

Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real) - craftman
http://www.infoq.com/articles/self-organizing-organizations

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cpeterso
Ted Nyman from GitHub recently gave a talk at Mozilla about GitHub's "manager
free" work environment. Here is a video with slides:
<https://air.mozilla.org/scaling-happiness/>

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nhoven
I was excited to read about how an "org-less" org could work. Then: "We've
grown from three to thirteen employees in about a year, to shrink back to four
in about two years." And: "About a year ago, we've filed for the French
equivalent of Chapter 11 of Bankruptcy Code."

It's hard for me to have much faith in the author's argument.

~~~
craftman
I read it as the description of a first experiment. Note they still can
improve and come back in the economic race. However, this is interesting to
see some people have courage to try those things, whatever the risk of failure
it represents.

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smoyer
I have a hard time equating a lack of all organization with progress. It's
true that many organizations have needless layers of management (and the
associated interference), but what the article describes could most easily be
replaced with four (or thirteen) individual sole-proprietorships.

And does the company's views on organization extend to the agile training they
provide? Agile isn't disorganized or even unorganized, it just recognizes that
you can't know everything/enough when you start. If they can't organize
themselves well enough to avoid bankruptcy, can they organize a software
project?

I think what they've done is an interesting social project, but by his own
description, it seems like they've proved it doesn't work.

~~~
mjn
There's a somewhat different risk profile in these models than with a
collection of a dozen sole proprietorships, though. Some ways better, some
ways worse. I'm interested in a model along those lines myself, if I can find
the right collection of people, as a way of trading away some upside gains (if
I have a huge hit, we all benefit instead of just me) for some downside
protection (as long as some subset of us is, on average, doing ok, we all can
eat & pay rent).

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RougeFemme
My initial reaction was that this couldn't possibly work at company level.
After some thought, I could see how it could work _if_ you have just enough
diversity in personalities and temperaments. For example, it sounds like they
need at least a handful of people who are willing to do those "critical, not-
so-gratifying tasks may remain undone and hurt us in the long-term."

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firlefans
"It's been a year since we've filed for bankruptcy and we're still there." - I
work in a company that strives to follow such a model, and it honestly
struggles to achieve the kind of efficiency most companies take for granted. I
dearly hope it doesn't lead to that end, but from what I can see it's a
distinct possibility.

~~~
stcredzero
I suspect that the highest performance levels come from a group that self
organizes around the vision of a leader.

~~~
craftman
That's the most common pattern indeed. Note they tried to find a vision by
themselves without an "official" leader. They were unfortunatly unable to find
one apparently.

However, I believe a kind of implicit vision has emerged which is simply to
make sustainable such a place. Put another way, people who are attracked by
this implicit vision (such as the author of the article) are still with them,
and the others have probably left because this was not a vision they were
inspired by.

~~~
stcredzero
One can outsource leadership in a variety of ways. A highly cohesive and
capable group can do consulting projects and self-organize around the project,
for example.

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katelynsills
This seems similar to Morning Star's self management principles:
[http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/enterprise-without-
bos...](http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/enterprise-without-bosses-an-
interview-with-paul-green-jr#axzz2N3Foviu3)

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programminggeek
In my experience, the biggest hurdles to a truly self-organizing organization
(at every level) are people and trust.

If you don't have really excellent, self-motivated people, you are going to
have a lot of trouble with self-organization simply because some people need
to be told what to do. People also have to be 100% bought in to the concept
and don't try to create themselves management and authority roles. It really
does take the right people.

Trust is probably the biggest problem. It takes a lot of trust from the people
who start the business to let it run itself. It is probably easier at the
start of a business than when it's big. Everybody has to have a high level of
trust of everyone else, and when that trust is broken the organization
probably needs to be willing to fire the person who took advantage of the
system.

For many people, the hardest part would be to maintain that kind of system
with ruthlessness enough to fire people who don't work well in the system.
Knowing that it's not going to be for everybody and practicing that is hard.

~~~
antinescience
Not only trust, but honesty. It's a lot harder (I would wager almost
impossible!) to operate in a flat organization without everyone being willing
to both be honest and receive honest criticism.

The company I work for is about 30 folks strong and there are, for all intents
and purposes, only two levels of hierarchy. It could _probably_ sustain being
completely flat, but I'd fear that it'd fall apart relatively swiftly due to
people being unwilling to both bring others to task and be brought to task
themselves.

Plus, there's something to be said for decision by committee severely
obfuscating progress if consensus can't be easily reached.

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lifeisstillgood
This seems to be a serious option, or at least becoming a viable experiment
for some groups of developers. Fred George and Developer Anarchy is the other
proponent of self-organised teams. My experience has been it is very very
tough but rewarding.

Oddly I think there is an intellectual justification behind this movement - if
we assume code literacy is as important now as real literacy was post 1451,
then it's a rare group of people who write for a living that do not have few
or no managers (who is the manager of authors at a publishing house)

------
DanielBMarkham
I love reading about people trying new things like this.

As an Agile/XP coach, what I find is that I need to be very careful that I
distinguish between things that work and things that feel like they _ought_ to
work. If you're not a pragmatist, always trying new things but always looking
at results with a cold eye, you're truly lost in this business.

Good article, but the jury is still out here. Right now this is more of a
sales pitch than a story. In about three years, I'd love to come back to these
guys and see how it's going.

One of the problems with any organization is that people like doing what they
like to do, not necessarily the things that need to be done. There are things
we are really good at -- programming, artwork, group encounters, whatever --
and we tend to gravitate towards situations that let us do these things. The
immediate danger of an organization without a tight feedback loop is that
people drift into doing their own things and other important stuff doesn't get
done.

But that's just the theory. The important thing is how it works in this
situation, for these guys. Hopefully there will be an update a few years down
the road.

