment) The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728477 - Oct 2020 (19 comments) The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1973) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17585104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17585104 - July 2018 (20 comments) The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535834 - Oct 2017 (2 comments) The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651406 - May 2016 (54 comments) “Meritocracy” and the Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495241 - Oct 2014 (1 comment) The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762486 - May 2014 (15 comments) RE: The “Tyranny of Structurelessness” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555013 - April 2014 (7 comments) The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 - March 2014 (120 comments)
deleted 2y ago
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red_admiral 2y ago
Every time this comes up, more people get pulled in to understand the point. Long may this continue!
aSanchezStern 2y ago
Anybody have a link to a description of the "Lot system" mentioned near the end?
dr_dshiv 2y ago
I love "lessness" words in english. Structurelessness is a pretty great word.
kazinator 2y ago
[flagged]
- orthecreedence 2y ago
  JFC the article is like a handful of paragraphs. This is how it ends, I guess...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
ewrong 2y ago
The tyranny of terrible typography?
mxmilkiib 2y ago
https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk
lkrubner 2y ago
I've written about the poor style of decision making that often happens at "flat" organizations. Repeating a point that Jo Freeman makes, without a leader or a process for decision making, flat organizations make decisions accidentally. The winners tend to be whoever is the most stubborn. See "The Accidental Democracy of Flat Organizations": https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/the-accidental-democracy-of-flat https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/the-accidental-d...

387 points by rzk 2y ago

rcy 2y ago

I get a 403 on this page. Is there another source?

Reminds me of the Zappos holacracy madness. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-f...

Matticus_Rex 2y ago
"Structurelessness" is the polar opposite of Holacracy. Holacracy is more structured than traditional management.

PaulHoule 2y ago

A classic essay whose significance goes way beyond women or feminism. I've been part of a few "structureless" groups which spontaneously organized around an opportunity and were initially effective because of that structureless (e.g. somebody gets an idea, the whole group moves like a military unit, opponents had no idea something like that could happen) but succumbed to the dynamics in that article on a time scale of three weeks (arguably ended a public company in that time!) to three years.

romanhn 2y ago
I'd love to hear more about how an org structure (or lack thereof) killed a public company in 3 weeks.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  See https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=etoy+vs+etoys https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=etoy+vs... First you need to know how conformist the culture was in the 1990s, when my wife and I would visit Manhattan we looked like two hippie throwbacks to the 1960s and got told we were the weirdest looking people in the city. I couldn't have stood to live there because you would look up and see a Tommy Hilfiger billboard and look down and see a lot of people wearing Tommy and if you couldn't take it, you couldn't take it. You couldn't get as good of a cup of coffee as you could get at an indy espresso bar in a small town in a flyover state because there was a Starbucks on every block to convince stock market analysts that it was like that coast to coast. In Dec 1999 there were the WTO riots which have broken the WTO ever since (e.g. the old "corn law" fight over free trade in agriculture reached the impasse it at now) and it had an effect that washed over everyone. For a few weeks there was a wave of honesty, for instance I saw an article in the tech press that somebody went to a Microsoft press conference and he was bored out his mind. So when Etoy had their domain stolen by Etoys many people from radical artists to people who didn't want to have their private property taken away rallied. We had a system where people would visit our web site and we'd use iframes to DDOS their web site. It ran for a few days with no effect, then I contributed a code snippet that made the attack many times more effective and brought the site down for a short time during the last shopping day of the year. Immediately they called the FBI who pulled the server out of the rack. We put a lot of effort into public relations and talking to the media, never mind flooding stock market discussion groups with propaganda. We knew we were being infiltrated by the FBI so we used the tactic of creating new mailing lists with (we believed) a clean list of participants periodically. (A general answer to "Eternal September" problems) The stock dropped precipitously when we were working on it, and a few weeks later they settled with etoy, an event we knew about before it was announced at their earnings call. It wasn't a good earnings call and the stock price spiraled downward and eventually the company folded (might have been more than three weeks but the critical part was about that long) The management and IT folks at Etoys would minimize the contribution of activists, wrote a blog about how they defeated our DDOS (but we scared them enough to call the FBI, caused a panic on the most critical day of the year, and could boast that the registration numbers that they triumphantly announced were inflated dramatically by fake users we injected) and would say that the company failed because the earnings were not good. I would say, however, that Etoys could have been a viable business in the long term if investors believed in management, selling toys online in 1999 was an idea with legs. Activism contributed to investors not believing in management, so they were forced to throw in the towel.
  - flerchin 2y ago
    This is an interesting piece of history, but doesn't seem to be a company folding after 3 weeks due to lack of org structure.
    - rout39574 2y ago
      I think the intended parable is that an unstructured group of activists took down a much larger, much better resourced, hierarchy.
      - mike_hearn 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - krisoft 2y ago
      You misread the original comment I’m afraid. It doesn’t say that the company folded after 3 weeks due to a lack of org structure. It says that a structureless group caused the fall of a public company in 3 weeks of working on achieving that goal. Presumably the company had a structure.
      - akoboldfrying 2y ago
        You're right about the writer's intention, but I "misread" it the same way. Even after going back and checking, I still think it could be interpreted either way, and that GP's and my interpretation is the more natural one.
        samatman 2y ago
        YMMV but the way the OP describes the entire cycle occurring in three weeks seems to preclude the founding of a public company, which does take considerably longer in general. That leaves toppling it from the outside.
        krisoft 2y ago
        100%. I don’t fault anyone who would misread it. The structure of the sentence is such that it contains multiple assides within one sentence. That makes is very prone to be misread.
- lkrubner 2y ago
  This is one of the main topics that I teach entrepreneurs about. I wrote something reasonably short here: https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/to-grow-you-must-build-a-beautiful https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/to-grow-you-must... I wrote something much longer here, but this material is mostly from other CTOs who I surveyed: https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos-how-flat-should https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos... If you are in New York City, we have 2 different speakers who will speak to 2 different aspects of this problem, at our event on February 27th.
leoc 2y ago
There was and is a whole literature about unstructured and less-structured and alternatively-structured organisations; it even used to get a fair amount of coverage in mainstream news publications. But some time shortly after the year 2000 someone rang a bell, and now the only way to discuss the subject is to reshare "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" (which to be clear, is very good) every so often. (EDIT: And to re-emphasise, I'm not criticising yamrzou for sharing it!) Pasting one of my earlier comments on one of the earlier reposts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292289 > This is really a good essay and surely deserves a high profile, but it's disappointing that it, and some bits of angst about Valve's internal situation, seem to be the only discussions of organisational structure that get widely shared these days. Back from about the '70s to the early '90s it seems that there was quite a lot of management-theory/theory-of-the-firm research into different organisational structures and how they affected innovation, ability to change and other desirable or undesirable characteristics of organisations. And it didn't just stay hidden in academia, as the results got a fair amount of coverage in newsmagazines and the like in the early '90s. (Which is how I heard about it: I'm no expert.) As you might expect, the findings on relatively "structureless" orgs seem to have been pretty compatible with Freeman's observations. But there was also research on many other unusual forms of structure and hierarchy, for example the "matrix management" which famously got implemented at Dow Chemical in the 1970s https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations . > But for some reason interest and attention seems to have completely faded out, at least at the popular level, by about 2000 or so. So the Valve situation gets reported on as if it's some kind of unprecedented novelty, and not an example of a sort of situation whose outcomes had been hashed out pretty thoroughly a decade or more earlier.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  The book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone is of interest. In my mind the most interesting application of that was the contemporaneous Falun Gong movement in China. Falun Gong practitioners would show up at a park and practice a set of simple physical and spiritual practices; the organization was deliberately structureless because organizations of all kinds in China are required to admit a cadre of Communist Party members to surveil and control the organization. No organization = no control network. (The very act of gathering a group of people at a point, however, is a basic practice of military science) The one bit of authority in the organization is a book which is said to be infallible, which defends them from having the book rewritten by the authorities. (We know pretty well how the Communists and Republican governments oppressed folk religion movements such as the Huxian cult, but Taoism in its established form has always been some selection of folk practices which are approved by the authorities as long as China has had governments) An unfortunate consequence of this is that Falun Gong cannot change any doctrine, such as their belief that "being gay is bad for your gong." They lost the support of mainstream western organizations and descended into pandering to right-wing nuts to get what support they could.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
> "structureless" groups which spontaneously organized around an opportunity and were initially effective [...] but succumbed to the dynamics Even spontaneous groups must filter for Competence. This is fundamental. From domain-specific skills to planning and managing the sustainability of the project, a spontaneous group must be more than superficial associates and barnacles. For a humorously timeless example, see the revolutionary movement in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/The_People%27s_Front_of_Judea https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/The_People%27s_Front_of_... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jll29 2y ago

Clicked on it in the expectation of encountering an attack on schema-free databases and "NoSQL"... only to find it is about social groups ;)

treetalker 2y ago

This has been posted several times over the last several years, with a total of about 100 comments. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jofreeman.com%2Fjoreen%2Ftyranny.htm https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jofreeman.com%2F...

eesmith 2y ago
You missed the 120 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 because it links to https://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm https://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm . There are about 11 other non-jofreeman.com comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Structurelesness&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... including some about the Wired article "A 1970s Essay Predicted Silicon Valley's High-Minded Tyranny" at https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-tyranny-of-structurelessness/ https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-tyranny-of-struct... .

whatshisface 2y ago

There should be a counterpart to this, "the tyranny of trying to encode an entire human mind in procedure." As well as, "the tyranny of pretending that rules are much more absolute than their authors." :-)

jkaptur 2y ago
Probably "Seeing Like a State", no?
- ndileas 2y ago
  I had thought that the thesis of seeing like a state is that when you attempt to rationalize a complex system, you necessarily simplify it and sometimes destroy the value in it. E.g. If a government wants to raise money via taxes on food production, growing food becomes disincentivized. Or the simple fact that maps can't show everything about the piece of land they represent. I think the opposite of the tyranny of structurelessness looks more like our legal + regulatory system where sometimes you need a team of experts to tell you where you can build a building, or the military where everything is so regimented so that you need to fill out forms to buy toilet paper.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    fwiw, the us government has given meat producers over $2 billion to cull animals infected with h5n1. seems like the government giving money to food production is working quite well.
    - ndileas 2y ago
      That was a hypothetical of a government taxing production. Of course in practice they tend to do the opposite, subsidizing food production quite heavily.
      - greenie_beans 2y ago
        oop you're right, i misread.

nialv7 2y ago

This made me lose a bit of faith in humanity, because it seems like when a group of humans get together, no matter what kind of structure the group take, it's going to be bad in some way. Hierarchical, flat, or structureless (as pointed out by this article); with a rigid procedure, without a rigid procedure. Doesn't matter how the group is organized, it's going to be bad in some way.

quotemstr 2y ago
The best you can do is at least make the badness legible so you can fix and optimize your structure in an intelligent way instead of getting randomized default primate settings.
rmah 2y ago
That people almost always self-organize into structured organizations gives me hope for humanity. Social structures provide people with means to make life easier. They provide support and a guide on how to accomplish things without having to worry about all the details or the "big picture". And, of course, no organization is perfect. Hoping for perfection is not only folly, it is the enemy of good.
- KineticLensman 2y ago
  Check out Dunbar's Number [0] (you might already know this). It's a theoretical constraint on the size of successful human groupings where everyone knows of everyone else, and is approximately the size of company-sized (in the military sense) subunits. Of course, these have very explicit structure, even if they contain 'characters' [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
  - bokoharambe 2y ago
    Definitely read the criticisms section of this article, because it shows how strange and unsound the whole notion is.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago

bell-cot 2y ago

Sounds like she majored in Mathematics - but Wikipedia say Political Science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Freeman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Freeman

qntty 2y ago

The Tyranny of Structurelessness and The Gervais Principle are the two essays that I think about a lot at work.

treetalker 2y ago
The Gervais Principle: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

killjoywashere 2y ago

Every data structure comes with costs. You give some to get others. Nothing in here should be surprising.

a_square_peg 2y ago

I recommend this essay often to people, especially in a start up. When someone describes their organization as being "flat", it's often a red flag because it means that there are unwritten power structure that newer employees will likely be excluded from.

kqr 2y ago
That is a beige flag at worst. Every organisation has unwritten power structures that (often) exclude newcomers. Some organisations also have additional written power structures that (often) exclude newcomers.
- lolinder 2y ago
  While you're correct, my experience has been that the unwritten power structure is much stronger in places where there is no written power structure. Where there is a written power structure you can usually appeal to it and eventually get something done. Where there exists no written power structure at all, you're out of luck unless you can quickly figure out what the power structure is. A written power structure is a low resolution map. It's not perfect, but it gives you some idea of where to start making sense of things. A flat organization is never actually flat, but it also has no guideposts at all to show you even the rough outlines of the real hierarchies.
  - watwut 2y ago
    I worked in an organization with a low written structure. Creating unwritten structure is necessary consequence - each it happened as a reaction on serious dysfunction. And each time it improved things. And what you learned each time is that if you dont keep power, things will get very bad again. Imo, that is argument for written structure. Written structure is easier to talk about openly talk about, reason about and fix. Unwritten structure is inferior consequence of its lack.
  - AdamN 2y ago
    This is analogous to the 'unlimited' vacation policy. Now instead of following a codified and shared standard the employee has to negotiate every vacation day and consider how it impacts their standing in the organization.

sitkack 2y ago

I would be curious what others would recommend as management books or anything related to organizational psychology in this topic. Books I can think of are "Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Organizations "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivering_Happiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivering_Happiness https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers

bunderbunder 2y ago
I find "Turn the Ship Around!" to be an interesting companion to this essay. It provides an excellent example of how, if you do it right, a well-defined structure can actually be quite empowering to people at all levels of the organization. Speaking from personal experience, I've seen it myself at one previous employer. The clear hierarchy and delegation of ownership and responsibilities made it easier for everyone to get things done and enhanced everyone's sense of psychological safety. People explicitly knowing exactly what authority they do and do not have means they can make confident decisions without feeling the need to play wasteful and exhausting games of "mother may I" with the latent power structure for fear of accidentally stepping on influential toes.
- sitkack 2y ago
  Yeah, I think having clear agency boundaries is a key property for all organizations that aren't run like a dictatorship. Here is a talk given by the author of "Turn the Ship Around!", David Marquet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJL8zX3EVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJL8zX3EVk
- tikhonj 2y ago
  Seconding that book. It's one of several things that got me to realize that a lot of the problems I had seen with hierarchies were not fundamental to the idea of a hierarchy but rather functions of culture, practices and individuals. It's also made me sad that finding teams that operate like that is really hard, and they often don't changes in management :( I had an absolutely amazing several years working on a team like that at Target of all places, until the broader Target culture caught up to us...

matthest 2y ago

On the flip side, Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" is a fascinating read on the benefits of decentralization. The premise is that in the 1500s, no one thought Europe was going to be the next great power. The dominant civilizations at the time were the Chinese and the Ottomans. Why did Europe win? Because no one could unify Europe. It was basically a collection of states. Whereas China and the Ottoman Empire were centralized. The problem with centralization is that if the guy at the top says to do something, everyone must fall in line, even if it's a bad idea. China used to have the most dominant navel fleet in the world. Then in the early 1500s, their government decided to stop building ships. Which ultimately led to them falling behind in the world order. In Europe however, even if one country received a decree to stop building ships, it wouldn't stop the others from doing so. This created a hotbed of innovation and competition that allowed them to develop rapidly. And establish dominance. The trade offs between centralization and decentralization are fascinating.

jandrese 2y ago
It mirrors in a lot of ways capitalism vs. communism. Or more precisely market based economies vs. command economies. The ultimate problem is that efficient distribution of resources depends on the unique conditions at thousands or millions of sites across the country. The people who are most well informed about what is needed are the people at those sites. The fundamental problem with command economies is transmitting that information up to the central source without overwhelming the system. Because it is way too much information to deal with they have to make simplifying assumptions, which lead to inefficiencies that compound over time. The more decentralized your decision making the more efficient the system runs. However, this has drawbacks as it becomes hard or impossible to focus on big problems. On the flipside centralized systems are highly vulnerable to corruption. No system is perfect, and the most sensible systems use a combination of both.
- matthest 2y ago
  100% agree. Market economies really do seem like the only way to prosperity in the modern era. Mao's command economy had the country stuck in poverty. Deng's market economy reforms turned them into a superpower.

kqr 2y ago

It seems like a lot of people do not make it to the end of this essay. Any time it comes up people invariably go, "Yeah, so that is why we should institute a hierarchy" which is not at all what Freeman was saying. > Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. She mentions some concrete ideas: - Leaders do not select their teams, instead, teams select their spokesperson. A spokesperson does not have authority over the team but can make decisions on their behalf in conversation with other spokespeople. - Rotating the role of spokesperson among the eligible of the team. Possibly even having multiple spokespeople on the same team for different types of decisions. - Set up processes to ensure someone does not sit on important information others do not have access to. All data should be public in the group. - etc. This is far from instituting an explicit hierarchy!

baxtr 2y ago
Thanks for surfacing her ideas. Although I have to admit that these sound all like ideas that sound great "in theory" but don’t work in reality. At least I’m not aware of good examples.
- scarecrowbob 2y ago
  Oh, I dunno- my experience is that in "reality" almost every group of folks I have worked with, from software teams to stage hands to bands has (when functioning well) been more or less organized around those kinds of ideas. It may sound hyperbolic to say that "anarchism is the default way humans work together". At the same every production I have worked in may have a boss, but at the same time usually the folks actually doing the work are getting along with very little direct hierarchy- people who know what to do go do it, folks who don't get tasked with doing things. Most folks have watched stuff really get into the weeds when every action needs to be dictated from above.
- atq2119 2y ago
  It is common in universities in at least some parts of the world for the dean(s) of departments to rotate among the faculty. That seems to align somewhat with those ideas.

mjw1007 2y ago

The part which describes the circumstances where she's seen an unstructured group work is interesting. In particular, this condition > 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. is a good match for many free software projects. That's one of four conditions she thinks are necessary. The other three are interesting too.

creer 2y ago
> It is the task that basically structures the group. Interesting idea. But the illustrations are lacking for now. I have seen events put up - and the thing is less that there was no structure (there are a core of people who know what they are doing, and the others who need their leadership) and more that (1) there is no time to haggle about the structure and (2) what you do notice is the people who are willing to put hard work on anything that needs it and the people who are there socially. In the case of software projects, there is the thing of people putting in programming work on whatever they feel like - but meanwhile there is a structure of people defining the project, prioritizing bugs, etc. And there is very often a project owner or BDFL. We can rationalize it by saying that it's a technical structure or leadership but it's still there. What I don't see much of is projects where being willing to show up and do the work is "enough". There are many project where people self assign themselves to this or that group - but that's not the same.

jumatier 2y ago

[flagged]

Jtsummers 2y ago
Interesting method of spamming. Literally copy part of another comment from the same discussion and put in random links. It's blatantly obvious and is just going to get you flagged. You could at least try to be more subtle. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795472

robertclaus 2y ago

I've run into a similar problem many times at small companies. Effectively rejecting the idea of structure because of slippery-slope arguments. I've had pretty senior folks make comments like "If we require PR reviews on every little change, we'll be just like <pick an unpopular large tech company> and take forever to do anything."

duxup 2y ago

Great read. >The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. I do think of some of the "awareness" activism I see where it never seems to lead anywhere. Folks are just busy with their awareness activities and everything is deemed good because they're generating awareness. Like minded people do their awareness thing, they like to do it, and there ya go... awareness is sort of its own means to an end and I'm not sure the given individuals or groups are structured in a way that they'll ever be capable of more. I'd even argue that some of these structureless groups are incapable of much critical discussion as their group exists purely because of their awareness raising efforts, it is what they are, change might take some leadership.

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285097 - June 2023 (73 comments) Jo Freeman's the Tyranny of Structurelessness (Recommended by Mark Andreesen) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829486 - June 2022 (1 comment) The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728477 - Oct 2020 (19 comments) The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1973) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17585104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17585104 - July 2018 (20 comments) The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535834 - Oct 2017 (2 comments) The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651406 - May 2016 (54 comments) “Meritocracy” and the Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495241 - Oct 2014 (1 comment) The Tyranny of Structurelessness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762486 - May 2014 (15 comments) RE: The “Tyranny of Structurelessness” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555013 - April 2014 (7 comments) The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 - March 2014 (120 comments)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

red_admiral 2y ago

Every time this comes up, more people get pulled in to understand the point. Long may this continue!

aSanchezStern 2y ago

Anybody have a link to a description of the "Lot system" mentioned near the end?

dr_dshiv 2y ago

I love "lessness" words in english. Structurelessness is a pretty great word.

kazinator 2y ago

[flagged]

orthecreedence 2y ago
JFC the article is like a handful of paragraphs. This is how it ends, I guess...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

ewrong 2y ago

The tyranny of terrible typography?

mxmilkiib 2y ago

https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk

lkrubner 2y ago

I've written about the poor style of decision making that often happens at "flat" organizations. Repeating a point that Jo Freeman makes, without a leader or a process for decision making, flat organizations make decisions accidentally. The winners tend to be whoever is the most stubborn. See "The Accidental Democracy of Flat Organizations": https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/the-accidental-democracy-of-flat https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/the-accidental-d...